5 Main Elements of Website Personalisation

For years, savvy retailers have optimised their omnichannel strategies to engage consumers in both physical and digital stores. This allowed them to remain relevant in a competitive environment. But times have changed and so have consumer behaviours.

Since the pandemic occurred, many consumers have shifted their shopping preferences to online shopping. So in order to keep pace, retailers started expanding their digital presence and focused on personalising their customers’ online shopping experience. By creating a distinctive customer approach, retailers recovered faster from the pandemic. According to research, 20-30% of businesses moved online during the Covid-19 pandemic peak.

So what precisely does website page personalisation entail? Well, instead of providing web page visitors with a generalised experience, personalisation allows you to provide visitors with a unique experience based on their needs and behaviours. This allows you to offer visitors tailored recommendations, dynamic content and perhaps exclusive offers. According to a survey conducted, 75% of consumers are more willing to buy from brands that offer a personalised digital experience.

Websites that are designed to address a customer’s needs and desires before they even mention them eventually reap the benefits.

Benefits of Web Page Personalisation

Relevant Product Recommendations

Product recommendations help nudge customers into making a purchase. These recommendations are generated through collecting user data. This user data is then stored in their profile and is updated with each interaction a user makes with the site.

Here are a few examples of how you can display your product recommendations:

Showcase your best selling products. This also adds social proof which can drive conversions

Highlight discounts and sales

Show recommendations based on a users browser history and purchasing behaviour

Better Understanding of Customers and Improved Customer Loyalty

By developing a deeper understanding of your customers, you can create more accurate buyer personas. You can then go on to personalise your website based on these segmented personas. In addition, creating an easy and relevant shopping experience can increase brand loyalty.

High Converting Landing Pages

From a marketing perspective, personalised landing pages create a positive first impression. From a financial perspective, personalised landing pages increase call to action success rates by 42%.

Increased Time on Site

By mirroring your customers’ habits and interests, you give them a reason to explore your site further. By increasing site engagement, you can ultimately increase sales and decrease bounce rates.

So, now that we’ve established that website personalisation is beneficial, let’s get to the bottom of how to achieve it. Personalisation, like anything else, is a process. But when followed diligently, it can produce great results.

Personalisation Elements

1. Analysing the Data

First thing’s first, start by collecting relevant data. By sorting through the data, you can better design your personalisation roadmap. Although it may feel overwhelming, there are a few approaches you can take.

A popular approach is to use the data to find the lowest performing areas of your site. After pinpointing the weak points, you can then go on to brainstorm solutions.

Examples of potential site weak point include:

Pages with high traffic but poor performance or engagement

High bounce rates, particularly in the different purchasing stages

Alternatively, you can take a visitor approach through traffic segmentation. Traffic segmentation is a process whereby a business identifies where their traffic is being generated from. The process then continues as the behaviour of each traffic segment is analysed. This approach allows businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their acquisition channels and optimise user experience.

Below are types of parameters used for traffic segmentation:

Returning visitors

Traffic sources

Geolocation

Behaviour

UTM parameters

Device

By analysing the data, we can identify opportunities in which we can improve the site personalisation. Now we need to determine how to materialise these opportunities. How to put them into practice.

2. Brainstorming Ideas of Testing

During this step, teamwork is essential. All relevant department members must be encouraged to share their ideas and combine their skills. Here, test ideas can be put together.

Start by looking at all the different areas that you can realistically test on. From there, put together a list of the types of tests you could run on each area you have chosen.

Examples of test areas include:

Page Layout

Emails

Banners

Offers

Lastly, but most importantly, you need to consider why the test would be beneficial and if it aligns with set goals.

3. Define Objectives and KPI’s for Each Test

Here, the team should explore desired outcomes for each test based on the businesses objectives and goals. This includes identifying the primary metric for each test.

Examples of primary metrics include:

Conversion rates

Revenue

Repeat purchases

Bounce rates

Average time on site

After completing the above, the team should have a clear idea of each test’s priority and value. Moreover, the resources and time required for each.

Now that the ideas have been evaluated and clear priorities have been set, it is time to jot down the specifics of each campaign in a brief. This brief will contain all the campaign information as well as outline the implementation considerations.

4. Reviewal and Implementation of Test Campaigns

Now, all involved departments must align to draft the required material. This can include any product mock ups, marketing materials, or development scripts.

Alternatively, you can make use of tools such as WordPress that speed up the process. WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that allows you to build a custom website. It has gained popularity over the years as you don’t need any coding experience to use it. Additionally, WordPress allows you to install plugins and offers templates to make it all the more easier.

WordPress.com

After the drafts have been designed or selected, it should be reviewed and adjusted if needed. Thereafter, implementation should take place.

5. Evaluation and Optimisation

Analyse, monitor and optimise! In order to do this, the experiment must first reach statistical importance. Usually this can take up to three weeks, two weeks at a minimum, and will depend on the number of variables included and sample size. Only once the sample threshold has been met can you begin to test (A/B testing, for example) and evaluate your efforts.

After a test is completed, you will have gained valuable knowledge to help you better understand the reasons behind the results. These results should be stored so as to build on it as well as new tests.

In Summary

Web personalisation has now become a bare minimum for e-commerce platforms. Customer expectations are ever changing and demanding. But don’t place too much pressure on yourself to figure it all out now! Through experience and time, your processes and knowledge will start to flow more efficiently. Eventually your efforts will bring scalable results.

Although you will find your business’s needs may adapt and that new approaches will be required. The purpose of this article is to help you reshape your approach to personalisation and to provide a basic framework for implementation.