As Forrester has so aptly stated: We live in the age of the customer. The winners of tomorrow will be organizations which adapt to their customers’ needs – organizations that are relevant across all the channels their customers use. Focusing on understanding, delighting, engaging, and serving customers will be the chief source of competitive advantage.1

To be relevant in the digital world, you need to initiate a dialogue which resonates with your visitors and, if possible, anticipate their needs and keep them engaged with your brand.

Personalization is key to engaging your customers.
However personalization comes in many shapes, sizes, and colors. There are different techniques that can be used. Some are easy to master and others demand more effort.

If you haven’t used personalization before, there is great value in starting with the low hanging fruit of personalization – rules-based personalization. This type of personalization is based on if… then… logic. For example, if a website visitor has searched for “travel Barcelona,” then the website will show content for Barcelona promotions. This is simple to set up and relevant for visitors.

Personalizing with keywords is just one example. When a visitor arrives on your site, they bring a whole set of parameters that could easily be used for rules-based personalization. We call this The Digital Fingerprint.

Getting started capturing valuable low-hanging fruit with personalization as a quick and easy way to make a valuable impact on strategic objectives. Start by capturing intent through the different insights in the Digital Fingerprint, etc., and then personalize website content with easy-to-use rules-based personalization.

Where to personalize

Let’s assume that when the visitor lands on your site, the content they see on that first page is relevant, so no need to personalize the messages there – unless they land on the home page and that show the same content for everyone.

You should be looking for high impact pages, which visitors often visit – those could be…. The Home Page, Category pages, etc. this is where you will place your personalized content – and maintain relevant for the visitors.

Another place are the where the conversion happen, if you manage to get the visitor all the way to the lead form, the order checkout, the self-service form etc. then you should have content that are relevant, linking back to their interests and intent.

Five Personalization Quick Wins

Below are some typical parameters, that you can use for start personalizing the experience.

Inbound Campaigns

You have different marketing initiatives, using different channels PPC, Display advertising, Email Campaigning, Social Messages etc. All these initiatives should be tracked in your analytics, by applying campaign ID to inbound links. This will not only be great for your analytics, you will also be able to use the information on which marketing initiative brought the visitor to the site. By understanding what brought the visitor to the site, you can also better understand their intent and keep content relevant linking back to the theme of the marketing campaign.

GEO Location

If the location of your visitors have an effect of what content would be most relevant, then look into GEO location, here you will get information about the visitors country, state, region and city. Use that to show regionalized content, promoting the nearest location or just because people across different stages and countries are different, now you can also serve them with best possible content.

Landing pages

Organic keywords used to be a goldmine for personalization, with a big amount of visitors coming from search, knowing their keywords could better map their intent of coming to the site with relevant content. But as Google are hiding most of the keywords coming from organic search, this is not effective any more. What you can do is use the information of which pages the visitors land, if these are not broad category pages or the home page – they will help you determine the intent of the visitor and that’s effective for personalization.

Paid Keywords

If you are running many PPC campaigns, then together with the visitors clicking on these, you still get the keyword information from Google – use this, you will know their intent. Are they searching for Camera Reviews, then show them reviews, are they searching for Camera Best Prices, show them your best offers.

Referrer

This is the information about which site linked to you and thereby brought the visitor to your site, perhaps you have different referrer sites, that are bringing you a lot of visitors and perhaps looking at those sites could give you better insights of visitors demo- and psychographs, looking at the specific links to you, could help you understand their motives and intent – use that, personalize the content they see throughout their journey on your site.

1 Forrester Research, Inc. Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer, June 6, 2011