Talk To Me Like You Know Me

Imagine being able to give each website visitor a customized experience with your website and your brand. In reality, your website is one central communication tool that has to appeal to many different types of people. How will you make a connection with each individual visitor? By personalizing your website content, communications, and interactive experiences, you can more effectively meet specific business goals such as sharing information, donations or purchases.

What is personalization?
Web personalization is a strategy, a marketing tool, and a CRM approach. It allows you to tell your customers what they want to hear and deliver an experience based on preferences or interests. It requires collecting user data and utilizing user behavior and preferences to deliver relevant information that will ultimately inform them and guide them to a desired action. Here we outline three levels of personalization that all focus on making the most memorable connection with your website visitors.

Content
Personalizing your website content for audience segments – or mass personalization – is the most common form of web personalization. You can start by creating distinct paths for certain users to follow (ie: separate For Parents and For Students links or Patients and Physicians, etc.). Understand what is important to those user groups and give it to them. Customize the vocabulary and general voice of the content to resonate with them.

Communications
Targeted Messaging is an aspect of communications and promotions that can be highly effective if customized correctly. This consists of addressing your visitors by name and showcasing the most relevant content to them, whether this is geographically-targeted information, recently-viewed pages, or items in your shopping cart.

E-mail marketing campaigns are another simple, yet effective way to talk to your customers like you know them. By collecting names and company names of your readers, you can deliver a “Dear So and So” email with information relevant to their industry.

User Experiences
Dynamically customizing imagery and content on your website is a more advanced personalization tactic. When a user navigates your website, you can remember their path using a “cookie” to understand their preferences. Cookies are small pieces of code, which communicate with the website to offer the most relevant content. Cookies are what allow a website to store items in your shopping cart and offer other items you may be interested in purchasing, for example.

A good example of web personalization is the ASPCA website (ww.aspca.org). By identifying users by which pets they care about, the website is able to deliver relevant images of only these animals, therefore enhancing the connection that the user has with ASPCA and ultimately affecting their level of involvement with the website and the organization as a whole.

What results can you expect from personalization?
Whether you chose to pursue a connection with your audience through custom content, e-communications, or dynamic user experiences, personalizing your marketing message will help boost:

All of this results in a more engaged audience, and as we all know, the more engagement, the bigger rewards for your organization.