With all of the paid posts, podcast commercials, and YouTube ads, we’re bombarded with commercials 24/7. Although people are always interested in new products, they don’t want to have their senses completely numbed from all of the commercials.
That’s why 63% of consumers are annoyed when brands blast generic ads repeatedly. People don’t want to be shouted at. They want to have a unique, personal experience with a brand. People want to be treated as individuals.
And that’s where behavioral targeting and website personalization comes into play.
Today, we’re going to learn:
- What personalization actually is
- The basics of eCommerce personalization
- What works better, manual or automated personalization
First, for some of you who don’t know, we should explain the concept of personalization…
What is Personalization?
In both traditional and digital marketing, personalization refers to a marketing approach that aims to treat consumers as individual people.
In mainstream marketing, Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” strategy is a good example. During the campaign, the company stamped over 250 popular names on their cans and bottles, in an effort to motivate buyers to seek out their own “personalized” cokes.
Did this simple act of personalization work? Just check out these numbers:
- Hashtag #shareacoke become the #1 trending topic
- Consumption among teenagers grew roughly 7%
- In the United States, sales went up by 2.5%
While in principle, things are the same in the digital world, however, when it comes to eCommerce, personalization works a little bit differently.
What is Website Personalization?
In eCommerce, personalization goes a step further. Every time a person visits your website, you have a chance to learn something about them.
In return, you can analyze the data and deliver relevant content based on it.
Customers now expect this from you. Nearly three-quarters of users feel genuine frustration when a website doesn’t show any signs of personalization.
The problem is most site owners are not sure whether they have enough information to create personalized experiences. In fact, 55% of marketers feel that they lack data for any real personalization. In reality, you have everything you need:
- You can identify someone’s age and gender based on their behavioral preferences
- You can identify someone’s location and the devices they use
- People with purchase histories provide insights into their preferences
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s plenty of other data you can use.
Manual Personalization vs Automated Personalization
How can you start creating personalized experiences for your visitors?
Well, there are two ways to go about it. On one hand, you can do everything on your own to make sure your shoppers are getting the content they want. On the other hand, you can use a piece of software like twik to handle all of the research for you.
Let’s examine further these two ways of doing eCommerce content personalization…
Manual Personalization
The first option you have is to organize your employees and start processing all of the data you have manually. Needless to say, this process isn’t easy or time-saving. Here are just a few things you have to do manually:
- Capture customer data: First, you need to add code to your webpage to make sure that all of the data you need is recorded, which requires at least basic coding knowledge.
- Sort out the data: After that, you need to go through customer data, see what’s actually valuable to your organization and what’s not.
- Analyze customer data: When you find the right data, then you need to analyze it and see what information it gives you about your customers.
- Act on findings: Use your findings to segment your customers and create user profiles to make further marketing decisions, plan new promotions, create content, and provide relevant recommendations.
- Allocate human resources: Then, you need to create teams within your organization that will handle the process, planning, and coding of new pages or properties to serve different content to each customer group.
Automated Personalization
As you can see from the examples above, manual personalization takes a lot of planning, analyzing, and hard work. That’s why you have automated personalization solutions that use machine learning to collect, analyze, and use customer data.
Using behavioral tracking, tools like twik can create individual customer profiles and come up with product and content recommendations based on data analysis. Here’s what automated personalization tools can do for you:
- Collect and combine data: Collect data from your website and social channels, put them all into one database, and visualize it through tables and graphs.
- Analyze website statistics: By recording all of the website statistics, they can help you tweak your campaign even after you launched it.
- Keep track of your campaign: Come up with KPIs, keep track of them, and measure the satisfaction rates of your shoppers after personalization was implemented.
Stop Wasting Time and Automate Personalization Right Now!
Once you implement eCommerce personalization, you’ll be able to improve in many aspects of your business including:
- Consistent brand image across channels
- Better overall customer experience
- More brand loyalty from your shoppers
- More efficient content strategies
- Increase in sales and revenue
Our technology is evolving. So are customer expectations. When your visitors provide their personal data, they give you their trust. That’s why you need to treat them as individuals.
Tools like twik can help you do just that, with a lot of less effort and trial-and-error.