More than four out of five consumers believe personalisation has at least some influence on what they purchase, so start customising content today as part of your enterprise website development and planning strategy.
In a world of seemingly limitless digital content, marketing managers need to offer more personalised – and hence relevant – content to improve website engagement. But what does personalisation mean beyond marketing parlance? Let’s take a look at a few practical steps content managers can take to give a website a personal feel.
The concept of personalisation is all the rage among marketing professionals who make a living out of trying to cut through the noise of digital content – from online ads to email and social media – to reach buyers by using information, or data, available to you about your prospect. The more information you have about a prospect the more relevant you can make a targeted offer. Essentially you are using data-driven marketing to drive your personalisation efforts. A simple example is an insurance company offering boat insurance to people aged over 50 who live in sea-side areas.
Consumers are also more accepting of personalised content. Research from Saleforce found that 57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalised offers or discounts. Similarly, 52% of consumers would share personal data in exchange for product recommendations, and 53% would do the same for personalised shopping experiences.
On the web, personalisation can be used for much more than a simple “Hi Sally” at the top of a web page. Regardless of whether your prospects come from inbound or outbound marketing efforts, when they land on your website the more personalised and relevant the content the more likely they will engage and identify themselves. The goal of personalisation is to move visitors from anonymous to known and use as much data as possible to improve their onsite experience to convert them from prospects to customers.
Personalisation Options
With personalisation becoming more prolific and sophisticated, there is a limited number of “out of the box” tools for developing a tailored experience for a visitor. This has resulted in a mash-up of different tools and processes to meet custom requirements. Thankfully, personalisation features are integrated into content management systems to give website owners a smoother path to visitor satisfaction. When considering a CMS platform for you website, make sure it offers options to personalise content to anonymous visitors in addition to customers, or members, that are signed in.
Begin your personalisation journey with:
- Previous interactions and segments: Perform analytics on the information you already have about your visitors. Should you segment your audience? If there is a clear need then define audience and customer segments to make personalisation simpler.
- Links and search information: What are people searching for that brings them to your website in the first place? A good understanding of why your visitors are here can be fed back into the type of content you promote on your home page and write about on your blog.
- Cookies and browser information: What interest do visitors have and what type of device do they prefer to visit with?
- Site usage: Each visitor will spend some time on the site looking at areas of interest. This behavior can then be used to present timely and sought after content.
- Surveys: A short (even VERY short) online survey helps gauge people’s interests.
Armed with an array of visitor preference information you can begin to build up a persona of a visitor which, if managed well, will keep them coming back for more relevant content.
Shut the Gate! Or Keep it Open?
Content should be personal, not prohibitive. There is a huge debate (one for another blog post) going on as to whether content should be used to nurture a potential buyer by being freely available (no forms to fill out) and enable people to do their research to build trust and reciprocity, versus putting everything behind online “gates” to capture leads regardless of where the buyer is in their decision-making journey.
The benefits of identification and authentication are clear – you can use implicit and explicit information to target content and further enhance personas – however the biggest problem will always be getting people to fill out a form or sign up in the first place. A prudent personalisation strategy would not gate information for customers or members as that would just annoy them and be counter-productive.
If your priority is customer retention and cross-selling consider using personalised content on a portal where people log into to pay an account or receive an offer. In the case of an insurance company, it is likely to have a large pool of customers who already use the online portal to pay an account or update their address. Your customer profile information can be used to display relevant content when they are logged in or just visiting.
Beware of Personalisation Pitfalls
With people spending more time online, it’s easy to see a lot of ambiguity with personalisation. If someone is looking for an “apple” do they mean the fruit or the computer company? And people are often looking at content for work, social activities or a friend or relative which can be in contrast to their own interests.
There’s no easy way through the sea of visitors and their preferences, but what site managers can do is “rank” the things they definitely know about a person and promote these interests above information that is considered marginal.
Choosing a good CMS with content personalisation features will dynamically present content to anonymous visitors based on what is happening right now on the site which may be different to their last visit. This contrasts with the use of stored profile data only that doesn’t account for changes over time or utilise the behavioral data over the profile data. For example, stored profile data might indicate someone is interested in cheese, but their current session on site suggests an interest in chocolate. The CMS should present content on chocolate not cheese on this occasion. This is also where the use of simple pop up questions can help clarify interest and intent and used to tweak relevant content delivery.
It’s an exciting time for content personalisation and website stakeholders have a significant opportunity to redefine how they manage their content. Taking the time to personalise content using data available to you will reap the reward of better engagement and potentially much better customer acquisition and retention.