1 September 2023
The employment of personalisation on digital platforms aims to craft unique user experiences that surpass mere transactions. Our article sheds light on why personalisation is not just a fleeting trend, but rather a crucial approach to fortify the brand image sustainably and enhance conversion rates. Discover how you can reap the benefits and why data forms the indispensable foundation.
Imagine an estate agent showing each customer only a single house. Or a grocery shop selling the same products to every person. Sounds absurd, doesn't it?
The same principle is being applied more and more to digital platforms, and for good reason. If a company's platform offers the same experience to all users, it results in them not feeling addressed or possibly not coming back.
So, how can you ensure that your customers feel acknowledged and engaged? The answer is actually quite simple: by integrating personalisation into your platform.
When your platform has a personalisation strategy, it enhances engagement, conversion, and customer loyalty. Finding the right strategy isn't easy at the start.
However, our digital experts can help you select the right tools and improve your platform in a way that provides a personalised experience for all visitors.
The Significance of Personalisation
According to Sitecore, personalisation is "a way for brands to contextualise messages, offers, and experiences according to the individual profiles of visitors."
It's important to distinguish between the terms personalisation and customisation. Personalisation doesn't require effort from the website visitors. Customisation means that visitors manually modify the user experience, such as filtering search results in an online shop.
By using personalisation, a platform strategically controls the content that website visitors see. The digital experience is shaped based on users' interests, reducing unwanted distractions and guiding desired actions.
87% of consumers state that personally relevant content positively influences their attitude towards a brand (Source: Instapage).
Consumer-business relationships are not purely transactional. Consumers prefer brands that cater to their individual needs. Therefore, companies should focus on personalisation measures and create individual user experiences that build a long-lasting relationship with their customers.
Personalisation is Good for Business
Given consumers' preference for brands that cater to their individual needs, companies should implement context-based marketing and build a personal relationship with customers. This boosts conversion rates, strengthens the brand's reputation, fosters customer loyalty, and contributes to business success.
Here are some things to consider:
Data - the Foundation of Personalisation
Individual users have different interests and are in different stages of the sales funnel. So, how can you cater to all of them?
For your platform, collecting, tracking, and responding to data about your users is essential. This is the only way you can offer an individual experience where your customers feel acknowledged and understood.
When a user interacts with a web platform, the backend technology captures known and inferred attributes, creating a user profile. Offering a personalised experience for each individual is realistically nearly impossible, which is why the use of audience segmentation is a good way to achieve the goal.
What are Audience Segments?
Audience segmentation allows digital platforms to display specific content to different user groups. It describes the process of dividing users into groups based on common interests or activities. This simplifies personalisation management, as it's easier to track attributes of an entire group than of individual persons. Here too, the platform's ability to track data plays a role.
What Could a Personalisation Strategy Look Like?
The benefits of personalisation are clear, but the journey towards it can be challenging. Where should you even start?
Throughout the customer journey, there are several points where personalisation can be implemented.
Marketo, a marketing software company, suggests examining every phase of the customer journey and deriving possibilities for implementing personalisation in each of them:
- Acquisition - how you capture leads
- Personalisation here could involve targeted messages and content on landing pages
- Conversion - how leads are turned into customers
- Personalisation at this point could look like: incorporating a reminder of an abandoned shopping cart or tailored retargeting campaigns
- Growth - how the relationship with new customers is nurtured
- Personalisation here could involve product recommendations, up-selling, and cross-selling
- Retention - how the new customer is retained and encouraged to return
- Personalisation here could look like: special birthday offers and loyalty benefits
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There seem to be endless possibilities to integrate personalisation into your web platform.
What Experiences Can Be Personalised?
- Homepages
- Web pages
- Advertisements
- Emails
- Mobile Apps
- Online chats
Make Personalisation One of Your Key Topics.
Personalisation is not an add-on or a practical function; it's a cornerstone of modern marketing. By drawing meaningful conclusions from the collected data, your company can address users as if the website were tailor-made for them. This way, you can convert leads into loyal customers and achieve long-term success.