Website Personalization: 6 Strategies to Improve Customer Retention

What is Website Personalization?

Website personalization is the practice of creating a unique experience for each visitor based on their needs and behavior. Marketers personalize visitors’ experiences through collecting user behavior data and identifying user segments.

The overwhelming amount of information available today has made web personalization even more valuable. This way, visitors will only see relevant information, which provides a more convenient experience.

Why is Website Personalization Important?

In this era, website personalization enables businesses to capture their target market’s attention more easily. Offering a customized experience shows your audience you care about them, so they will become more interested in your brand and spend more time on your website.

Besides, users are expecting personalized experiences while they are browsing the web. In fact, 74 percent of customers get frustrated when they visit a website that doesn’t provide personalized digital content.

Benefits of website personalization:

Personalization is a natural expectation

Getting what we want is not a choice—it’s a natural function for humans! Unfortunately, technology has not yet reached the stage of being able to offer exactly what we want. It’s just a matter of time until smart advertising will serve us only and exactly what we want in terms of brands, websites, apps and streaming services.

Personalization has become the standard

For all online shops these days, personalization is an imperative. Personalizing visitors’ experience is so common that it goes unnoticed in all facets of our digital interactions. Many people take personalization—at least in its most basic forms—for granted. This means you don’t need to look for a reason to embrace this practice. Rather, you must do so, just so you can catch up with the standard. Otherwise, your online shopping competitor could easily overtake you in the race to grab a shopper’s attention.

It’s your best chance of increasing customer engagement

The more relevant your website content is, the higher your chances are of grabbing visitors’ attention in the very small window of opportunity they give to you. This is especially true for first time visitors.

It reduces your marketing costs

Personalization has proven to be an effective way to increase ROI (return on investment) of marketing activities. Levi Strauss has reported that its customers accepted 76% of personalized recommended products, resulting in an increase of 52% in their annual revenue.

Strategies for Implementing Website Personalization:

Define Your Goals

Before you get into personalizing your website, ask yourself what exactly you hope to achieve. Why do you want to personalize your website? Do you want to reduce bounce rate, increase conversions or increase repeat purchases?

Gather Data

How do you know enough about your visitors’ unique needs and desires to provide them with a personalized online experience?

The simple answer is data collection- especially in real-time. The key demographics (basic information such as income range, gender, location, age, etc.) of your audience may give you a clue to what they want, but it won’t be enough to craft a detailed personalization strategy.

Data is the bedrock of any form of personalization. The more you know about your visitors, the better your marketing website personalization can be.

Create Quizzes and Surveys

Quizzes and surveys are designed to get data from visitors and are potentially more effective than other methods.

Here’s why: your visitors give you their information directly in their own words. So, you have first-hand information on their preferences, desires, and needs.

Use Pop-ups to Target Specific Customer Segments

Popups are annoying, yet, many brands still use them. Why? They work, especially when they are used smartly.

On your web personalization journey, popups will be very handy to get clues about what your customers want.

Popups help you collect customer information directly. Popups are dynamic and can be used across many scenarios and stages of the customer journey.

Create Clickable Links for Your Different Value Proposition

If you have customers with different needs, or you offer a variety of products or services, it would be smart to create clickable links for each of your value propositions on the same web page or campaign.

Your unique value proposition is what makes you different from the marketing competition. It’s how you convince your audience to do business with you.

Segment Your Audience

In fact, segmentation is the act of classifying your audience according to common interests. By segmenting your audience, you can easily determine who they are, where they are located, what they want, and how to reach them through personalization.