What Is Personalization?

Contents

1. How do you actually build personalized experiences on digital channels?
2. Personalization
3. Want to learn more?
4. Strategy 1: Give first-time visitors a great first impression
5. Strategy 2: Recognize returning visitors
6. Strategy 3: Use the visitor’s referral source to show relevant content
7. Strategy 4: Show information relevant to the visitor’s location
8. Strategy 5: Give visitors who become leads a personalized call to action
9. Strategy 6: Score your visitors
10. Strategy 7: Infer where the visitor is in their journey

How do you actually build personalized experiences on digital channels?

Anyone familiar with digital marketing knows personalization is not a new topic. According to US research, adding personalization to customer interactions on digital channels can raise customer satisfaction by more than 35% and increase customer lifetime value by up to 2x.

Unfortunately, in our experience serving businesses, many corporate websites still haven’t adopted a personalization strategy. The main reason is not that people don’t know its benefits; it’s that getting started always seems complicated, and preparing different content and assets for different audiences puts a heavy workload on marketers.

Personalization

Personalization means that, on digital channels, the business proactively offers each visitor the information they are most interested in, so visitors spend less effort searching and feel looked after. This is what people mean by “a thousand faces for a thousand people”. But if you segment customers into groups (say, 10), offering “ten faces” to “a thousand people” already feels personalized to visitors. Preparing ten versions of marketing content is much more achievable for marketers, and it is a good way to start a personalization strategy.

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To tackle this problem, here are some quick, practical personalization strategies you can test and refine with minimal investment to find what works for you:

• Strategy 1: Give first-time visitors a great first impression

  First impressions always matter most. The information on the first screen of the home page should show visitors your unique value. It’s a long-established strategy, but it’s still important and effective.
  Also, although they are visiting for the first time, these visitors could be at any stage of the marketing funnel, so the home page needs clear paths to other relevant pages. This improves the browsing experience and helps visitors find what they need quickly.

• Strategy 2: Recognize returning visitors

  Beyond new visitors, you should offer returning visitors a more thoughtful experience. Returning visitors usually have more advanced needs, such as product manuals or FAQs. You can also cross-sell based on the products they look up.
  For example, if someone comes to look up a digital camera manual, on-site ads can recommend compatible lenses.

• Strategy 3: Use the visitor’s referral source to show relevant content

  Use information about where visitors came from (such as a Google ad, a Facebook fan page post or a shared post on Mobile01) to personalize what they see.
  For example, if a visitor arrives via a Facebook post about gloves, the site can automatically point them to other glove styles and related items such as ski jackets, which effectively increases the close rate.

• Strategy 4: Show information relevant to the visitor’s location

  Serving information based on where the visitor actually is when they arrive is another good personalization strategy.
  For example, if an investment trust company runs courses in northern, central and southern Taiwan, the home page can first show the courses nearest to the visitor’s city. When a visitor from Tainan opens the site, the Kaohsiung course information appears at the top of the page, making things more convenient.

• Strategy 5: Give visitors who become leads a personalized call to action

  Visitors who subscribe to a newsletter or leave their email to download a white paper can be treated as potential leads. For these visitors, you can start tracking their progress along the customer journey and connect a marketing automation engine to deliver calls to action across touchpoints (website, email, LINE) that move the journey forward.

• Strategy 6: Score your visitors

  To better understand visitors’ behavior and preferences on your site, you can plan various scoring rules for each visitor. For example, when a visitor views a bracelet they haven’t seen before, the system adds one point to that visitor’s jewelry category; after they have viewed three bracelets, they have 3 points in jewelry. The system can then dynamically adjust on-site ad content or the personalized page layout based on each visitor’s scores, putting related jewelry products in the most prominent spots.

• Strategy 7: Infer where the visitor is in their journey

  Whatever marketing model you use, whether AIDA, AIDMA or AARRR, the customer journey follows a certain order of steps. With the six personalization strategies above, the system captures more detail and data about visitors, so you can define rules that place each visitor at a stage of the journey, and show the next step of the journey prominently on the page.

With these simple strategies, you can start right away, whatever content management platform you use. Start small: run a small pilot, and once you see clear results and your team is comfortable with the way of working, evaluate a more complete solution that runs personalized digital marketing more efficiently. That is a steady path to transformation.