Anyone can create a website, a blog, or even an online business. Often, the difference between the ones who find success, and the ones who fail, are those who are willing to put in the time, work, and effort where others won’t.
One of the best ways to see how different businesses and brands are doing this is to simply explore the world of online marketing and e-commerce. No matter if it’s to a business, a customer, or a new random visitor to your site – it’s all about engagement and making sure you are standing out in new and exciting ways that pique the interest of your users.
This is often best accomplished with personalization–the art of using data signals and dynamic variables to provide a different, more relevant experience to each and every site visitor. In this sense, personalization is one of the most important aspects of planning out your marketing strategies.
For agencies, consultancies, brands, and freelance practices of all types and sizes, it’s important to make sure you are not only using these tools for your own in-house marketing and creative, but also to better cater to the needs of your audience and customers as well.
With all of this in mind, we are going to walk through some of the most effective ways these methods are being used, while also highlighting a few tools and solutions to help you accomplish the same.
1 - Personalized Lead Triggers and Calls-to-Action
As much as this focus point might seem like a no-brainer, it’s still amazing to see how many site owners and brands are not optimizing their site traffic to the fullest. Even more mysterious is how rarely web design agencies offer personalization capabilities to their clients, as it’s a great way to differentiate by delivering major conversion optimization lift.
Many times, this can come down to not having the right tools or CMS platform in place, or simply not knowing which direction to go. WordPress is a common CMS for content and site creation, but it’s definitely not seamless when you start looking for new plugins to accomplish individual tasks. And when it comes to personalization, there are plenty of options to choose from.
Other recommended personalization methods include user history and showing promotions based on user interests, automatic geographic tracking and map locations, and even displaying different menus on the site based on time of day.
By having a platform in place that allows for easy content creation and management, while also offering personalization and built-in marketing tools, this only improves the overall value and ROI for both your customers and business.
2 - Recommend Products that You Know Your Audience Wants
If you’ve ever wanted to see one of the best personalized ad marketing campaigns, just head over to Amazon.com and take a look around the site. Besides the simple stuff like welcoming you to their site with your name, they use personalization and behavior habits throughout the site to get users to click “Add to Cart” throughout the site to increase their average customer checkout size.
These personalized recommendations are usually found on the main product pages, and especially as you scroll down through the content and product information.
With sections and phrases like “Customers also bought” and “Customer questions & answers”, Amazon usually has a pretty good idea of what other products you would likely add to your cart, and answering your most common questions before you even get a chance to ask them.
After much research and publicity, these features have played a huge role in the massive success and business volume that Amazon continues to see annually.
“Judging by Amazon’s success, the recommendation system works,” wrote Fortune’s JP Mangalindan back in 2012, when the e-commerce giant’s secret sauce was just starting to seep into the conversation.
“The company reported a 29% sales increase to $12.83 billion during its second fiscal quarter, up from $9.9 billion during the same time last year. A lot of that growth arguably has to do with the way Amazon has integrated recommendations into nearly every part of the purchasing process.”
Isn’t it time you caught up? Amazon is a great example of personalization at its best, simply because they have put billions of dollars into their research and split testing – so you know it works!
3 - Engage with Your Audience through On-Site Chat
When someone visits your website or online store, they are there for a reason. With such a purpose in mind, wouldn’t you think the average conversion for a site would be much higher?
Drop-off rates can be high for a number of reasons, but an excellent way to increase engagement and keep visitors, while also turning them into customers, is through the use of on-site chat bots, or through real chat support.
A perfect example of this can be seen right on TemplateMonster.com. Not only does the site have an active chat feature throughout the site, they also have custom call-to-action headers that appear the top of the site whenever a new promotion is going on.
You will also notice that the top banner also recommends connecting with a “Chat Agent” to get the full details.
Once a conversation starts with a chatbot or online agent, you can probably assume that conversions are going to drastically increase. Think of on-site chat for prospective customers as being like a concierge service for helping people find the products that they, as individuals, are most interested in.
This is one of the most effective ways to provide more value to your audience, immediate engagement, and also to increase conversions in the process. It doesn’t matter if your site has somehow landed dozens of backlinks from edu domains and is ranking like a beast on the search engines – if you can’t convert the people who click through to your pages by offering personalized service, you won’t see any revenue.
4 - Use the Geographic Location of Your Audience
On the internet, user data is pretty much everywhere. This is something that the world has recently discovered more about than ever before, thanks to GDPR, Facebook, and their recent advertiser and user data regulations.
Keeping this in mind, every user on the internet has an IP address which allows the sites they visit to see from where in the world they are browsing the internet. In short, this information can be used to further personal ad creatives and calls-to-action on your site.
Since this is more personal and can be seen as scary to some site visitors, it isn’t used often with websites, but is something you will see more often with affiliate marketing campaigns and landing pages.
One niche market that commonly uses this type of personalization is online dating. Visit any online dating site, and you will likely find relevant singles based on your current location. You can see this in action on Plenty of Fish.
If you wanted to set something like this up on your website or ad campaigns, it’s usually just a matter of adding a line of code or a quick geographic location plugin for WordPress.
What’s also interesting about communities like Plenty of Fish and most social platforms is that the advertising backend is great for targeting audiences based on their locations, their interests, and other personalization factors – more on this in a moment.
5 - Take Advantage of Facebook’s Custom Audiences
Of the many different ways to target audiences and create ad campaigns to target their interests and everything else possible, how could we not talk about Facebook?
Through the use of Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform, advertisers can target audiences on a wide range of factors based on their personal information and browsing habits. And depending on which of these targeting methods you use, one should have a specific marketing and lead nurturing campaign or methods in place as well.
Through the use of Facebook Lookalike Audiences and Custom Audiences, these campaigns can get even more targeted and personalized. A quick example of this would be if you wanted to create an ad campaign or site just for people who have already visited three of your product pages and left, or simply for subscribers on your mailing list. This can also be done through the use of using your own pixel tracking or ones provided by Facebook’s ads platform.
As with all marketing, the more creative and personalized you get, the better results you can see. Facebook is great for playing around with all of these metrics, as they push out billions of ad impressions through their platform every day.
How to Get the Most Out of Personalization for Your Business
Now that you’ve seen some working examples of how important personalization is for different businesses and brands around the world, it’s time for you to start using these same methods.
You can also see that there are many different methods and solutions out there for getting this type of messaging and tracking across to your audience.
Take some time to look at the different options out there, and run a few split tests. It’s also important to remember that not all ad campaigns and messages need to be personalized. Run small experiments, and start to see how your audience engages with your site differently over time.
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