Since personalization is such a common part of our lives, we tend to expect it from businesses we interact with. Creating these unique experiences for customers is primarily achieved through personalizing websites.
Companies collect data from customers with explicit permission in order to create an individualized web experience. By using geolocation, site behavior, past purchases, and much more, they tailor the customer's experience on mobile apps, emails, digital ads, and websites.
Customization is not exactly the same as website personalization. Personalization vs. customization can be explained as follows: Customization is controlled by the user, whereas personalization is controlled by the company. Dashboards, chat rooms, and email filters are all types of customization a customer can configure to fit their specific needs while personalization is done by the company, using customer data to present them with a more relevant online experience.
This article discusses the types of customer data that can be used for personalization, its benefits and challenges, and how to personalize your website for customers. Additionally, we've added some mini-case studies featuring a few of our favorite companies doing an excellent job with website personalization.
Now that we know more about personalizing the customer experience, let’s dive deeper into website personalization.
What is website personalization?
Marketers use website personalization to create unique customer experiences, including tailored recommendations, dynamic content, and exclusive offers. A visitor's behavior on the website, their demographics, and their interests determine the type of advertising they receive.
By addressing customers' needs and desires before they mention them, website personalization enhances the user experience. Did you ever walk into your favorite coffee shop only to find your drink waiting for you on the counter? Your barista created a personalized experience for you - he recognized your car in the parking lot and started your order before you even asked. For your visitors, website personalization should feel like this.
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A website that adapts based on a visitor's previous behavior can even make more money. 91% of consumers prefer to shop with brands that give them personalized recommendations. Although personalization can improve traffic, customer retention, and sales, only 13% of marketers are very satisfied with the results. It might be time to review website personalization if you aren't seeing these growth metrics with your site.
The Benefits of Website Personalization
When you truly understand your customers, they will notice. If you offer them relevant product recommendations, they'll spend more time browsing your site and clicking CTAs.
Relevant Product Recommendations
A relevant product recommendation is the biggest benefit of website personalization for your customers. In order to make accurate and timely recommendations to your users, you need to know what they are interested in purchasing next based on their data. Retargeting ads are a great way to anticipate future purchases. Your website's homepage can automatically display specific items based on the engagement information provided by those advertising campaigns.
Better Understanding of Customers & Customer Loyalty
You can provide a better customer experience when you understand your customers. Develop buyer personas for your most common customers as a starting point. After that, you can work with your IT team to customize your website for each persona. By starting with brand personas rather than individual customers, you have far fewer combinations of data to generate. Instead of trying to create an experience for, let's say, 15,000 unique customers based on their addresses and the items they've purchased, you can instead create five or six buyer personas using broader categories like their location and their spending over the past six months.
Increased Time on Site
Our attention tends to be drawn more to things that interest us, and we only have 8 seconds before that attention begins to wane. As humans, we are fascinated by ourselves. Your customers are more likely to stay on your website longer if you mirror their habits and common themes about their buying history back to them. Virtually every marketer monitors time spent on-page because it is a sign of engagement. A visitor's time on your website is important, but converting on a call-to-action or landing page is even more important.
High Converting CTAs and Landing Pages
The ultimate benefit of website personalization for your business is high conversion rates across landing pages and CTAs. Companies that create personalized experiences see revenue increases of at least 6%, according to BCG. Growth like that doesn't happen by accident. Personalization of websites requires high effort, intention, and action, so ROI expectations are high. By taking the time to do it right, you will increase your chances of success with this strategy.
The Challenges of Website Personalization (and how to get around them)
Performance Scalability
Personalizing your website requires a delicate balance between managing large amounts of traffic and displaying dynamic content quickly to the user. Using a static snapshot of the page, a regular, non-personalized website can handle heavy traffic without affecting its performance. When a visitor returns to your site, they see the cached snapshot, which loads faster.
If you customize your website, you can probably imagine how difficult it is to cache a dynamic webpage. A personalized website almost always trades off performance for speed, but you can take steps to mitigate this issue. The use of a content delivery network (CDN) can help your images load faster, and removing unnecessary plugins from your website can help reduce its "bloat", or extra files that don't contribute to its performance.
Privacy
Privacy has become a hot topic among social networking giants and everyday website owners in recent years. Third-party tracking, commonly known as cookies, is used by most websites to record information about visitors.
They track all types of data, such as location and device type, to help website owners create a more personalized experience for their visitors. Cookies are blocked by default in browsers like Safari and Mozilla Firefox, and Google is well on its way to blocking them as well.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation enforced in the European Union has changed the way cookies can be used to track and collect consumers’ information. To track and store a user's data, GDPR requires explicit consent - this usually appears as a pop-up at the bottom of a website, with an option to allow or learn more about how the site will use that data. For anything that might be considered personal, you're always better off getting consent from your users.
Data Collection
When you created an app, onboarded a new email marketing system, or updated your payment processing system, you may have been asked: "How will we transfer our data?". Whether a company is big or small, this can result in information silos. Customer demographic data may be stored in a separate CRM from customer purchases, which are stored in a separate database from customer website behavior.
It becomes much more difficult to create a personalized experience for the user when this information is scattered across multiple systems. Although you can probably customize your website, the recommendations won't be as relevant as they could be if all the data was synchronized in real-time. From sales to customer service to finance, restructuring your databases can improve the customer experience for all departments in your company.
How to Personalize your Website
The benefits and challenges of personalizing your website have been discussed, but how can you do it? Additionally to using the right tools, you can track several personalization factors on your site to create a unique experience for your visitors. These tracking parameters are designed to keep your visitors interested in what your company has to offer and encourage them to purchase items they need. Your buyer personas are the first step.
Buyer Personas
What are buyer personas and how can your business use them to personalize your website? Based on research and data, buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. We use these representations to create accurate yet simple snapshots of our diverse audience for marketing campaigns, product launches, and websites. Using HubSpot's "Make My Persona" tool, here's an example of a buyer persona.
It is possible to create different versions of your website homepage for buyers like Wanda by incorporating buyer personas into your website personalization efforts.
Geolocation
Despite what it seems, geolocation tracking is not as frightening as it seems. Geolocation tracking is often mistaken as a website tracking the movements of its visitors. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Using cell towers and WiFi nodes closest to a site visitor, geolocation tracking detects their approximate location.
Websites can use this information to recommend stores nearby that they can visit. Non-physical situations can also benefit from this tracking. Using language and images that are local to Memphis, TN, your company can target Wanda, your buyer persona in Memphis.
Device type
You can learn a lot about your visitors from the type of device they use to access your website. Regardless of whether they use an iOS or Android device, a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop, you can make reasonable predictions about their buying preferences. Four out of five Americans shop online, and more than half make purchases using their mobile phones. As a result, mobile visitors might benefit from more purchase recommendations than desktop visitors.
Time Spent on Page
The amount of time spent on a website is an important metric for anyone who runs one. We use this metric to understand how our site is performing overall. In Q1 2019, Statista reported that the average time spent on desktop, smartphone, and tablet devices was five minutes, four minutes, and five minutes, respectively.
Visitors' time on our website is influenced by things like page design, content quality, and load speed. When you combine this information with the device type information above, you can get a better understanding of which devices affect time spent on pages.
Data Tracking Tools to Personalize Your Website
If you’re wondering what tools and features your website needs to track this data, we’ve got you covered. Here are five awesome tools for personalizing your website.
1. HubSpot
With HubSpot's CMS, you can create and manage a stunning, personalized website. To enhance the customization options you offer customers, you can also use forms and chatbots.
Adding smart rules and personalized features is easy with HubSpot's drag-and-drop editor. Through the CMS, you can collect data about website visitors' behavior and use that information to enhance your site.
You can also test different web pages to determine which options are most valuable to customers. Your final personalization design will be exciting and functional based on this information. HubSpot is an all-in-one, scalable, and easy-to-use marketing software package.
2. Barilliance
Ecommerce platform Barilliance offers tools to personalize online storefronts. You can reduce shopping cart abandonment by offering relevant recommendations. Each visitor's shopping trip can be optimized and personalized with Barilliance.
Adding relevant product recommendations based on a visitor's interests can be done, as well as recommending products that other customers have viewed and that the user may also find interesting.
Consider Barilliance's campaign and website features if you want to customize your e-commerce website for each visitor.
3. Qubit
Qubit's personalization is just as unique as the websites you can create with it. The offerings are divided into three categories: Start, Grow, and Pro. By experience level, these categories target company goals.
Those who want personalization foundational tools, such as chatbots or recommendations, can use Qubit Start. Grow is designed to solve more specific problems, such as integrating customer data across platforms. On the other hand, Pro offers different packages to choose from.
All Qubit categories offer the same basic features: tests, integrations, recommendations, and omnichannel personalization. Consider Qubit if you are looking for software that fits your skill level and business size.
4. SiteSpect
If user behavior is a metric you’re interested in tracking, SiteSpect is a great option. The tools offer personalization based on user data, such as previous visits, sessions, and omnichannel behavior.
SiteSpect collects and analyzes this data, which you can use to customize web pages for different audience segments. With the software, you can create segments based on factors such as location and device type which will enhance the impact of your site.
SiteSpect can help you build a website and track its effectiveness among your visitors. You can better configure your design for customers when you analyze campaign performance.
5. Hyperise
Hyperise was designed specifically for B2B marketers seeking to customize their websites. Using this tool, you can boost conversions by using hyper-personalization (recommending products based on data).
Lead nurturing features include IP lookups and form completions. For company branding, you can add your logo, profile images, and dynamic text. Additionally, you can create multiple, custom, CTAs to engage your audience.
Using this software, you can upload data from your CRM into Hyperise, making the platform integration-friendly. You can also download an extension from Hyperise to continue building your website.
Hyperise is a great personalization tool that integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, and Google Sheets.
Website Customization Examples
Your website might use all or just one of the tracking metrics we’d described in this article. It is not necessary for all websites to track tons of data to deliver a personalized web experience to their visitors. Here are some examples of how tracking only a few data points can help your business meet and exceed its goals by creating an engaging online experience.
HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Academy offers online courses in marketing, sales, and customer service. In order to help Academy participants build on their knowledge, HubSpot recommends similar courses or more advanced courses based on their previous courses.
The page greets the user by name and lists the courses in progress. Users can pick up right where they left off whenever they log in.
It doesn't have to be complicated to personalize. For B2B marketers who prefer minimalist design, think of simple elements that will still provide the results you need. Greeting the user by name and showing previous interactions are great ways to make the customer feel valued.
Kroger
We discussed third-party tracking and cookies earlier as one of the challenges of website personalization. Through its loyalty program, Kroger overcomes this problem. Customers can sign up for a Kroger Plus Card using their phone number, which gives Kroger explicit consent to track their purchases.
With this loyalty program, customers receive discounts on many grocery items. Every time a Kroger customer makes a purchase, they enter their phone number to receive the discounts. In exchange, the business can provide recommendations and coupons that are likely to be used by the shopper.
As you can see in the image above, Kroger has recommended that I add ice cream, olive oil, and limes to my grocery list since those are items I purchase frequently. Kroger Plus customers can even get limes on sale.
Apple Music
Recently, Apple Music has released more personalization updates to enhance the entertainment experience. Since this is a paid service, they don't use third-party tracking or cookies. By monitoring my downloads and replays, they can customize a station just for me. The station plays the hits I love and some new vibes I may not have heard yet. One of Apple Music's cool features is the ability to see what songs my friends have been listening to recently. My personalized playlist of my friends' jams gives me a sense of community.
Airbnb
There are few things more personal than a vacation. Using your geolocation, Airbnb recommends nearby experiences based on your next vacation. Taking into account your driving time from where you are to your vacation destination, Airbnb personalizes these recommendations. Saved searches are also kept in the app. If you wanted to take that trip to Denmark but postponed it, you don’t have to search for hours to find that perfect Fjord again. When you're ready to travel again, Airbnb saves it for you.
Google News
In the "For you" section, Google pulls relevant, recent news articles based on a searcher's browsing history. It pulls results from various sources, including past website visits, to provide a range of options. Personalization doesn't have to be limited to one goal. Displaying relevant content or products is possible using the data you have access to and permission to use.
Build Your Own Powerful and Personalized Website
The reward of personalizing your website outweighs the effort. According to the data, customers who feel valued by a company make more purchases and are more likely to return. Every powerful user experience like this is backed by an even more powerful CMS. Your CMS platform works just as hard as you do to help you create memorable and profitable user experiences.
With website personalization, you can make each visitor's experience on your website more personalized. You can present a unique web experience to your audience by using behavior tracking, location data, past browsing history, and a CMS that can handle it all.