With content personalization, marketers and publishers are able to deliver different user experiences to different types of website visitors, based on available data about what interests them. When you segment your traffic according to referrer, pages visited, geolocation and more, you’re able to serve up an immersive user experience that’s tailored for maximum relevance. This is where front-end design meets business intelligence.
It’s a remarkably hot trend in the media field, too. Some 77 percent of the respondents in a recent Adobe study (registration required) indicated that they believe real-time personalization is crucial. Perhaps even more poignant, though, is that 60 percent said they struggle with personalization.
For an audience of one
It makes sense that so many find the practice to be a challenge. Personalization generally takes some code-intensive measures to implement, with the tools of the trade often involving a heady mix of browser cookies, coded event firing and calls to third-party resources. This calls for high levels of development skill, generally not found among marketers or business managers.
So what’s the best way to go about crafting a beautifully designed front end that draws the user in as if he or she were an audience of one? Is all that technical wrangling really worth it?
What makes personalization so potent
The people who visit your website want a personalized experience. One study from the University of Texas found that people prefer a personalized experience for two primary reasons: We want control, and we hate being overloaded with irrelevant information.
The personalized experience cuts out the things that are not relevant to us, which helps relieve information overload. Instead of getting thousands of resources to sort through, we’re presented with information that is exactly what we’re interested in.
In today’s marketing world, customers are more knowledgeable and demanding than ever. Competition remains fierce. By 2020, price is expected to be a less powerful key differentiator for B2B brands than customer experience, according to a study by the Walker business consultancy. Focusing on delivering a personalized, quality customer experience can make all the difference in converting visitors and building customer loyalty.
Image copyright Walker
Thanks to the three tools I’ll describe below, you can serve up the personalization you need to boost your bottom line without resorting to code-heavy and user-unfriendly solutions.
Mobile-integrated calls to action
A relatively new tool on the market, Banana Splash, allows you to capture your mobile audience by delivering personalized content in real time. Choose the action you want your mobile visitors to perform — call for more information, register for an account, download a premium content asset or tap through to a specific page — and the system will deliver the content most likely to drive them to convert.
The tool offers hundreds of tested and proven designs included, so you can set it to trigger the perfect call to action (CTA) at the perfect moment according to how your site visitor behaves in real time. Plus, it integrates with Google Analytics, so you can manage and track results alongside your other performance tracking.
Offsite-powered segmentation
A powerful platform used by enterprises and smaller businesses alike, Frosmo allows you to gain full control of your website so you can modify any design or functional aspect without relying on code development.
Instead of allowing your site infrastructure’s development limitations to hold you back, Frosmo uses its own servers to host UX experiments for your site. Simply place a code snippet in your CMS, and visitors will see different versions of the front end, as served up by Frosmo.
Frosmo can segment users according to geolocation, pages viewed, conversion data, device, onsite searches and many more parameters, and marketers can set sophisticated personalization rules according to combinations of multiple parameters. Personalized user experiences can range from product recommendations to entirely different home page designs, and it’s all A/B tested for performance measurement.
The platform’s dashboard uses JavaScript to inject the personalized elements, so managing experiments isn’t nearly as easy as a drag-and-drop site-builder interface. However, in addition to the SaaS platform, Frosmo offers a team of coders (paid by the hour) to implement changes on your behalf, so it’s a great solution for those seeking extremely sophisticated personalization without needing to hire an army of in-house developers.
Intelligent product and discount offers
Bunting offers four tools in a single interface to help you personalize e-commerce user experiences: one for shopping cart abandonment, one for product recommendations, one for behavioral targeting and one for email marketing.
Triggered by location data, onsite browsing history and other signals, the personalized recommendations and discount offers can be delivered as emails, modal boxes or sidebar widgets.
Bunting’s behavioral targeting module allows you to target specific offers to those buyers who are most likely to convert. For instance, you can run a discount on an item and set the offer to go out to everyone who has already purchased from the same category before — while at the same time running a completely different promotion for first-time shoppers.
The platform’s focus is on complete automation, though, so it’s built to require close to zero maintenance. Users can even use personalization “templates,” and the machine learning takes over from there.
Tailor your UX for audiences of one
Not sure yet if personalization is for you? Consider that according to an Econsultancy report conducted with Monetate, marketers who personalize web experiences and quantify the improvements see an average of a 20-percent increase in sales (registration required).
Don’t let the fear of code stand between you and delivering a stellar personalized customer experience for each and every one of the visitors who come to your website. Today’s personalization tools are easier to manage and lighter on development resources than you might think. Maximized, targeted relevance is within reach.
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