The Benefits of Personalizing Your Site Visitor’s User Experience

Personalized marketing has become the buzzword of choice for modern marketers. In personalized marketing, one focuses on strategies that emphasize initiatives and messaging targeted at the individual prospective customer. Using different forms of automation and data analysis, the marketer communicates with the prospect in a manner tailored to that individual. It often includes using the prospect’s name, shopping preferences, and other data to make them feel like you are speaking directly to them.

How Does Personalized Marketing Work?

The key to a successful personalized marketing campaign lies in successfully mining data about your customers. You need to obtain as much personal information about the prospect as possible without seeming invasive. Fortunately, you can gather a lot of information about a customer in a number of passive and minimally invasive ways. You then need to take this data, analyze it effectively, and then synthesize targeted offers and other communications based on your findings. These communications will usually form around observations about the user’s past behavior while visiting your site, things that interested them, and other data points like name, age, and location.

How Do I Collect Data for Personalized Marketing?

The Internet makes data collection for personalized marketing campaigns relatively easy. You can gather a lot of information about a customer through the use of cookies, such as the pages they visit and any products in which they show an interest. Interactive feedback tools, such as polls and sign-up forms, can provide even more useful information without becoming overly invasive.

To ensure you get the best results, you will need to constantly monitor, update, and test your program. Collect data from as many locations as possible. Remember that your site visitors exist outside of their time on your pages. So, leverage tools outside of your site (like social media, surveys, and emails) to gain additional insights and as vectors for your personalized marketing campaigns. Also, automate your processes as much as possible, as this form of marketing can become very labor intensive.

The Benefits of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing allows you to individually target customers with content tailored to their specific wants and needs. This boosts the customer’s engagement, giving them marketing content they actually find relevant and useful (as opposed to impersonal communications filled with offers and promotions about which they do not care). Studies show this kind of personalization increases conversion rates, with 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates for personalized emails, and an overall sales increase of approximately 19%.

Beyond conversions and sales, though, personalized marketing also improves brand sentiment. Customers that believe a brand pays attention to them feel better about the company and experience deeper feelings of connection. When companies use impersonal ad campaigns, customers feel more disconnected and even frustrated. This can actually drive away customers, shrink mailing lists, and decrease both conversion rates and overall revenues.

Challenges with Personalized Marketing

Of course, doing personalized marketing well can be somewhat challenging. Depending on the type of business and its size, truly personalized campaigns could become cost-prohibitive. Moreover, for the overworked marketer with little time, this approach could require too many resources to execute effectively.

Of course, even in these situations, clever companies can find solutions. Personalized marketing does not require total commitment from day one. Some find it more effective to ease into personalization, doing small things like adding dynamic fields to emails that add the customer’s name to the subject line or body of the text. Others create customer list segments separated by categories of products customers purchased. This allows slightly more focused marketing to those groups based on related products in which group might have interest. Depending on the nature of the business, countless other options may also exist to allow some personalization without implementing a complete program.

Personalized Marketing Starts with a Well-Built Website

Of course, to fully take advantage of the benefits of personalized marketing, you need a properly built website. It needs to have appropriate touch points where you can collect data about your users without becoming intrusive or annoying. InMotion Hosting’s Web Design Services team has built thousands of sites. They know just how to integrate a personalized marketing campaign into a beautiful website. To learn more, and to request a free design assessment, visit our Website Design Services page today!