What is Website Personalization?

5 minute read
What is Website Personalization?

As a B2B marketing manager, you’re always looking to optimize your website and provide the best experience possible. But, at some point you might think there’s not much else you can do to optimize your website experience. However, with the help of website personalization, you can set up exclusive optimizations that will change for every website visitor. Yes, that’s right, every view of your website will be different based on your visitor’s firmographics. Keep reading to find out more about website personalization and how to use it in your marketing strategy.

What is Website Personalization?

Website personalization is the process of creating a personal and custom experience for the visitors to your site. Instead of creating one website and having all your visitors experience the site the exact same way, you can create a personal experience for each visitor. The process of creating a personalized experience for visitors is not a new idea; the customer service industry does it for every customer they have. With the digital world taking over, we must now turn to personalize new touch points with our customers. 

Online retails can now provide a targeted and personalized customer experience based on their visitor’s browsing behavior. Sites can now tailor messages to their visitors based on their behavior, needs, browsing pattern and so much more. 

Why Is Website Personalization Important?

Why is website personalization important?

For many industries, it can be difficult to implement personalization online as they have primarily done this offline. It can be a learning curve to transition your business to online and then to implement tools like website customization. But with the rising expectations of online customers, you need to elevate your online customer service and personalization. Customers now expect to get all the information they are looking for and get it quickly. Not to mention, they want to feel that they are unique and they matter. This can be hard to achieve over and over and over again for all of your customers. Thankfully, with automated tools, it can be much easier, and it can make all the difference to your visitor who expects this. 

The Benefits Of Website Personalization

There are many reasons one may want to explore the use of website personalization. Some of the main goals are to increase brand loyalty, engage your customers, and increase your conversion rate. Website personalization can drastically improve all of these areas. 

Brand Loyalty

A personalized website can help the relationship your site visitors have with your website. The data you get from your customers will allow you to tailor the messages they see and offer them specific content pieces. You are making your marketing strategy more personal and effective across all channels. Not only will your brand loyalty go up with existing customers, but it will also improve their engagement and introduce new customers to your site. 

Engagement

You can nurture the customers on your site through the use of targeted offers based on their behaviour. Using the data collected on visitors, you can ensure the engaging content is relevant to them. This personalized touch accelerates your customers through their buying journey by increasing their engagement. 

Conversions

By truly understanding your site’s browsing data, you can get a clear road map of your buyer’s personas, demographics, and purchase behaviors. You can then use this data to understand your customer’s preferences before the checkout to increase conversions. You can see double your current conversion rate through website personalization and upwards of a 70% increase in added to cart conversions. 

Types of Website Personalization

Types of Website Personalization

There are many ways you can customize a website for visitors. Some of the most common ways are through pop-ups, landing pages, suggested content, similar products, and social proof. Through these different personalization tools, you can learn more about your site visitors and use those unique data points to better serve them. Each data point is a piece of the puzzle you are building to get a clear picture of who your customers are and how you can build long-term value with them.  

We enable B2B companies to identify the anonymous businesses that visit their website and personalize their experience. Your sales team can now follow up with the visitors that don’t convert, while marketing can personalize your website based on firmographic information to drive up conversion rate. Start your 14-day free trial today!

Popups

Through the use of website popups, you can quickly grab a site visitor’s attention and get your message(s) across. Unfortunately, they sometimes get a bad wrap, but they can be one of the most efficient ways to do it. You can also use them for future retargeting and remarketing purposes. Helping you create a clear picture of who your customers are and how to target them. 

Here are a few examples of how to create a personalized popup:

  • A welcome message for first-time visitors
  • A welcome back message for returning customers
  • A popup that is triggered at specific engagement points (scrolling, time on page, page viewed, link clicked, cursor position, etc.)
  • Exit popups to encourage customers to stay or recommendations to other content they may like

There are many ways popups can be used effectively to increase engagement on your site. Ensure that you are not overdoing it with popups or have the issue of customers leaving and not returning. 

Content Adaptation

We have all seen how large brands such as Netflix, Crave, Spotify, or Amazon do this. They adapt their website by modifying the content. This allows them to tailor the content presented to the viewer’s preferences. 

Here are some ways to do this:

  • Images: Websites can tailor the visuals, products, or content on a page depending on the customer segment. For example, if the visitor is visiting from a snowy place in the north or Canada, they could be presented with snow gear or athletic gear for snow sports. 
  • Product Order: Depending on the way your customers browse your site, the order of products can be changed. Based on their previous or current behavior and page path, you can tailor your content to show related products first.
  • Recommendations: Like Amazon, most e-commerce stores offer product recommendations. A section such as “often bought with” will increase conversion rates as well as cart totals. This allows customers to grow within your product line further and increase brand loyalty. 
  • Social proof: Through the use of notifications such as purchases, page visits, reviews, etc. you can show your visitors that others are enjoying your site and products. Most customers will not buy a product without looking at a review first; it is important to your visitors that others also use your products. 

What Does All This Mean?

It can be difficult to know where to start with website personalization, but it can be very beneficial to you and your business as you can see from some of the recommendations above. But, on the other hand, if you use too much, it can be detrimental to your business and drive traffic off of your site. There is a delicate balance of how many tools to use and where to use them. This is where learning more about your customer’s behaviors comes into play. It can take time, test what works best for your customers. 

Visitor Queue Website Personalization Software

You may be thinking that website personalization sounds great but it seems complicated. That’s why we’re here to help! Easily personalize your website based on your website visitor’s location, demographics, employee count, company name, and much more. Show them a tailored view of your website including case studies, use cases, FAQs, and calls to action that will entice them to convert. Like I mentioned before, website personalization can increase brand loyalty, relationships, and ultimately increase conversions. Start personalizing your website today by starting a 14-day free trial of Visitor Queue.

Where To Start?

A safe place to start is to look at other sites you admire and see what type of tools or elements they are using on their site. If you are an eCommerce site, I would recommend implementing a system that suggests other products to your customers that are related to what they are looking at. This is almost a basic function of eCommerce sites at this point. Can you remember the last time you were on a site shopping and were not recommended another similar or complementary product? Next, I would recommend looking at social proof software, as this is very helpful to demonstrate how others are using your products. After your customers can see other products they should be interested in and see other customers who are shopping with you, you can branch out and find out what other tools work best. 

You can then explore the use of popups, reordering of products based on customer behavior and showing specific products based on behavior, geographic region, and other data points relevant to your product/services. These next steps are how you can create a persona online for your customers, but a persona that is personalized to their needs. Website personalization is a job that is never done as there are always new tools on the market and new ways to approach customers. Always be tweaking your personalization and ensuring your customers are getting the best experience possible. 

While you're here!

98% of your website visitors leave without converting. Visitor Queue allows you to identify who they were, and personalize their website experience based on their needs. Your sales team can now connect with them to close the deal, while marketing can provide a personalized version of your website based on visitor firmographics to increase conversion rate. All of this starting at $39 USD per month. Start your 14-day free trial now!

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Written by

Nick Hollinger | CEO

I am the CEO and Co-founder of Visitor Queue. Currently working with ~5000 companies across the globe including Microsoft and Jones Lang Lasalle. In my spare time, I am also the Game Day Director for one of Canada's most successful Junior Hockey Teams (the London Knights). Previously, I held Head of Marketing/Sales roles at SMB B2B organizations. A strong believer that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. I enjoy sharing my knowledge, experience, and opinion on Marketing, Sales, SaaS, and Entrepreneurship.