Today’s shoppers prefer to receive tailored promotion and communication from their retailer to imbibe the most in their purchasing habits. As per a study by Infosys, 86% of customers and 96% of retailers believe that personalization has positive impacts on the purchasing decision. While the key to a better user experience is understood, the study further reveals that almost one-third of the consumers insists on having more personalization in their shopping experience.
As a website owner, you have to push your website designs to foster effective personalization. Encompassing a variety of techniques such as website optimization, email marketing, web segmentation and promoted messages, you can drive the conversion rates, raise product/service awareness to influence individual customers purchasing habits.
Business motives of Website Personalization
When you offer your audience easy-to-use navigation sites, they can find your products, services, and other relevant information quickly. As a business website, this can come as a package of benefits. Some of the benefits of having a personalized website are:
Higher conversion rates
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Your website is now targeting the right audience segment that has better prospects for conversion. More likely is that when your website is personalized, it enhances your visitors’ loyalty.
Better revenues
What comes when you target your ideal customer base? Your solid leads translate into more sales, thus a greater revenue generation.
Loyal customers
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Naturally, every user likes to revisit a personalized website. More returns from these delighted users help your website gain popularity (better ranking as well) and promotes word-of-mouth publicity.
Collecting data
Edwards Deming’s quote,”In God we trust: all others bring data” is the mantra for the modern age corporate world. With 2.7 zettabytes of big data around, you can be rest assured that the availability and accessibility of data are at its peak. Using analytics and other tools, you can find the most about your audience. That will help you not only in creating a personalized experience for your target audience but will also provide rooms where you can innovate and create your site better than your competitors.
Customer Purchase Records
You must have extensive customer information that can help you find the trends of your audience segment. Check for the information in it and look for clues such as how visitors come to your website, how often they buy, what do they do if not buying your product.
Website traffic analysis
With tools like Google Analytics, you can get demographic and other information about your customer-base. When you dig deeper, you can find the interests of your online visitors, their income group, the technology they prefer, etc.
Social Profile Data
Implement social login on your website to let users register and sign-in with their social network accounts such as facebook, google+, twitter, etc. After the user consents to share his social information, as a website owner, you can have access to an accurate data set.
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Seven quick tips to personalize the website
How do we achieve this personalized effect? Without going into any jargon, here are the seven quick tips that can help you develop your personalized website.
1. Improving the user experience
As per a study, marketers see close to 20% increase in sales when they can personalize the user experience.
Increasing the usability of your website, web personalization delights the web visitors, thus encouraging them to make the purchase.
How do you improve the user’s interaction?
Keep a track of what users do when they visit your web pages, and find out the area(s) where they spend more time. Some sections will also be where the users spend very little time; you can consider hiding/eliminating those pages.
2. Improve the search features and navigation panel
Easier it is for a user to navigate to and fro your website, the better experience she is going to have. Consult your web development team to know how to make the navigation the most attractive one.
3. Payment process
As a rule, all ecommerce sites need to have quick and user-friendly payment process. It is the point where the customer is ready to buy your product, don’t let a complex payment process ruin your hard work.
4. Think locally this time
With the data you already collected and analyzed, you know the location where most of your customers come from. It is better to connect with your prospects by providing them a customized version of the website. When the users see that a website respects and displays things that they prefer, it is natural, they get a better experience. You need not change your brand identity for that, all you need is to include your customer segment’s preferences so that they can relate more to the brand than they previously did.
If you have a market that has multilingual segments, make sure your website is displayed in the language that your audience understands. Also, you can increase the usability of your website by using localized pricing for each visitor so that he can understand the values perfectly.
5. Visual appeal
The first impression is definitely the long-lasting impression, if not the last one. With the immediate visual impact, you can capture the attention of your audience so quick that their perception towards you remains positive. Use beautiful user interface that is crafted to meet your audience’s aesthetics sense. Especially when you are an ecommerce portal, having good quality product images can prove crucial to the online sales figure.
6. Recommendation Engines
Using recommendation engines can make your customers get suggestions based on the products in which they showed their interest in recent past. With sites like Amazon practicing this technique, the availability of big data has brought this into the mainstream. Widely used beyond e-commerce websites, recommendation engines are more helpful in displaying the most accurate and preferable products, services and in general information to the user.
7. Personalized email
Personalized emails can generate six times more revenue than a non-personalized email, says a report from Experian. Isn’t it then surprising that more than 70% of brands do not personalize thus missing to tap the potentials?
Marketers can personalize email communications so that a positive brand impression can be conveyed. This will also lead to lesser opt-outs and will enhance open rates and conversions.
Some ways to personalize emails are:
Segmenting the subscriber list on the basis of social data like birthday, profession, location, etc.
Test and track the impact of repetitive messaging and call-to-action (CTAs)
When your website is able to evoke response from the audience, and connects with them, it will always result in a superior experience. While the usability and functionality should be the top priority while designing a website, you can enhance its impact by adding another layer of emotional design. It is important to keep your website simple enough so that the usability doesn’t get lost in complex designs. Developing a website to make a statement about the brand it represents is not easy, but with the right expertise and experience in web development, modern websites can be made interactive and highly engaging.
