Personalise your website in 4 steps
A good salesman knows who he’s selling his products to. Delivering the same sales speech to a variety of different people is doomed to fail. A salesman knows that the only way to success is by listening to and connecting a client’s unique problem and needs to the best possible solution. And he does so by integrating his solution into a highly personalised sales pitch.
Websites are not different. Offering one-size-fits-all experiences for unique website visitors with specific needs is less effective in generating more sales.
Personalised websites constantly change to reflect each customer’s needs and interests. Integrating customer data such as behavioural, product, and psychographic data allows you to determine what is relevant to your customers. So that the content offered on your website meets the needs of individual website visitors.
Personalizing your website helps to build a meaningful connection with customers. They will feel understood. And because their experience is more relevant, it will lead to more conversions.
The simplest and most effective way to personalise your website is with the help of a customer data platform (CDP). A CDP stores all your customer data on one platform and uses smart AI technology to help you personalise your customers’ experience. In this guide, we’ll show you how to start personalizing your website in 4 simple steps.
Step 1: Define and segment your customer base
You can’t offer a personalised experience without truly understanding your customer. That is why you have to collect and gain insights from data first. Fortunately, a CDP does the heavy lifting for you. It gathers first-party data from various channels and unifies it around each individual customer. Out of this data, it creates 360-degree predictive profiles.
These profiles will be automatically segmented through pattern recognition or compared to look-a-like profiles. But you can also create your own segments based on a multitude of different data points. Examples of such segment properties include historical purchases, website events, location, demographics, even personal interests, and which persuasion tactic is likely to be successful.
Once you know who your customers are, what they need, and in which segment each individual is classified, it’s time to start outlining your personalisation strategy based on your ideal customer profile(s).
Step 2: Outlining your on-site personalisation strategy
Every website visitor goes through their own unique customer journey. Start by outlining the customer journey of your website through the eyes of your ideal customer / website visitor. You could do this for every specific persona or audience so that it becomes clear how different customers experience your website and touchpoints.
First, identify your key conversion and touchpoints per buyer phase. Next, identify their needs. Are they looking for a specific product or solution? Do they have an informative or purchase intent? Are there any barriers to placing an order?
Identifying the intention of your website visitors can help you anticipate what they expect to be offered. A customer journey map can be a useful tool for identifying opportunities for personalisation, but it is important to be specific and targeted in your approach. Consider the different stages of the customer experience and any interaction where personalisation can be beneficial. Start with personalizing a single use case, and gradually add other touchpoints and use cases.
However, only some aspects of the experience need to be personalised. Understanding your key visitors will help you to effectively plan and shape your messaging and personalisation strategy.
Step 3: Create personalised content
An effective personalised website contains different forms of dynamic content, each showing relevant messages to your visitors’ profile. Let’s go through some website elements that could be transformed into personalised ones:
The homepage: a captivating first impression
The homepage serves as the initial point of interaction for the majority of your visitors. It is crucial to focus on the content displayed above the fold, as it presents an outstanding opportunity to instantly captivate and convert website visitors. This can be achieved by strategically showcasing a compelling customized header/headline, location-based offers, product recommendations based on preferences, or social proof that cater to their specific needs and interests.
Call-to-actions & persuasion triggers: tailoring Engagement
Taking personalisation a step further, customizing your CTAs can significantly enhance customer engagement. For example: to appeal to price-sensitive customers, offer exclusive discounts or limited-time promotions. Additionally, emphasize product scarcity by showcasing real-time stock availability. The same principles apply to abandoned cart campaigns. This creates a sense of urgency and can compel customers to take immediate action. By presenting options that align with their needs, you increase the likelihood of them finding a plan that resonates with them.
Personalised product recommendations: boosting conversions
Leveraging personalised product recommendations based on their previous purchases and known preferences is a proven strategy to drive conversions. By implementing this approach, you can enhance the shopping experience and increase the likelihood of customers making a purchase. There are many possibilities to do so. The most common recommendations are showing the most popular, relevant, or similar products. Another example is cross- and upselling. To increase your average order value, you can include recommendations on your shopping cart page with phrases such as ‘People who bought X, also bought X’.
Customer reviews and testimonials: social proof
A powerful and widely used technique to increase customer trust is sharing your customers’ opinions in reviews and testimonials about your company, brand, or a specific product. You could personalise the variety of different reviews or company logos shown by making use of collected customer data. For example, a positive product review or rating can be an important factor for consumers in making their final purchase decision. And in B2B, a prospect might be sensitive to seeing similar companies and success cases among the vendors’ customer base.
Before you start personalizing, make sure you understand how your customers navigate your website. Use customer journey mapping to understand the different touchpoints and interactions that could be improved with personalisation. Effective tracking capabilities enable you to literally visualize your customer’s website journey and interests.
It may sound like a lot of work to analyse and interpret all this data. But it doesn’t have to be. With the help of a Customer Data Platform such as Spotler Activate, you can always decide to let our smart algorithm and automations do the heavy lifting for you. Gathering and learning from enormous piles of data, a CDP knows exactly what your customer expects and needs.
Step 4: Test and optimise
After you’ve personalised different parts of your website, it’s time for testing.
To assess the effectiveness of your personalisation strategy, you can use A/B testing. With Spotler Activate you can easily set up a control group and a test group to compare campaign results and implement optimizations.
Best would be to test and optimize each specific campaign or touchpoint per audience. So that you understand what works and what doesn’t on a deeper level. You don’t have to do this manually. A good customer data platform enables you to easily set up A/B tests. The only thing you as a marketer have to do is interpret the results and see if you can improve them by tweaking the personalised segments and touchpoints of your website and other channels.
Personalisation made easy
Personalizing your website – or any other channel – is necessary to keep up with your customer’s increasingly demanding needs and online expectations. But it doesn’t have to be technically difficult or very time-consuming.
User-friendliness is a key driver of Spotler Activate’ CDP, enabling marketer teams to self-serve. This ensures that any marketer can effectively use our CDP without being dependent on coding knowledge or external help from IT. This not only improves your teams’ productivity and marketing ROI, but also reduces ownership costs. And it comes with unique drag & drop functionalities to easily create personalised touchpoints and showcase dynamic content on your website, email, or in advertisements.
Book a personal demo
Our consultants are ready to show you the capabilities of Spotler Activate’s products. This way, you can quickly determine if it suits your organisation.
