Personalization is one of the most talked-about aspects of marketing. And there’s a reason: It works. The more you can cater your approach to someone specifically (and their particular circumstance), the more effective you’re generally going to be when it comes to marketing. There are all sorts of ways to personalize a marketing experience. For example, with ads, you can target specific groups of individuals who you know represent a certain demographic, or have certain interests or a particular psychographic profile. Your ad copy and images are specifically tailored to engage this particular group. With email, you can customize subject lines or email body copy with the recipient’s name, and send emails segmented by a particular topic or interest or purchase they have made with you.
And you can personalize your website. (It’s actually one of 7 UX Rules for Small Business Websites.)
For many small businesses, though, integrating more personalized experiences into a website can be challenging, particularly those that don’t have development resources at their disposal. If you can muster some resources for the effort, it’s certainly worth it. Here are a few ways you can approach a more personalized experience for your website visitors.
No. 1: Personalization Based on Geography
Let’s say you have a few brick-and-mortar retail stores in a local area and you sell goods both online and in the store. One easy thing you can do is provide the nearest store to that individual based on the geographic location of that visitor’s IP address or phone geolocation. It’s an easy reminder of a place they can shop. Most all web developers can easily help you execute this function. Knowing that IP address will also give you the ability to personalize deals to particular geographies. So, if in the wintertime, you want to provide winter boots to the northeast but sun tan lotion to Arizona, you can do that pretty easily by building a module that changes based on various states and ZIP codes.
No. 2: Personalization Based on User Choice on Input
Let’s say you sell a particular set of products or services, each with a distinct set of audiences (in other words, not much crossover in terms of audiences who might be interested in one solution and another). One thing you can do for those website visitors is to have them take a quick upfront survey or have them select particular preferences when they visit the site for the first time. Those selections and interests then determine the experience they receive. One example might be a wine shop that asks website visitors what their taste profile is like: Do they like California fruit-forward wine? More European style? And then, based on the outcome, personalize the offering to show the customer those choices that fit their preferences on a home page. Make sure to encourage the visitor to create an account profile and sign in so they receive the personalized experience and save their settings to the site. It will take some development effort to customize this but, in the end, you’ll find it’s worth it.
No. 3: Personalization Based on User Behavior
If you have given thought to the systems that you can connect to together (especially your CRM and the website, or the e-commerce platform and the website), you can begin executing this aspect of personalization. For example, if you can store data within your CRM or e-commerce platform for signed-in visitors such as pages they visited or items they’ve put in a cart, you can easily carve out a space in the home page or header to show them the pages they’ve viewed (so they can easily navigate back) or the abandoned cart items. Also, if you have a shopping cart function, it’s pretty easy for a developer to display a site alert to a return visitor saying they should “check out now” with the products they were intending to buy. Finally, you can also show related products (based on previous purchases or something they browsed), or recommended replacements of products that they previously bought and might likely need again after a certain timeframe.
No. 4: Personalization of Landing Pages (Especially for Ads or Campaigns)
One thing we always recommend for advertising landing pages, in particular, is to customize the landing pages based on a particular ad or topic that the ad covers, rather than sending them to a more generic landing page of your website. The more the landing page matches the ad copy and topic, the better the experience and the results – especially if the goal is to have someone filling in or submitting their information. With certain email or direct mail campaigns (especially when it comes to account-based marketing), companies will often create what is known as PURL (personalized URL) for individuals they’re targeting. These are dynamic landing pages that will change to address individual recipients by name or by the particular campaign that is being promoted. Typically, these pages can be built out of a more sophisticated marketing automation platform or by your site developer.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the ways that you can improve your website engagement through personalization. If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation and we’ll talk with you about the options and how you might execute them. We also provide more affordable website design, development, and content services to help you revamp or build a new experience for your site visitors.
