A website is typically termed as a company’s home base on the Internet. You want to invite users to repeatedly visit your site, introduce them to your brand and products, drive sales, and inspire customer loyalty. You can achieve all of these by adding personalization features to your website. In this article, you will learn what is website personalization, including two famous examples and tips for successful personalization.
What Is Website Personalization?
Website personalization is a strategy that enables you to provide customized experiences to your users. These customizations may be based on activity from previous visits, user location, or user behavior. The purpose of personalization is to create a stronger connection with users, improving user experience, increasing visit time, increasing site traffic, and boosting brand reputation.
Personalization has been a tactic used in commerce for a long time. For example, when a shop clerk offers shoppers personal recommendations. However, it has recently expanded in popularity in the digital world due to increasing access to user data.
Applying user data to personalization enables sites to adapt to the dynamic needs and wants of visitors. This makes sites more engaging for broader audiences and can significantly increase site revenue for website owners. It is also an effective way of converting users and encouraging them to respond to your calls to action.
Web Personalization Examples
There are many examples of website personalization that you may not even be aware of. There are also examples of websites that have leveraged personalization into a central aspect of their business model. Two such examples follow.
Amazon
Amazon is an eCommerce giant that owes a large part of its popularity to personalization. Throughout the site, there are curated recommendations based on your product viewing and purchasing history.
In particular, homepage personalization is leveraged to grab a customer’s attention as soon as they land on the site. Some examples of this personalization include:
- Greeting users by name
- Displaying the status of recent orders
- Notifying users when items on their wishlist are back in stock
- Reminding users of items left in their cart
Netflix
Netflix is another example that arguably wouldn’t exist without personalization. Netflix provides users the ability to individually rate titles, bookmark items to watch and to receive recommendations based directly on those actions.
These abilities provide a customized experience for users that they have significant control over. Additionally, Netflix enables users to create multiple profiles, allowing them to more finely curate recommendations.
Another important personalization feature of Netflix is the ability to resume episodes. By keeping a history of the watch position of videos and series, Netflix enables users to consume content in a way that is flexible and convenient.
How to Personalize Your Website the Right Way
There are several practices you can use to make sure that your personalization efforts are successful. Below are a few you can start with.
Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gather user information
AI technologies can help you collect, process, and analyze user data collected from your site and other sources. For example, you can use AI to analyze voice, images, or patterns of behavior to create robust customer profiles. It can enable you to automate the time-consuming processes related to these actions and help you implement insights gained.
To accomplish this, you can create custom algorithms or you can use pre-built personalization marketing platforms. The option that is best for you depends on the value of personalization to your site and your level of expertise. For example, if you just want to create a custom chatbot, there are several frameworks that you can use to create one relatively quickly. However, if you want to implement complex analyses, a professional platform may be a better choice.
Start small
When first implementing personalization features, it’s helpful to start small. This allows you to develop familiarity and proficiency with personalization tools and methods with minimal risk. It’s also easier to refine your implementation when there is only one facet of personalization added at a time.
Once you are comfortable with personalization and the impact that it is likely to have on your users, you can begin adding more features. By starting small you are also better able to maintain brand continuity and avoid wasted effort on personalization that is not effective.
Use multiple types of personalization
When adding personalization to your site, there are several types of personalization you can implement. By combining types, you can create an immersive experience for your users.
Some types to consider include:
- Navigational—based on browsing and purchase histories. This enables you to highlight areas of your site that a user has spent more time on. For example, pushing items that they displayed an interest in the front of shop inventories or highlight banners.
- Predictive recommendations—take user histories and apply those histories to the identification of similar products or features. For example, recommending bestsellers based on previous high ratings of popular fiction books. Or, offering related products based on a history of products being purchased together.
- Contextual messaging—applies user preferences and behavior to determine the best times and modes to contact a customer. For example, if customer engagement is higher over social media than email, communication efforts are focused on social media. Or, if a user pins a location in a mapping application, alerting them when convenient public transportation routes are nearby.
Measure your effectiveness
After you have gone to the effort of implementing personalization measures, you need to ensure that your efforts are effective. If your site visits are dropping due to personalization being glitchy or intrusive, you need to know. Understanding your effectiveness, and where it’s lacking, can help you improve your implementation and ensure that your efforts have a positive impact.
Some good places to start are social media audience insights, Google Analytics, and individual feedback. The first two can provide you with a larger, objective look at your user engagement and site traffic. The latter can help you both connect with customers and get highly specific insights that can then be applied to individual customers or customer types.
Conclusion
If implemented correctly, personalization can significantly improve user experience. The guiding principle is that by offering visitors with content they need, want, and like, they will be more likely to purchase. This principle has worked well for companies like Amazon and Netflix, which are continually personalizing offerings.
There used to be times when personalization was possible only for big companies. However, today there is a wide range of personalization solutions that can be affordable to medium-level companies, and sometimes for small companies, too. In most cases, personalization is achieved by leveraging AI technologies, user data, and big data analytics.
Personalization features can be implemented via manual configuration, by leveraging on-demand cloud computing resources, or by using dedicated platforms and solutions. Whichever method you choose, be sure to continually collect data and measure your effectiveness, and stay in touch with your customers, to make sure changes are positively accepted.
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