How Website Personalization Improves Your Brand
How your website looks, how it navigates, and how it makes people feel can determine whether or not a digital visitor becomes a paying customer. Therefore, website personalization is an indispensable part of a complete omnichannel marketing strategy.
Leveraging website personalization to create the optimal customer experience
For the consumer, your site must be a source of stability; each visit shouldn’t be a reinvention of the wheel. Whether visitors arrive via organic, paid, or referral-based channels—whether those visitors are at the very top or the very bottom of your funnel—your site needs to deliver continuity in its experience.
Website personalization ensures consistency across all touchpoints for both known and unknown visitors, and it gives brands the ability to engage in 1:1 interactions with visitors across the buyer’s journey. But, more importantly, personalization allows marketers to maximize the impact of their paid and owned media efforts. (In other words, any media effort that isn’t paired with a personalized site should be considered incomplete.)
Consider this…
- 78% of consumers will engage with a brand’s offer IF AND ONLY IF that offer has been personalized based on a previous brand engagement.
- 59% of consumers say personalization plays a major role in shaping their buying decisions, and industry experts believe that influence can drive a 30% uplift in revenue and retention.
What kind of results will your brand see from website personalization?
Increased customer acquisition and conversion
HubSpot found personalized calls-to-action outperformed non-personalized CTAs by +200%.
ABOVE: What a visitor sees on their very first arrival to the HubSpot homepage (During our first visit, we researched “CMS software”).
BELOW: On our next visit to the HubSpot homepage, we were exposed to personalized homepage creative related to CMS software due to our behavior during the previous visit.
Decreased cart abandonment
In an industry that sees an 82% cart abandonment rate, travel brands like Orbitz are using site personalization to increase their bookings by as much as 130%.
ABOVE: Homepage travel recommendation to an unknown visitor upon first arrival to Orbitz.com.
BELOW: Homepage travel recommendation to an unknown visitor after they’ve added a beach-resort booking to their cart.
Auxiliary sales
Amazon uses personalized suggestions (e.g. “customers who bought this item also bought these items”) to increase auxiliary purchases by 44%.
ABOVE: A consumer product we researched on Amazon.
BELOW: On the same page, Amazon displays a personalized list of similar consumer products they believe we’ll be interested in based on our previous behavior.
Higher growth
Walmart used personalization to increase unique traffic to their site by 55% and sales by billions.
ABOVE: The Walmart homepage during our first visit to the website.
BELOW: Recommended products on the Walmart homepage during our first visit to the website (during this first visit, we searched for—and added—baby clothes to our shopping cart).
BELOW: The Walmart homepage during our next visit to the website, featuring recommended products related to our previous shopping behavior.
Improved brand loyalty
In most businesses, 15% of customers account for 55% of sales which means maximizing loyalty is essential. One of the best ways to establish loyalty is through personalized promotions that cater to first-time site visitors.
ABOVE: To encourage brand loyalty, Everlane offers a pop-up promotion to first-time website visitors.
BELOW: On subsequent visits to Everlane’s website, the pop-up is no longer shown. However, because we have yet to make a purchase, the site still delivers a personalized, unobtrusive reminder of the promotion via the slender black banner at the top of the screen.
How to do website personalization the right way
If site personalization is something you’re ready to consider for your business, know that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. To properly personalize your website, you first need to obtain a 360-degree view of the visitor through…
Identification
Most people want a custom experience when they visit a website, but they also don’t want to self-identify. In fact, 98% of website visitors don’t identify themselves. Taking this into consideration, how can you hope to personalize your brand’s site? You can do it by aggregating that visitor’s previous online behavior (sites visited, shopping preferences, intent signals, etc.). Compiling that information takes a partner with a strong identity graph to match the unknown visitor to a known profile (or known audience) to make informed targeting decisions.
First-party data enrichment
Augmenting your customer data with first-party data enrichment (combined with ID resolution services) will vastly improve the range and depth of your site personalization. Moreover, first-party data enrichment allows for more effective omnichannel deployment. By offering a more complete understanding of the visitor, first-party data enrichment ensures the same decision logic is deployed in all channels (email, programmatic, push, etc.).
Once you have that 360-degree view, you can start deploying site personalization features like…
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence should be deployed to drive product and content recommendations on the dynamic modules of your site. Not only does AI automate the process of populating dynamic modules at scale, but it curates the modules shown to the visitor with unparalleled precision. This, in turn, optimizes website efficiency, and powers a continuous feedback loop that makes it easier to meet (and exceed) marketing goals.
Website personalization
Impactful, customized overlays that help create a personalized, customer experience based on a visitor’s behavior, history, and engagement with your site. Website personalization can generate a number of positive outcomes, including:
- Improved customer acquisition
- Increased email signups
- Lower cart abandonment
- Greater interest in brand-loyalty programs
- Extra attention for critical announcements or promotions
On-site recommendations
On-site recommendations are an ideal means of putting curated, highly relevant, and personalized content in front of your site visitors. Using powerful AI and a centralized real-time personalization engine, you can seamlessly guide a customer using tailored messaging throughout their journey, all the way from paid media to your most important ‘owned’ channel (your site).
If you don’t stop at the inbox, you shouldn’t stop at your website
Website personalization is but one of many touchpoints along the customer journey. For your brand to achieve optimal success, it’s imperative you personalize the experience across all the channels your customers live on. The brands that do this see an average 19% lift in conversions.
To learn more about the importance of site personalization, please contact Zeta here.
