Modern technologies have given businesses new ways to personalize customers’ experiences. “Yet, more than 74% of marketing leaders still struggle to scale their personalization efforts.” It takes time and effort to set up the technical requirements to create a fully segmented and personalized web experience for your customers.
If you are about to jump into the segmentation and personalization pool, fear not. You can wade into the shallow end and start making waves with some easier-to-implement personalization strategies.
Say yes to the lowest level of entry!
The key is not to overcomplicate your efforts. Often, stakeholders convolute this step by wanting everything all at once. With some consideration and autonomy, your assets can quickly become more personalized without over-investing time and resources. The key is to start small and slowly scale up as you gain a better understanding of how each strategy works for your business.
Our easy to remember segmentation approach in three levels:
- Based on broad rules
- Based on personas
- Based on profiles
Simplified segmentation tactics for quick wins
Divide customers into groups based on very simple parameters. For ecommerce companies, these broad rules are a natural extension of purchase orders. Simply divide customers based on the products they've purchased.
For professional service companies, stakeholders often struggle to define their audiences. However, working with your account managers, you should be able to divide contacts based on conversations and interests. Start by simply focusing on one service offering. Prospects for that service and customers of that service.
Now that you've created simple segmentation, consider leveraging email to:
- Send personalized emails: Send tailored offers and discount emails to customers based on interests or recent purchases.
- Collect customer feedback: Use surveys to collect feedback directly from your community, collecting data and encouraging opt-ins.
- Track user behavior and metrics: Track web, email, and survey activities to better understand customers' needs and interests.
Intermediate segmentation tactics to level up
If you have the DXP, CMS, or CRM in place, you can use collected contact data to enhance your customer experiences online.
If you are using a digital experience platform (DXP) like Kentico, for example, you can separate contacts into groups or personas. Or if you don’t quite have that data yet, you can at least duplicate content and change your message from ‘welcome’ to ‘welcome back,’ based on new or returning visitors data. While this plan would still require your website to be built in components that can be conditionalized and can use this data to separate groups by broad rules, it is much easier to implement than one-to-one personalized content delivery targeted on an individual contact level.
- Add dynamic content: Create content that’s tailored to the site visitor based on first-party data, new user, returning user, existing customers, etc., Or even by user device, highlighting mobile products versus desktop products.
- Automated emails, notifications, and product recommendations: Set up automated content triggered by website activity, such as abandoned carts, contact forms, subscription forms, pop ups to serve tailored customer service messages, product recommendations, and more.
- A/B testing of website elements: Use a native DXP or third-party tool to run audience-driven split tests on various elements of your website, from CTA buttons, banners, and images.
It's important to remember that website personalization isn't about adding bells and whistles – it requires thoughtful experience design.
Always collect data!
During every part of your user journey, be sure to collect data. Do not be afraid to ask your customers and community direct questions. Consider the whole digital experience and your onboarding processes. Take every opportunity to collect information. They can always say no to your requests, but they may just say yes.
The bottom line is that even small steps make a big difference. Continue to level up your efforts by capturing and leveraging information wherever you can so you can deliver personalized experience for your customers.
If your business is looking to evolve its digital strategies to include personalization, give our pros a call to get started.