How to create a website personalization strategy
Now that you understand the basics of personalization, let’s explore the steps to create your successful website personalization strategy:
Define your goals
The first step is to identify your specific goals for personalization. Do you want to increase conversions, boost average order value, or improve customer retention? Clearly defined goals will guide your entire personalization strategy.
Choose the right personalization tool
Choosing a user-friendly personalization tool is essential for effectively implementing your website personalization strategy. Fresh Relevance by Dotdigital can assist you with AI-powered product recommendations and real-time personalization across multiple channels.
Some benefits of using Fresh Relevance for your personalization strategy include:
- Easy integration with your existing marketing and ecommerce platforms
- AI-driven product recommendations tailored to individual shopper interests
- Real-time personalization to ensure your website remains relevant and engaging
- Seamless cross-channel personalization that’s compatible with email, SMS, and social media marketing.
By selecting Fresh Relevance as your personalization tool, you can streamline your personalization efforts, making better use of customer data to create a personalized shopping experience for each unique visitor.
Develop a personalization plan
Craft a plan that outlines how you will personalize different elements of your website. This could involve creating targeted content, displaying personalized product recommendations, or dynamically adjusting calls to action.
Gather and analyze data
Effective website personalization relies on one crucial element: data. To manage your data effectively, you can use a customer experience and data platform (CXDP). A CXDP is a comprehensive platform that enables you to effectively manage your customer experience and data.
Dotdigital CXDP acts as a central hub, collecting and unifying customer data from all your touchpoints. This creates a single, holistic view of each customer, allowing you to:
- Gain actionable insights: Analyze all your customer data in one place to understand their behavior, preferences, and lifecycle stage. This empowers you to personalize experiences more effectively.
- Simplify data management: Reduce data duplication and streamline data governance with a centralized platform. This saves time and resources, allowing you to focus on strategic personalization initiatives.
- Fuel cross-channel personalization: Utilize the unified customer profile to deliver consistent and personalized experiences across all channels, like email, mobile app push notifications, and website content.
Incorporating a CXDP like Dotdigital into your website personalization strategy ensures a better understanding and utilization of customer data, leading to more engaging and rewarding experiences for your site visitors.
Segment audience
Segmentation allows you to group shoppers based on similar characteristics for targeted marketing. Analyze customer data to build segments like:
- Lapsed vs. engaged shoppers
- High spenders vs. bargain hunters
- Specific demographics (young parents, DIYers, etc.)
- Product, brand, and price preferences
Develop targeted communications for each segment to increase engagement and conversions.
Know your audience
In-depth audience understanding is key. Segment your visitors based on demographics, interests, behavior, and purchase history. The more you know about your audience, the more effectively you can personalize their experience.
Collect additional data, if necessary
Once you’ve set up your CDP and analyzed and segmented your audience, you may find great reasons to collect more data:
- Add subscribers to your BAU newsletter
- Improve cart and browse recovery message conversions
- Increase sales with price drop, replenishment, and other behavior-triggered messages
- Improve the customer experience (CX) with personalized messages and on-site interactions
- Increase AOV through improved product recommendations
An effective data capture tactic is the on-site popover. They can be triggered by specific customer behavior, such as intent to exit. Popovers are great for engaging new visitors or re-engaging returning visitors who didn’t complete a purchase.
Since the popover appears at a relevant moment while shopping, visitors are likely to complete the form. You can also incentivize participation with a discount, coupon, or exclusive offer.
On-site data capture banners
Another popular data capture technique is the onsite banner that, once clicked, reveals a form or survey. The banner collects valuable customer data without interrupting your shopper’s browsing experience as much as a full-page popover.
Test and optimize
Personalization is an ongoing process. Continuously test and refine your efforts through A/B testing to discover what resonates most with your audience. Here’s the process:
A/B testing
- Create variations of your personalized elements, such as product recommendations, calls to action, or website layouts.
- Split your website traffic and show different variations to a portion of your visitors.
- Analyze the results to see which variation performs better based on your goals (conversions, engagement, etc.).
Refine your strategy
- Implement the winning variations from your A/B tests and update your personalization strategy accordingly.
- Continuously develop new hypotheses and test additional personalization tactics to keep optimizing the user experience.
By following this test-and-refine approach, you can ensure your website personalization efforts are constantly evolving and delivering the best possible results for your marketing.
