How Website Personalization Drives Engagement, Loyalty, and Conversions
Consumers are increasingly demanding more relevant and tailored experiences from brands, especially when interacting with them online. 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience. Without living up to these expectations, brands will fall behind competitors who are creating a more personalized interaction. To optimize the customer experience, brands have turned to website personalization.
Why Website Personalization?
Website personalization is beneficial to both the brand and its consumers. It creates customized experiences for visitors, establishing an enhanced connection to the brand. Rather than providing a single, broad experience, personalization allows for unique experiences tailored to your visitors’ needs and desires. Personalized websites are dynamic and help build relationships, encouraging visitors to take notice and engage with your content.
Unless you have a one-size-fits-all product, a one-size-fits-all website won’t fulfill the expectations of your consumers. Done right, website personalization facilitates the path to retention and conversion for the visitors you care most about with every website visit.
Types of Website Personalization Data
To implement website personalization, you need to leverage visitor and customer data, which can be collected through various channels. Each of these data points provides visibility into how to better address visitor needs and build segments and experiences for applying relevant personalization.
- Behavioral Data – Customer or visitor interactions and engagement with the brand. Similar to a conversation history, this includes website page views and browsing history, website CTA clicks, article reads, purchases, email opens and clicks, etc.
- Demographic Data – Data attributes that group audiences based on characteristics such as geographic location, age, gender, occupation, income and lifestyle.
- Contextual Data – Background information that provides a deeper understanding into a visitor’s situation. This can include the type of device or browser visitors are using, whether visitors are new or returning, or what source or referral link they’re coming from.
Impact of Website Personalization
Ultimately, a brand sets business goals to increase conversion and retention rates. This can be accomplished through creating increased convenience and an improved visitor experience. Website personalization can lead to:
- Increased and longer website engagement sessions – When visitors are provided with relevant content that fits their needs and desires, they are more likely to spend longer periods of time on that website and revisit it more frequently.
- Reduced lead nurturing time – Utilizing visitor data allows brands to tailor the experience to prioritize content that is most relevant and cultivate brand awareness, pushing leads further down the funnel to their end objective.
- Increased conversion rates – Introducing content and recommendations that align with individual visitors’ buying journey is more impactful than generic brand messaging.
- Increased brand loyalty – According to the 2023 Twilio State of Personalization Report, 56% of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience.
Leveraging Data Insights for Personalized User Experiences
With consumers actively vocalizing that they expect brands to understand their individual needs and desires, website personalization has the power to increase consumer loyalty and conversion. It provides the opportunity to build better relationships with visitors by utilizing the data brands already collect, creating more relevant experiences that drive business results. While website personalization is most effective with the broadening of data and deepening of website match criteria, it can be achieved at varying levels of data capabilities and technology stacks.
Brands can utilize their existing technology and audiences to create a unique experience that allows for simplicity and convenience for visitors. However, with the shift in new privacy features, brands face new challenges to achieving personalization. Not only is it key to be transparent in stating within the website privacy policy how data is collected and used, but it’s essential to invest more heavily in zero- and first-party data. This data opens the opportunity for anonymous visitor personalization. In leveraging data about visitors’ interests and preferences through browsing behaviors, brands can utilize contextual and collaborative filtering to personalize the experience to unknown visitors.
Ultimately, in creating a more relevant experience at any level, you are getting closer to meeting consumer expectations. This leads to an understanding of the conversion rate optimization benefits and gaining learnings about personalization lift, prior to a full-scale rollout of personalization to the organization.
Ultimately, in creating a more relevant experience at any level, you are getting closer to meeting consumer expectations. This leads to an understanding of the conversion rate optimization benefits and gaining learnings about personalization lift, prior to a full-scale rollout of personalization to the organization.
This is not an advertisement, and solely reflects the views and opinions of the author. This website and its commentaries are not designed to provide legal or other advice and you should not take, or refrain from taking, action based on its content.
