Website Personalization: What Is It and How Do You Do It?

Website Personalization: What Is It and How Do You Do It?

The key to running a successful business is to provide the best customer experience possible, beginning with the website. When you make your customers feel welcome when they visit your website, they will return for more.

You can do this by personalizing the website to their specific requirements.

In this competitive world, website personalization has become the focus of attention as it boosts conversion rates by 15%, which satisfies customers and helps retain them, eventually leading up to 25% more sales. 

Businesses are focusing on increasing website visitor engagement through personalization. 

What Is Website Personalization? 

Website personalization is the process of providing a tailored experience to customers by delivering relevant content and offers based on their behaviour, search history, cookies, etc.

Instead of displaying the same version of your website to all customers, personalization allows you to show dynamic content unique to each customer based on their audience persona.

Why Is Website Personalization Important? 

Customers prefer websites that best cater to their needs and give them the desired experience. According to a survey by Accenture, 91% of customers prefer to shop with brands that identify, recall, and offer them appropriate offers and recommendations.

Website and content personalization are critical for building loyalty; otherwise, a once-repeat consumer may migrate to a competitor.

Chargebee increased their conversion by 40% by personalizing its website using CustomFit. This shows the exceptional impact of website personalization.

What Are the Benefits of Personalization? 

Now you know what website personalization is and why it is important, let's look at the benefits:

  • Customers who were nurtured through website customization increased sales by 20%
  • Targeting specific personalized products will motivate customers to purchase more, thus increasing your average order value
  • Website personalization will make customers relate to the brand better, boosting website visitors' engagement
  • 84% of marketers said website customization has increased customer loyalty and retention

Different Types of Website Personalization 

There are three popular types of website personalization.

Homepage Personalization

Your homepage is the first point of contact for your website visitors. Personalizing the header and the hero image based on customer persona or visitors' IP addresses will be a welcoming sight for your leads. It'll help you increase conversions. 

Freshworks


Freshworks did a great job personalizing their homepage based on the customer's search query and displayed a personalized version of the homepage relevant to the traffic source. 

Geo-Location Based Personalization 

The next major type of website customization is based on the customer's location. For example, if a customer is from the USA, display content that will interest the US prospects.

Identifying your customer's location is the easiest, and you can customize your website relevant to the location. Even as simple as changing your website language based on the location will have a great impact on your conversions. 

You can have various versions of your website. For example, if a prospect visits your website from London, you can display content relevant to that location instead of showing the common version. 

IBM personalization

Source

Demographic Personalization  

Demographic or Profiled personalization goes a step beyond. It is the process of personalizing a website based on visitors' age, gender, income, education, interests, preferences, and occupation details while signing up. 

84 percent of customers believe that being treated like a person, rather than just "another customer," is the most important factor they consider while choosing a product.

This is only possible if you know everything about their customers, and that's why it is important to create audience personas beforehand and personalize your website that'll cater to their needs. 

Firmographic Personalization 

Firmographics are extremely important in the B2B industry. It helps you cater to their needs individually. 

Displaying customized testimonials, content in native languages, customer reviews, personalized logos, and offering customer support in their language are some things that will make them trust your brand.

How Do You Personalize a Website?

Website personalization is simple if you follow these simple steps to collect customer data to deliver personalized content.

Collect Visitor's Data

According to statistics, about 90% of customers are eager to provide their data/cookies for a better experience.

Here are some ways you can gather customer data:

  1. Your sign-up form will include fields for collecting a customer's name, address, contact information, gender, age, and so on
  2. Understand their interests by looking at the pages they visit, the brands they often search for, the items they purchase, and so on so that you can tailor relevant content based on that data
  3. Uses cookies to track customer action for deeper insights 
  4. If a customer has logged in using their social media accounts, gather data from those handles 

Profiling

Based on your gathered data, it is time to build distinct buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It will inform you about a customer's demographics, interests, preferences, pleasure, and pain areas, which are important for content customization.

Buyer persona

Source

You can also segment customers based on buyer personas to target your campaign to the right customer at the right time.

Define Your Goals

Your goals include upselling/cross-selling, sending next purchase coupons, recovering abandoned carts, minimizing bounce rate, increasing customer retention rate, increasing dwell time, persuading customers to refer their friends, etc. 

You must set these goals before you initiate website personalization to get the desired conversions. 

Plan Your Personalization Strategy 

Proper planning is necessary before you jump into website personalization. This is how most websites do it:

Homepage 

You can use hero images unique to each customer instead of a common one. Use reverse IP lookup, geography, or time to display relevant content on your homepage to create the best first impression and to deliver a holistic experience.

Zoho


Source

Here's a personalization example from Zoho. This time they displayed a version of the website based on the visitor's IP address.

Product page 

Every B2B SaaS product has a product pricing page, and you can show prices relevant to the visitor's location. If a visitor enters your pricing page from Europe, display the pricing in Euro. If he's from India, display your pricing in Rupee. These small details will go a long way and increase customer loyalty in the long run. 

Implement Your Personalization 

Implementation is a step-by-step process:

Define campaigns 

Start drafting your actual personalization campaigns. Select the pages that you want to personalize and create necessary resources. 

For example, if your website personalization goal is to minimize cart abandonment, you need to offer discounts based on the cart price or enable the Pay later option to make the customer complete the purchase. 

Prioritize campaigns 

Once you've defined your campaigns, prioritize them based on their difficulty. Implement the easier campaigns first and then proceed with the harder ones. 

Test your campaigns 

Your work isn't done once your content personalization campaigns are live. You need to test them consistently to keep increasing the conversions. 

You can run split testing to see which content personalization works better and if you find any flaws, you can fix them before it delivers a negative experience to customers. 

Measure Your Website Performance

Once your campaign is live, you must measure its performance to see how many conversions are ROI it can generate. Here are some crucial metrics to measure:

  • Website dwell time
  • No of pages visited and frequency 
  • Churn rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Track customer's actions
  • Analyze visitor quality
  • The volume of returning and new visitors

These data will provide you with a 360-degree view of your campaign's performance, and based on the data. You can make necessary updates to your website personalization campaign.

Conclusion

Website personalization is all about delivering relevant experiences to customers based on their activity, and it is a proven strategy employed by marketers to increase conversions and sales. 

According to experts, even customers prefer websites that adapt to their specific requirements. They would rather buy from a website that offers product recommendations, rewards, and other perks.

So, now it is time for you to begin website personalization using these strategies and share your success story.

Ashwin Kumar
Co-Founder & CEO of CustomFit.ai