THE ULTIMATE WEB
PERSONALIZATION
PLANNING GUIDE
HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION
STRATEGY INTO ACTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why Personalization is Important ... 2
Getting Started: Defining Personas and Journeys ... 3
Audience Segmentation ... 4
Setting Your Personalization Goals... 5
Designing Personalized Experiences ... 6
Forms and Surveys ... 8
Mobile Messaging ... 9
Testing and Measurement ... 10
Personalization in Action ...11
Picking a Personalization Platform ... 13
It’s no doubt you’ve made some big plans for your digital marketing strategy, and at the top of the priority list is web personalization. It is at the top of your list, isn’t it? If not, consider this: 75% of marketers we surveyed are already using some form of web personalization. And industry surveys have revealed that over 90% of marketers say personalization is important to their organizations’ long-term goals. Which means if it isn’t a priority for you, it’s definitely a priority for your competitors.
What makes web personalization so important to today’s marketers? The answer is simple: results. Web personalization gives you the ability to effectively target website visitors in increasingly meaningful ways, based on their preferences and intentions. It takes online customer experiences beyond the one-message-fits-all approach in order to generate more immediate interactions,
greater engagement, and increased loyalty. And web personalization has been proven to drive a significant increase in conversions and revenue from your website.
The good news is it’s not too late to make web personalization a priority for your organization, and this Personalization Planning Guide is an ideal starting point. We’ll help you understand the ins and outs of web personalization and where to focus, and we’ll also provide examples of effective web personalization you can emulate in your own strategy. Let’s get started!
WHY PERSONALIZATION IS IMPORTANT
As a marketer you understand the importance of defining your personas prior to implementing any marketing strategy or program. Web
personalization is no different. As you consider your web personalization strategy, start by asking these questions
.WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?
To define your personas and identify target buyers, begin by examining your historical sales data and refine it against explicit visitor or consumer data — demographic information such as gender, location, income, and marital status as well as implicit purchase and browsing behavior. In the case of business-to-business (B2B), use explicit data such as job title, industry, and size of company. Then you can further refine your personas using implicit data such as referring sources, products browsed or added to cart, pages viewed the longest, videos watched, and content downloaded.
Not only should you identify your personas, but also define the buyer’s journey. Carefully map out the steps a visitor takes from discovering your website to completing a purchase, downloading content, or taking some other important action. With a journey map you can then associate
GETTING STARTED: DEFINING PERSONAS AND JOURNEYS
■ Who am I targeting?
■ What are their personas?
■ What is their relationship with my brand?
■ What is their intent on my website?
■ Do I want to convert more visitors to leads?
■ Am I looking to increase purchases?
■ Do I want visitors to spend more time on site?
key messages and targeted content that are most likely to move a visitor from one step to the next: dynamic content, real-time personalized offers, progressive calls to action, and more. Such timely and relevant content will help accelerate the journey. Remember, you may have more than one path per persona, and multiple personalized tactics per path.
WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?
As a marketer, you know that it’s important to build a genuine, lasting and authentic connection with your customers. By gaining a clear understanding of your personas and how they navigate through your site, you’ll gain the insight you need to create valuable content with which to target your browsers and prospects throughout their journey. You need to know who they are, their motivations and the obstacles that stand in the way. With personalization, a B2B marketer can create a campaign that detects an individual’s persona and alters the home page just for them. Or an e-commerce site can show a first-time visitor the category of products they’ve spent the most time browsing, while a repeat visitor can see the category of products from which they’ve bought the most.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE KNOW YOUR GOALS
AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION
While web personalization is effective at delivering in-session personalization, it is still vitally important to understand who makes up your broader audience segments and why.
After all, a deeper understanding of audience segments will be the key to identifying the most influential calls to action in your web personalization strategy. What’s more, what you learn through online behavior will help you to further optimize and refine your audience segmentation strategy.
A marketer’s role is to reach the right audiences at exactly the right time in their buying journeys. Without a systematic process for user research and continuous analysis, you are likely throwing darts in the dark. While you’ll likely learn about every customer on a 1:1 level, you will start to uncover key trends and patterns that organize your data into key segments. These segments will help you deliver more customized, personalized and tailored marketing messages.
■ Visitor behavior and trend analysis
■ Engagement history and predictions
■ User and account level trend analysis
■ Goals and objectives by audience
■ Personalized or targeted messages
■ Measurement of campaign results
INFORM YOUR PERSONALIZATIONSTRATEGY SEGMENT AND ANALYZE YOUR AUDIENCES
Let’s take a look at the three top goals of online marketers. First, marketers need to acquire
visitors to their site through ads, email campaigns, content, SEO, and other marketing activities.
Once people arrive to their site, marketers want to engage and convert them. Lastly, marketers want to re-engage visitors through remarketing to keep visitors coming back.
While all of these goals are important, the ultimate goal of marketers is conversion, and they should be investing in it as much as (if not more than) acquisition and re-engagement.
First, marketers must make the digital experience better for all. When visitors arrive on a website, it’s the marketer’s job to make it the best experience for everyone through web design, A/B testing and usability studies.
SETTING YOUR PERSONALIZATION GOALS
Conversion-focused marketers need to ask themselves how they can make the very best digital experience possible for each person on an individual basis. How? The answer is personalization.
As you plan your web personalization strategy and even before you launch, it’s critical to have a clear vision of your goals. Do you want to improve engagement, increase email signups, drive more revenue or lift conversion rates? Goals will vary across audiences, industries and organizations.
In addition to setting your goals, you have to understand how you will measure them. For example, do you have a formula for scoring customer engagement on your website?
How do you measure lift? Is revenue tracking tied to the success of your website? Mapping out the analytics that are essential to supporting your personalization initiatives will enable you to put the reporting infrastructure in place starting from day one.
MARKETING GOALS
Acquisition
Adwords Advertising SEO / Content
Conversion
Site Design Testing Usability Personalization
Re-engagement
Retargeting Email Marketing
Off Site / Off App OnSite / InApp Off Site / Off App
Acquisition Conversion Re-engagement
Off Site / Off App OnSite / InApp Off Site / Off App
Now that you’ve defined your personas and gained a better understanding of your audience segments, it is time to think about your personalization experience. What types of messages do you want to deliver? And how do you want your visitors to experience them?
Knowing this — how and when a visitor receives your message – is almost as important as the message itself.
First, creating effective messages. We recommend some key steps to developing your messages, testing them, and optimizing them for best results.
Second, planning the visitor’s experience. It is critical that each visitor receives personalized content and messages that are cohesive and timely — meaning the content makes sense based on the session he or she is engaged in and the action he or she is likely considering. For example, an abandoned cart is not necessarily the best time to invite him or her to subscribe to a newsletter. Also, be conservative.
Let your offers be aggressive, but don’t populate your website or mobile app with so many personalized messages that they’re overwhelming. And finally, use your company’s style guide or at least style guidelines. Make sure your web experience supports your visual brand and voice.
DESIGNING PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES
■ PLAN
Have a clear call-to-action for each message and how you expect it to impact visitors.
■ DESIGN
Select a message type and layout that best fits the call to action and desired impact.
■ TEST
Evaluate all screen sizes, browsers, and devices for optimal experiences.
■ IMPLEMENT
Push your message live and gather performance data - keep on testing.
■ REFINE
Optimize your messages based on what you learn from live performance and testing.
STEPS TO DEVELOPING YOUR MESSAGES
Personalization Experiences: Effective Designs
Examples of Personalized Messages and Experiences:
CALLOUTS
Highlight the most important features and content on your website to drive more engagement.
INLINE CONTENT
Deliver personalized blocks of dynamic content based on a visitor’s behavior or actions.
IN-PAGE EDITS
Personalize parts of a webpage including text and images to present relevant content.
POP-UPS
Interrupt the user experience to drive a critical action or to promote relevant content or incentives in real time. Lightbox optional.
INFOBARS
Communicate information or notifications with a persistent, but non-intrusive header or footer bar.
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How Rue La La is Boosting Revenue with Real-Time Personalization
By way of example, Endurance International Group (EIG) uses different types of surveys to gather feedback and account information from users. Historically, EIG used a long registration survey to collect information about the customer and their business. This approach yielded acceptable results, but ultimately degraded the quality of the on-boarding experience. Using web personalization, they implemented an integrated sidebar survey that users could answer at will. The survey is smart, and asks relevant questions based on answers to earlier questions.
FORMS AND SURVEYS
■ INLINE SIDEBAR
An integrated and non-intrusive sidebar that visitors can answer at will.
■ LIGHTBOX MODAL
A more aggressive pop-up style suggesting urgency to participate.
It’s not easy to get meaningful data from your customers. Capturing user behavior on your site is an important step but may not be enough, especially if visitors have not yet engaged in a meaningful way. Improving data collection can be an achievable goal if you employ targeted forms and surveys.
Like other personalized content, forms and surveys will be most effective when the timing and questions are right. For example, a brief survey following a purchase to rate the experience is more likely to be engaged than an email submission form moments after someone arrives at your home page for the first time. Short 1-or-2 question progressive profiling surveys that vary based on what you already know or don’t know about your audience also get better response rates. Surveys should be carefully planned just like other calls to action.
FORMS AND SURVEYS
TYPES OF SURVEYS TO CONSIDER
EIG successfully does progressive profiling with inline sidebar surveys.
EIG also uses light box modal surveys targeting specific customers.
Without a doubt, as you plan for web personalization, your mobile strategy must be a key consideration. The statistics speak for themselves: 50% of smartphone owners use it as their primary internet device, and 72%
of tablet owners make a purchase online each week.
Furthermore, while tablets are considered a mobile device because of their portability, most users expect a desktop-like experience when visiting a website using a tablet. Smartphone users on the other hand expect a mobile-optimized version with all the features
of the desktop.
Confusing, isn’t it? It can be, which is why more and more often we are seeing a transition away from companies hosting two versions of the website and more use of responsive design. It makes for a less frustrating consumer experience - which should continue to be your goal.
While effective mobile personalization experiences are similar to those commonly used in desktop experiences, there are some important differences. Let’s look at some examples.
MOBILE MESSAGING
■ DON’T FRUSTRATE POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS
Attention spans on mobile devices are short.
Make sure you deliver the most relevant content in the least intrusive experience.
■ AVOID JAVASCRIPT POP-UPS
Creating popups that are difficult to interact with on a mobile device will likely cause a user to immediately bounce.
■ PROVIDE DEVICE-APPROPRIATE FUNCTIONALITY
But if you do have a mobile-optimized site, make the full desktop experience available to users should they choose to use it.
KEY MOBILE CONSIDERATIONS
MOBILE INLINE MESSAGING
Ideally suited to capture emails, or to provide targeted relevant content to users primarily engaging via mobile devices.
MOBILE CALLOUTS
Great to highlight a specific feature available only to mobile devices, or to carry over desktop callout messaging to the mobile experience.
MOBILE POPUP LIGHTBOX
These popups provide the same value as their desktop counterparts, and are an effective promotional tool targeting mobile users specifically.
Your personalization ideas are in place and you started building your campaigns. Once they go live, it’s important to test your personalizations.
Why? Your visitor base is dynamic and constantly in flux, and there are multiple pathways on your website to reach multiple goals and outcomes.
You want to understand the wants and needs of each individual, giving him or her the right content at the right time with the impact only effective personalization can deliver.
The power of testing comes in how a marketer develops the test and analyzes the results. Your personalization solution should offer you a simple way to test all of your campaigns as well as a simple way to see real-time results. Use your learnings to optimize your personalization strategy and meet your website’s goals.
FROM MEASUREMENT TO SUCCESS
Personalization, much like all digital marketing, does not offer one golden answer. What works on one site might not work on another, and what works for one segment might not work for another. As a marketer you need tools that put your data and ideas to work, and allow you to test and understand your campaigns. With established goals, you can analyze how your campaign is performing over control. You can better understand the statistical data and have confidence in your test results, and you’ll be better positioned to evaluate if your personalization solution is supporting your efforts. With an advanced technology in place, you can capture and analyze every user’s actions and behaviors to provide a deep understanding of your audiences. Marketers can also analyze segments and measure campaign effectiveness with real-time stats on conversions, revenue attribution, engagement levels, and more. Set goals, test and iterate for personalization success!
TESTING AND MEASUREMENT
■ A/B TESTING
Also known as split testing, A/B testing is the simplest way to test. It is a verification method that lets you know what is working and what is not. Your A/B tests can tell you if the control or variation won. When you perform an A/B test, you create two different versions of a webpage, one with changes and one not, and split the traffic between the versions. Then after receiving sufficient traffic, you can see which is most successful.
You can also test more than one variation of a page with A/B/C testing, etc.
■ PERSONALIZATION-BASED A/B TESTING
Combining A/B testing with personalization can be particularly powerful. Rather than testing page changes for your entire audience, you should A/B test your content targeted at specific segments. With personalization-based testing, for example, you may show a particular welcome message to visitors from the U.S. and a different welcome message to visitors from France. You can then set a control for each experience and see how effective each message is for each group.
COMMON TESTING METHODS
PERSONALIZATION IN ACTION
PCH.com, a popular gaming site, lifts engagement with a personalized infobar message that encourages users to play more games based on the types of games they prefer.
Brainshark, a leading sales enablement solution, increases leads by promoting relevant content and events on their website to appropriate visitors.
Here are some real-world examples with results of personalization in action:
Registration Lift 15%
Engagement Lift 36%
Rue La La, a popular members-only retail site, drives revenue by showing relevant products based on visitor behavior.
Endurance International Group, a leading provider of cloud-based platform solutions, promotes targeted offers to customers who are ready to upgrade.
Increase in Upsells 24%
Revenue Lift 32%
PICKING A PERSONALIZATION PLATFORM
You know that when people visit your website or web application, they have varying expectations and intentions. As such, a one-size-fits-all
approach to website engagement will soon become obsolete. While the notion of catering to individual web visitors may seem like a daunting task, providing personalized user experiences doesn’t have to be overly complicated. With web user-friendly platforms like Evergage, you can implement, manage and analyze personalization campaigns much like you do with email
marketing campaigns.
The good news is that companies who embrace web personalization solutions have a unique opportunity to connect with individual web visitors at precisely the right time – when they are engaged with your brand.
Understandably, however, anytime a new technology is introduced to your marketing arsenal, there are challenges, risks and uncertainties. Therefore, when evaluating web personalization platforms, it’s best to keep the
following in mind:
Adding a web personalization platform to your marketing toolkit represents a valuable strategic investment.
Companies with personalization programs enhance their existing marketing efforts, increase customer engagement and deliver measurable results. But you need to have the right technology partner to give your team the best chance of success. Evergage’s cloud-based platform empowers marketers to increase engagement and conversions of website visitors and users through real-time web
personalization based on deep behavioral analytics. Best of all, marketers can achieve success without the need for IT or developers.
■ LOOK FOR A SOLUTION THAT CAN COMPLEMENT YOUR EXISTING TOOLS, TACTICS AND PROCESS
In addition to providing more engaging user experiences, web personalization can also improve many of your existing marketing efforts, such as pay-per-click, email campaigns and content marketing. Given the potential impact on your digital marketing efforts, look for a web personalization solution that works alongside and even integrates with other marketing technologies and will be familiar to your staff in terms of other types of campaign management (e.g. email or marketing automation).
■ FIND A PLATFORM AND INTERFACE THAT IS USER FRIENDLY
Many of today’s personalization solutions require IT or developer support. While personalization can seem like a technical challenge, it doesn’t have to be that way. You wouldn’t want to ask for IT support to implement email campaigns, so why should you need to do so for website personalization campaigns? Look for a solution that’s easy for your marketing team to use without requiring deep technical expertise and resources.
■ LOOK FOR A SOLUTION THAT PROVIDES REAL-TIME RESPONSE AND FEEDBACK
You should be able to respond in real time to user behavior.
Some solutions require hours or even a full day to make tracking data actionable or to summarize results. Your web personalization solution should be able to track behavior and respond with the personalized content immediately. It should also offer real-time reporting results. This will improve your chances of increasing your conversions and provide your team with intelligent and actionable data.
■ SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION THAT IS SOPHISTICATED ENOUGH TO EVOLVE WITH YOUR NEEDS
User expectations and technologies are evolving at breakneck speeds. You want an easy-to-use web personalization solution but not a simple one – it should be robust and constantly evolving. Your solution should help you understand, communicate with and report on visitors in deep and powerful ways. It should support not only straightforward personalization but also sophisticated segmentation, analysis and personalization that you won’t outgrow; you should be able to count on it to enable continuous optimization well into the future.
■ FIND A PARTNER TO HELP GUIDE YOU THROUGH YOUR PERSONALIZATION JOURNEY
Equally important to the technology platform, you want to find a solution backed by dedicated staff and resources to help your team become web personalization ninjas. After all, this is a journey. Should you need help with A/B testing, want to bounce an idea off an expert or just want some guidance on the best way to execute a campaign, your vendor should be there to advise you every step of the way.
