The expert-backed prediction of personalization tools is known to be on the rise, correlating with the increase of people seeking personalization hacks online, and those appearing in many places on the internet. But why is this seemingly sudden, meteoric rise actually taking place? The reason actually has to do with consumers’ desire to make purchases from websites and people they perceive as trustworthy.
Recent studies have found that companies who know their buyers’ buying habits get the most sales from their consumers. This is done by figuring out who shops at a particular website, where they are from, when they conduct their purchases and tracking their product browsing history. Once you understand your target audience, you can begin to make your site more relatable to each particular visitor through personalization.
Website personalization is extremely useful, but it is not something that just anyone can handle achieving. Seeking out a reliable web design firm is the perfect solution for anyone who is seeking a professional approach to website personalization. These agencies command a lot of experienced resources that can professionally and precisely set up your site to be personalized to consumers and within any niche imaginable. See examples here.
The key point to grasp to fully understand the concept of web personalization is that the first step is to understand your target customers. Without sufficient understanding of who shops at your site, you cannot hope to tailor and personalize each visitor’s experience.
View-Tracking Personalization
One of the most essential metrics to consider when you are working through a website personalization process is page views. The study of page view data will give you true insight into the problems or pain points that people are seeking a solution for. What is it that makes these issues a challenge to handle for the customers? When you know the problem, you can start working on a more personalized address to the best solution.
One of the most common ways this is addressed by startups is with a survey, but this is a faulty approach because most people will not bother with a survey from an unfamiliar source. Successful marketplaces have leveraged the browsing history of visitors to understand the needs of their prospective consumers. When a business finds that those who frequent their site are browsing for particular products, they can craft better-refined suggestions for these visitors in the future.
Pop-Up Personalization
There are few things more loathsome than a pop-up suddenly covering up the site that we really care about seeing, making pop-ups very unpopular with website browsers, and yet it’s one of the most used marketing tools. Why? While it may be epicly annoying, it’s also extremely effective.
So how do marketers utilize this disliked technology to their advantage? They tailor the pop-up based on the browsing history of the particular user. By advertising to viewers of the site with pop-ups relevant to their past searches, marketers are making the pop-up less annoying by boosting its relevance to the visitor viewing it.
This simplifies the task of personalization by turning something that is commonly a turn-off into something that looks relevant to the particular site visitor through personalization.
Survey For Better Personalization
While it is not the ideal starting point, surveys are very effective in terms of website personalization, but only in the case that they are utilized based on databases comprising a sizable customer base.
There are some inherent problems with this method, however. Response rates for surveys are typically low, and a depressed turnout for survey takers can cut off your confidence level at the knees. If you are gathering too small of a sample size from the survey responses you collect, the data you are receiving is incomplete. If you are working from incomplete data, you risk making incorrect decisions when it comes to how to approach personalizing your site.
Having said that, experts still advocate for surveys to be used. If the challenges presented can be overcome, surveys can be very informative about how to best personalize the sites. To streamline the process, many marketers use automation tools to better integrate their survey questions into their sites.
Taking Advantage Of Link Clicking
With the questionable reliability of surveys, many marketers use marketing automation tools to boost their customer reach. The biggest problem with surveys, as noted earlier, is a low response rate. Since most people won’t fill the surveys out, you can use a particular trick to get those people to come back and give you the information you need. But first, you need a place to test the strategy.
Perhaps you can send multiple emails to people with several links included, thereby increasing the probability of at least one of the links being clicked. This is especially effective when the emails are crafted strategically. But you must exercise caution, send links to different areas, then observe and wait for the links to redirect attention.
In doing so, you can gauge the behavior of your audience. The information you receive in return can be very valuable, so long as you have sufficient knowledge about your audience going into it. People reacting in a particular way when they click the link is going to be a very important consideration, and it is equally important to remember that to get your audience interested in clicking the links, you must offer value in your emails that will entice them into following the link you provided.
The Bottom Line
When you have collected sufficient data, it’s time to use the knowledge and information you have acquired to craft your website, with a specific focus on page view and site view metrics. Page view data is important for consideration of filtering out who your likeliest customers will be. For instance, if someone is looking into the price section, they are likely considering a purchase. In essence, you are listing out potential customers. Another strategy is using retargeting emails for first-time visitors.
You can work together with your web design agency to figure out the best website personalization methods and to achieve optimal results.
