How to Master Website Personalization to Improve Customer Experience

Each target visitor who comes to your website is unique. They belong to a different industry, have distinct preferences, and might be looking to achieve a different goal.

So, a one-fit approach won't help you create a good experience for them.

Enter website personalization.

Personalization allows you to create personal and "human" experiences through the customer lifecycle.

But where do you start? What do you personalize on your site? What challenges await you as you embark on this journey? Our guide will answer these questions to help you develop an effective web personalization strategy.

Table of contents

• What is website personalization?
• Personalization vs. customization
• Why does website personalization matter?
• How to build your personalization strategy
• Tools to create personalized content on your website
• How to tackle the challenges of personalization
• Website personalization best practices
• Website personalization examples
• Get started today!

What is website personalization?

Website personalization involves creating a unique experience tailored to each individual based on their past interactions, behavior, demographics, and preferences.

For example, you can personalize your website by showing product recommendations on the cart page and content-related pop-ups.

Personalization vs. customization

Both personalization and customization aim to create a unique experience for the users. But there’s a thin line of difference that separates them.

The difference lies in who makes the changes and how they create them.

Why does website personalization matter?

Personalizing the web content matters because of the following reasons:

• Strengthens customer relationship

Users want to see content that resonates with their preferences, and when you show them exactly that, they feel heard and valued. With personalization, you make the user's experience more humanized. Such experience boost engagement by building customer relationship and conversion metrics.

Related guide: How to Enhance Customer Experience to Drive Retention and Growth

• Facilitates repeat purchases

As per Amplitude, customer acquisition cost (CAC) has gone up 50% over the past 5 years. Thus, retaining existing customers becomes more important than ever.

Personalizing user experience can help you keep existing customers, as 44% of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience.

• Get better qualified leads

To get good qualified leads, visitors should instantly know your USP and the benefits they can get from it. Showing personalized content to target different segments will help you attract leads that have a high chance of converting. It will also help your sales team eliminate the time and effort they would spend nurturing cold leads.

Related guide: Marketing Qualified Leads: How to Get Better MQLs

• Increased customer lifetime value

You want your users to buy from you frequently and personalized content can help you achieve that goal. Using AI and machine learning-based recommendations, you can show the most relevant content based on their browsing data. It will keep users engaged as you show them what they want to see and thus encourage them to convert, increasing customer lifetime value.

How to build your personalization strategy

To give the best-personalized experience to your users, you need to understand the 3W's of personalization:

Why are you personalizing? - The end goal you want to achieve.

Whom are you personalizing for? - Understand your target persona and segment them into different groups based on data.

What are you personalizing? - Decide what you will show your selected segment to achieve your goals.

Let’s discuss each of them in detail.

Why are you personalizing?

First step towards personalization is to identify the goals you want to achieve. Remember your goals will vary depending upon the industry, target buyer personas, budget, and resources.

Do you want to convert new customers, retain existing ones, or reduce the bounce rate on your product page? Or do you want to increase the average order value from a particular segment of your audience?

It's imperative to be crystal clear of your objectives if you want to create an effective personalization strategy.

Who are you personalizing for?

You can't personalize until you know who you want to personalize for, i.e., your target audience. And you can't identify your audience if you don't have the means to collect and understand the needs and behavior of your customers throughout their lifecycle stage.

Here are a few ways to collect users' data to create a unique digital experience for them:

1. Ask your users directly

Ask your customers about their preferences and interests to collect useful first-party data. There are many ways to collect that data:

Surveys

Send out different surveys such as feedback surveys, follow-up surveys, NPS, CSAT, etc. via email. To get more responses, try AMP forms as they allow users to submit the form in the email, reducing friction.

Checkout our AMP form templates

Signup forms

Use lead generation or signup forms to collect user data such as demography, industry, and business size.

2. Setup website cookies

A website cookie is a text file that gets stored in the user's device and tracks visitors browsing history. It collects information like pages visited, IP address, cart details, etc.

This information can be helpful in tailoring content based on whether the user is new or a repeated one.

3. Dig into customer service and sales data

Dig into your customer service and sales data. Talk to a sales rep to get data on what users are saying about your product/services and any feedback that might be useful.

4. Map user’s journey

Mapping users' journey by analyzing different touchpoints through their lifecycle stage can give you a handful of data. By mapping a user's journey, you can deep dive into their behavior. Where do they spend the most time on your page? Which link did they click on, or which e-book did they download? You can collect this by mapping the user's journey.

For a B2B, some common traits can be industry verticals, company size, and funnel stage.

For e-commerce, it can be past purchases, items added to shopping carts, demography, or location.

What can you personalize on your site?

Once you have your goals on the target persona, you can begin personalization.

For instance, as a SaaS, you want to increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) by 20% in the next 6 months. And to achieve this goal, you need to upsell your current customers. So, you can personalize your landing page that highlights the benefits of upgrading to premium plans.

Here is a list of different elements you can personalize

• Homepage

• Landing pages

• Search results: When someone types a word, you suggest relevant queries just like Google does

• Visuals: Images, videos, GIFs

• Pop-ups: Personalize pop-ups based on which content users are interacting with

• Social proof: Show social proof based on which feature or service users are looking at.

• Shopping cart page: Add related product recommendations based on the user's browsing history

• Relevant content recommendations: Show content to read next based on the user's interaction or add inline content.

There is no limit to what you can personalize, and the above examples are just some ideas to get you started.

Tools to create personalized content on your website

Here are the tools you can use to create personalized content and also run a/b tests to optimize your page for maximum conversions

1. Optimizely

2. Google Optimize

3. Personyze

4. Dynamic Yield Ltd.

5. Evergage

How to tackle the challenges of personalization

No doubt personalization offers many benefits, but there are many challenges that might discourage businesses from investing resources.

Lack of personnel, budget, and skills are the top challenges while approaching personalization.

Source: Salesforce and Researchscape International, 2020

To create a truly unique experience, understand and develop strategies to tackle such issues.

• Train employees: Equip them with the expertise to learn advanced technology like AI machine learning.

• Review your annual budgeting strategy: Assess the current projects, and redistribute resources to support key priority such as personalization.

• Encourage collaboration: Allow employees to share and solve problems across the organization, in IT, analytics, product development, and legal.

Website personalization best practices

Here are some of the best practices to follow while setting up personalized content on your site:

• Invest in customer data platform

Forget personalization if you don't have the means to understand the user's needs and behavior.

To provide a top-notch personalized experience, you need to develop a strong foundation. Analyze different data types, and deploy algorithms to identify behavioral patterns and choices.

This is where a customer data platform (CDP) is essential to execute these tasks. CDPs help you create a 360-degree customer profile by collecting data points through machine learning across channels, cookies, and ad networks. It then enables real-time campaign execution across touchpoints and channels.

• Protect user’s privacy

As the user's data is the foundation of personalization, you need to be vigilant in using that data. Laws like GDPR and CPRA have put strict regulations on users' personal and sensitive information usage.

So, be transparent while collecting the data and ask for the user's consent. Use only the required data to enhance UX, and deploy resources to keep user data safe.

• Analyze the channel-wise behavior

What users do and interact with your website can limit your personalization efforts. To create a memorable experience, track their behavior across different channels. Use cross-channel data to develop hyper-personalized content to deliver a unified experience from one touchpoint to the next.

• Don’t overdo the recommendations

Too many or too frequent recommendations can make your brand annoying to the readers. After all, your goal is to enhance their experience, not downgrade it.

So, be watchful of what you suggest and diversify your recommendations to keep users engaged on your site.

Website personalization examples

With the spread of AI and machine learning, brands take the user's experience to the heights by personalizing the content. Here are our top 3 picks that we love and couldn't resist sharing.

1. Amazon

Amazon is among the top brands that leverage personalization to its fullest. 35% of Amazon's sale come through product recommendations done through AI, machine learning, and predictive technology.

Log in to your Amazon account, and you'll see a parade of recommendations based on your previous purchase or search history.

So, they create a unique homepage experience for individual visitors. Given Amazon's large user base, it says a lot about the brand and how they aim to create a great experience for their users.

2. Netflix

You would have noticed how Netflix often changes the movie and web show cover. Besides, the recommendations also keep changing unfailingly. That is Netflix's way of creating a tailored experience for its viewers.

They tailor each experience across many dimensions:

• the suggested videos and their ranking,

• the way videos are organized into rows and pages,

• and even the artwork displayed.

Furthermore, constant a/b testing fuels their personalization and thus they never fail to delight their users.

3. Spotify

We can't talk about personalization without adding Spotify to our list. Spotify never fails to catch our eyes and make us wonder - How can they know me so well?

And their recent update - Blend, is taking personalization to the next level. The feature allows two people to merge their music tastes. The aim is to help them connect, discover, and bond over their favorite songs, artists, and tunes.

Get started today!

Delivering a personalized experience may seem daunting due to the enormity of data and technical know-how. But, good personalization can shift your business trajectory and unlock exponential returns. The process is pretty doable; the getting started part is often the toughest one.

Pick your goals, collect data through surveys and journey mapping, and decide what you can personalize to achieve your goals.