Web personalization: What it is and best practices

We’re at the point where customers expect a certain level of personalization when interacting with a business. They want a unique experience and to see content and products relevant to them. They want to be seen as more than someone who brings in revenue for your company. How do we give them that? With web personalization.

What is web personalization?

Web personalization is how marketers create unique experiences for their customers. It’s a strategy that helps them provide relevant recommendations and exclusive offers. Web personalization is based on several factors, including a customer’s behavior, interests, and location.

The goal of web personalization is to create a better customer experience by addressing their needs before they ask. Imagine walking into your favorite restaurant and seeing the meal you wanted already waiting for you—that’s the kind of experience that web personalization brings to your customers.

Marketers who utilize web personalization are better positioned to make more sales—93% of B2B marketers attribute their growing revenue to their personalization efforts. Web personalization can improve customer experience, conversion rates, engagement, and more.

If you’re not seeing the growth metrics that you want to, it might be a good time to look into the benefits of web personalization.

Types of web personalization

While there are various types of web personalization, let’s look at the two most common: data-based and experience-based.

Data-based web personalization

We can break down data-based personalization into two categories: explicit and implicit.

Explicit

Explicit web personalization is where users input their own data into a website. For example, visitors might be asked to select their gender, location, and other preferences. This helps the site show more relevant products and services to its customers rather than displaying its entire line of offerings.

Implicit

Implicit web-personalization can be contextual or behavior-based.

• Contextual personalization looks at the context in which visitors browse your site. For example, that context can be the time of day, weather conditions, or even if your customers prefer video over text. Google is a great example of contextual web personalization; it offers search results based on a person’s location and suggests activities and destinations based on factors like the weather, day of the week, etc.
• Behavior-based personalization is based entirely on a visitor’s browsing history and the site’s content. It relies on a massive amount of data to personalize the interaction between a website and its customers to offer a tailored experience. This is how Amazon recommends products, Spotify recommends songs, etc.

Experienced-based web personalization

We can also break down experienced-based personalization into two categories: interruptive and seamless.

Interruptive

Interruptive experiences include things like pop-ups, push notifications, and in-app messages. Marketers typically use these experiences to entice visitors to take part in a prompted action, make a purchase, or further engage with the brand. One of the biggest benefits is that you can set when and how users see these notifications; you don’t have to show them to all visitors by default.

Seamless

In contrast, seamless experiences are an important part of what you offer your visitors. Your customers expect personalized experiences, but 93% of consumers still receive marketing communications that aren’t relevant to them. Product and content recommendations integrated into the website’s UI are the most common types of seamless web personalization.

Web personalization benefits

Offer your customers a personalized experience and they’ll take notice. By showing them relevant recommendations and content, they’ll spend more time with your brand, keep browsing your site, and continue clicking on your CTAs.

Let’s go over some of the biggest benefits of web personalization.

Conversions

Higher conversion rates are what every marketer strives for, and web personalization can make it happen. Companies that give their customers a personalized shopping experience can increase their revenue by 6% to 10%, and at a faster rate than their competitors. Web personalization has high ROI expectations. It’s a high-effort strategy, but one that’s worth it for basically every business.

Customer loyalty

Understanding your customers allows you to provide better web personalization, and better web personalization helps you gain insights into your customers and customer loyalty. By developing buyer personas, you can start personalizing your site for different customer segments. This way, rather than trying to create a unique experience for each and every user, you can create a few different personas and use broad categories based on things like location and spending habits. Analyzing what happens afterward can let you further customize your web personalization to enhance your customer retention and acquisition.

Relevance

One of the biggest benefits of web personalization for your customers is that they’ll get relevant recommendations for content, products, or anything in between. Based on their data, you can make better recommendations at the right time, in the right way. Using their engagement data lets you populate specific products and services on their instance of your website and makes running retargeting campaigns easier.

Time on site

If you want your customers to spend any significant amount of time on your site, you need to capture their attention and keep them interested—and you have about eight seconds to do so. What’s the best way to do that? Mirror their habits, behavior, and buying history back to them. Basically every marketer monitors visitors’ time spent on their site; it’s a great measure of engagement. Conversions aren’t going to happen if your visitors click off your site within seconds.

Web personalization challenges

With the benefits of web personalization come some unique challenges. Here’s how you can get around them.

Data collection

Information silos are a big obstacle when it comes to web personalization. When updating systems or making changes, many marketers find themselves wondering, “How are we going to transfer all of the customer data to a new platform?” It’s a real problem when your customer data is stored in a CRM separate from other information like their web behavior and purchase history. When key data is spread across different databases and systems, it becomes almost impossible to give your customers a personalized experience. That’s where customer data platforms (CDPs) come in—you can keep all of your customer data synced in real time and in the same place.

Performance

Web personalization requires balancing between handling a high volume of web traffic and displaying dynamic, customized content on demand. Personalized content means that you can’t rely on caches to increase performance and decrease load times for your visitors. Web personalization almost always comes with a trade-off between speed and performance. However, there are ways to reduce that trade-off. Many websites have unnecessary plugins that come with extra files and bloat that don’t do anything other than slow down performance. You can also use a content delivery network to help decrease the load times of images and other content.

Privacy

Privacy has been the talk of the marketing world in the past few years, and third-party tracking is being phased out. This includes cookies that track location, device data, and more. Many browsers block them by default, and Google is implementing its own solution. This transition, along with the newest GDPR legislation, can make it difficult for marketers to collect the necessary data for web personalization. This means it’s always better to get your users’ consent when collecting data for personalized offers. Luckily, many consumers are willing to share their information in order to receive a more personalized experience.

Web personalization strategy & best practices

We’ve talked about what web personalization is and its benefits and challenges, but how do you do it?

There are various web personalization factors you can track and use to help create a unique experience for your customers. It all starts with the buyer personas we mentioned earlier.

Buyer personas

Buyer personas are a representation of your customers based on the data you gather. They can help you create a better picture of your audience and give you accurate, actionable information to apply across your marketing campaign. Buyer personas make web personalization easier—you can see what type of customers prefer text over email, who likes videos over blog posts, which devices they are more likely to make a purchase from, and even what time of day they are more likely to shop. Incorporating buyer personas lets you create different versions of your website to cater to your various types of customers.

Device type

The devices your customers use to browse your website can give you a lot of insights about them. Do they use iOS or Android? Do they shop from their desktop computer or their smartphone? It might seem frivolous, but this information can help you make predictions about what kind of customer someone is. 79% of shoppers made a purchase from their smartphone in the past six months. Knowing this, maybe it’s a good idea to show people browsing from a mobile device more product recommendations than someone using a desktop.

Location tracking

Using geolocation tracking can help provide a better web personalization experience for your customers. Geolocation tracking finds a user’s approximate location by using various nearby WiFi nodes and cell towers. This term may make some customers nervous, but it’s important to understand that it never gives away someone’s exact location; it simply shows their general area. While this is obviously useful for stores with physical locations, it’s also beneficial for digitally native companies—you can use language and visuals unique to a customer’s area.

Time on page

Time spent on page is an important metric that helps marketers gauge the website’s performance. Content quality, overall performance, and personalized offers all affect a visitor’s time spent on each page of your website. On average, a customer will spend four to five minutes on your website, and it varies based on their device. You can use this information, along with your buyer personas, their preferred devices, and their location, to create a personalized experience to keep them engaged.

Building a website based on web personalization

Web personalization takes time, money, and effort. However, the benefits far outweigh the costs. The data shows that customers who feel valued make more purchases and are more likely to keep doing so.

Behind every good customer experience, there’s powerful data and an even more powerful customer data platform to create a personalized, profitable user experience. See how Lytics can help you give your customers the unique experience they crave through web personalization.