Website personalization is the process of creating an exclusive, one-on-one, customized experience for visitors to a website. Based on time of day, location, number of visits to the site, past purchases and more, it tailors the experience for each individual user rather than provide a broad, uniform experience.
A new study conducted by Forrester reports:
In today’s world, people expect personal attention. Many of us are used to personalized experiences within our social media feeds and shopping recommendations, sometimes without even realizing it. Website visits should be no different and a website builder can help you with that! Let's learn more.
Many of us use these two terms interchangeably. However, they are different!
Personalization is the automatic tailoring of web pages, content, functionality, and experience to an individual user’s characteristics or preferences — this is accomplished with a program or app.
Customization enables users to make changes to the website experience themselves in order to meet their needs — this typically requires some sort of manual action by the user.
Here is a fun exercise to help hammer home the difference between these two actions.
Let’s say you’re about to order a latte from Starbucks. You get on the app, select the location and place your order: a grande latte with whole milk, sugar, and everything else to make it suitable to your tastes. This is customization.
When you next go to order from Starbucks, the following happens. You open the Starbucks app; the app selects the location and automatically brings up an order of your latte - just the way you like it. All you have to do is hit the Order button. This is personalization.
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Lots of recent research indicates that personalization of a website can boost its brand and ultimately result in higher conversion rates.
The world of marketing is constantly progressing and this can leave consumers feeling oversaturated with messaging. Competition among marketers is at an all-time high, which makes it increasingly difficult to catch a customer’s eye.
The key to overcoming this is to create personalized experiences for consumers and tailor your marketing efforts to their individual needs. Powerful personalization tools are now available to help businesses design one-on-one customer experiences that make users feel special and valued. Happy customers generate more revenue!
Landing pages are often the first point of contact between a business and potential customer, which makes it a perfect place to add website personalization. Consumers tend to make split-second decisions when browsing the web, so personalized touches on your landing page can encourage users to stick around and continue browsing. First impressions matter when it comes to web browsing!
Here is how this looks when put into practice...
Let’s say your service is web development. Using website personalization, you may want to create a short welcome video for first-time visitors that describes your web design services. As returning visitors are probably more inclined to reach out with their information, you would probably want to opt to create a “Contact Us” popup.
An essential part of any effective marketing strategy is understanding your target customers. With website personalization, you can begin to sort and filter different types of customers and identify how to market to each individual type. You then have the ability to display different versions of your page or popups to different target audiences, giving them more relevant experiences. Each of these individual experiences can be further refined with A/B testing.
This type of personalization is critical for increasing your customer conversion rate and creating better lead generation.
Here is how this would look in the real world...
If you’re a clothing retailer, you can use the geographic location of your customers to personalize their experiences. This means you may choose to display winter jackets to customers in Minnesota, but not to site visitors from Florida. This improves the user experience by displaying the most relevant products to their needs.
When you provide a more personalized, relevant website experience for your users, you encourage them to browse and explore the products or services they’re likely to be interested in. As a result, they’ll spend more time on your website..
Personalizing a website will also decrease the number of users that leave it after visiting only one page (i.e., bounce rate). Right away, you want to show your users something that catches their eye and encourages them to stick around and explore your products or services. This is why it’s a good idea to personalize what the particular eye-catching thing is, as all users are different and what captures one user’s attention might not be relevant to the next.
There are lots of personalization tools out there and the best one for you will heavily depend on your unique needs. According to G2, one of the largest & unbiased review websites, lists Insider, Omnisend and Duda as the top 3 Best Personalization Software in 2021. Other companies on the list include Optimizely, VMO, and Mutiny.
Here are brief overviews of each one:
The answer is yes! Google is offering a free tool in the form of something called Google Optimize. Also, the Duda platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools as part of their website builder, and many paid tools offer a limited free option as well.
Let's take a quick look at how to use a couple of the website personalization tools listed above.
In order to use this tool, you have to create an Optimize account and container as described in this support article. Once these are set up, you need to install Google Optimize Chrome Extension.
For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to create a simple personalization experience for a website using a feature called “geotargeting” that allows you to single out visitors from a specific city, region or county.
Here are the step-by-step instructions:
While this process is simple, I encountered a problem with the mobile view — it didn’t optimize consistently with the other views (cutting off of parts of images, etc.) — and I realized that this personalization is probably better accomplished through the website’s own editor.
In our research we compared Squarespace, Wix, and Duda website builders and looked at their personalization and customization tools.
Here is what we found:
Here are step-by-step instructions for using Duda's comprehensive website personalization tools:
Duda has many default rules included in the platform, which are fully customizable. This makes rule creation even simpler. See the image below for a list of default rules.
Below are a few interesting ways you might consider applying website personalization on the sites you build.
When a visitor comes to a website for the first time, show a popup asking which services or products are needed while also collecting their email information.
If the visitor reaches your website for the second time, display a popup with a newsletter signup, which allows customers to stay up-to-date on the business's latest initiatives and promos.
If the visitor reaches the site from a nearby location, display a sales coupon. This is especially useful for local businesses that are tied to a given geographic area (e.g., restaurants, yoga studios, salons, etc.).
If the visitor reaches your website within a certain timeframe, display a popup that highlights any important information about the business customers may need. For example, if the business that owns the site is moving to a new physical location, this is exactly the type of information that is quick and easy to communicate with website personalization.
As you can see, website personalization provides a richer and more relevant experience for customers and maximizes a site's performance and conversions. Engaging your first-time visitors with a welcome video, promoting a sale with a special coupon to your second-time visitor, or adding snowflakes to your page during the winter can make a huge difference when it comes to impressing your visitors. And there are lots of tools out there (especially Duda web building platform), that make it easier than ever to add the power of personalization to the websites you create.
This post was contributed to the Duda Blog by Olympia Caswell, Owner of Local Business First.
