Learn about engaging visitors with web personalization

I’m guessing you wouldn’t send the same exact email to your entire database even if it were well tested and proven to deliver results. Your database is made up of multiple segments and different types of prospects and customers. So blasting them all with the same communication, offer, or content would not be effective. But when it comes to websites, marketers frequently offer the exact same experience to every visitor every time regardless of their behavior or attributes. With web personalization, you can segment and target your website visitors and then create more tailored, meaningful, and engaging experiences.

Web personalization is a means of delivering a personal and relevant experience to each website visitor based on who they are, what they do, whether that visitor is anonymous or known, a prospect or a loyal customer. This involves understanding your buyer’s interests and tailoring your website to fit their needs. For example, when a person visits a website that is running web personalization, their inferred or cookied attributes can identify their buying intent, behavior, persona or geolocation. Based on these attributes, you can present them with the most relevant copy, imagery, offers, and calls to action to create a uniquely customized experience. Someone visiting your site based in the US might see a promotion for your conference in Chicago, whereas a visitor from the UK might instead see a promotion for your upcoming event in London.

Web personalization helps marketers do several key tasks. Let’s go over some of them. Understand visitors. Web personalization helps you understand your personas better by showing the demographics and behavioral data most likely to result in conversions. Nurture and engage. Using web personalization, your website becomes another one of your cross channel tools to accelerate customers through their unique buyer journey. Increase revenue. When you better understand your online visitors and present the most appropriate offer, you are improving your ability to engage with them and drive revenue.

There are many approaches to web personalization. It’s best to start with a few and see what works best for your audience on your web properties. Here are a few approaches you can use to get started. Location. This approach is ideal if a company is looking to increase profits in a particular location. For example, a clothing brand could choose to highlight its swimwear for users visiting from hotter climates. Demographics. This approach is optimal when you’re looking to build inroads with a specific group of people. For instance, clothing stores can increase the relevance of customer experiences by showing women’s clothing when a woman visits the site, or men’s clothing when a man visits. Behavior. This is a good technique to use when you’re looking to shorten the time from acquisition to conversion. If someone has visited your website previously and reviewed or purchase specific products, suggest similar products or content the next time they land on your homepage.

Buyer persona and history. In many cases, the buyer visiting your site has had previous interactions with your brand and is known to you. The information you already have on a specific buyer can be used to further customize and optimize their buying experience with more relevant offers. For instance, a customer who has shown previous interest in a golf vacation will be presented with content and offers on your latest golf package. Or a customer that bought a specific car model can be offered a relevant upgrade or additional equipment to add.

With Marketo web personalization, first, you create your segments, and then you create your web personalization Campaigns that you associate to specific segments. For example, you might segment your audience by region and create Campaigns to present different content to visitors depending on which region they are in. You can create three different types of Campaigns in web personalization. Dialogue. With Dialogue Campaigns, your marketing content appears in a dialogue box on your website. Think of these as the familiar popups you often see on a webpage. In-Zone. In-Zone Campaigns appear as content on your website, often replacing a default banner image with a relevant offer or message. Widgets. A Widget Campaign is a sticky text or banner that appears on the right or left side of your webpage. It has the ability to expand and contract while remaining fixed on the website throughout the visits.

Now that you understand how web personalization works you can begin to define your channel’s specific goals and develop a strategy to achieve them. Start with the 4 W’s of personalization, which will help you uncover ideas about how to use personalization to benefit your organization. Who? The who in personalization is your target audience, which is defined by a combination of attributes. If you’re a B2B marketer, you may focus on firmographics, such as company name, vertical size, revenue, and stage in the buyer journey. If you’re a consumer marketer, you may personalize your content based on customer journey, geolocation, product interest, price sensitivity, and buying history.

Why? This is the reason your target audience is important to your business and why you need to personalize their visit to your web properties. Is it because of easy sales, high revenue, or new markets? Are you driving toward more engagement, more leads or higher conversions? What? What should I personalize? Start by deciding what you’re personalizing. You probably already have lots of content you can leverage. Determine which piece fits which target audience and in which phase of their buyer journey. Combine your content with calls to action and compelling imagery, or even video for a more personalized user experience. Where? Think about where on your website you can best connect with each segment or where the most value can be gained. The homepage is a good place to start.

Selecting the right metrics to measure the success of your web personalization, like any marketing activity, is extremely important, not only for any one Campaign, but also for determining the ROI of the channel as a whole. Based on the goals you set for your web personalization efforts, there are some standard, early, mid and late stage metrics that you may want to track. In the early stage, you will notice things like increase of the time visitors spend on your site engaging with content. At the mid stages, you will see an increase in your digital advertising ROI and the number of actions taken by users. In the late stages, you’ll see more opportunities and revenue attribution.

In Marketo, you can use the program dashboard summary to track the effectiveness of each of your web personalization Campaigns.

You can also view how well your content assets perform. The available reports provide valuable insights you can use to improve your marketing messaging as well as your marketing spend.

Now that you know what web personalization is and how it works, let’s go set it up in Marketo. -