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 to not overcomplicate your efforts. Stakeholders tend to 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.
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 categories:
- 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 segment 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 using email to:
- Send personalized messages: Create 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' preferences.
Intermediate segmentation tactics to level up
If you have the DXP, CMS or CRM in place, enhance your online customer experiences with collected contact data.
Using a digital experience platform (DXP) like Kentico? You can separate contacts into groups or personas. If you don't have that data yet, you could 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 use this data to separate groups by broad rules, it's easier to implement than one-to-one personalized content delivery targeting individual contacts.
- Add dynamic content: Create and serve content that’s tailored to a 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 site activity, including abandoned carts, contact forms, subscription forms and 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 site elements like CTA buttons, banners and images.
Remember that website personalization isn't about adding bells and whistles — it requires thoughtful experience design.
Always collect data
Gather valuable data at each point of your user's journey. Given the opportunity, don't be afraid to ask your customers and community direct questions. Consider the entire digital experience and your onboarding processes. They can always say no to your requests, but some will say yes.
Bottom line? Even small steps make a big difference. Continue to level up your efforts by capturing and leveraging information wherever you can — then use it to deliver personalized experiences for an enhanced customer experience.
If your business is looking to evolve its digital strategies to include personalization, give our pros a call to get started.