With dozens of businesses reaching out to your target audience every day, you need to make your business stand out from the rest. One of the best ways to get a leg up on the competition by doing website personalization  experience. Personalizing every user interaction and making the site more engaging is critical to the success of any website. Personalization is human, it’s effective, and it’s the direction of the web moving forward. 

What is Website Personalization?

Website personalization is the art of offering an exclusive, one-on-one custom made experience to your online visitors when they land on your site. You customize their experience based on their past purchases, their geography or behavior in a manner that serves multiple business purposes – higher customer satisfaction, longer visit duration, boosted site visits, lower bounce rate, better conversions, and an improved brand reputation.

The better the website personalization experience, the better you can serve your online visitors and help them achieve their goals. This will further lead to better retention rate and better word of mouth for your brand.

Benefits of Website Personalization

• Optimized landing pages
• Increased user engagement on the website
• Better qualified leads
• Greater brand affirmity

Here are some ways in which designers can start website personalization:

1. Understand Your Target Audience During Website Personalization

The first step in learning how to personalize web content is to understand your target audience. You can’t successfully personalize the experience if you don’t know who wants your products or services. Start by looking at your typical customer(s). Identify and document information like age, gender, location, occupation, income, hobbies, buying habits, etc. this information will help you create a well-rounded profile of your target audience and you can use that information to form buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of actual customers that you can use to help you target new, similar customers.

In addition to knowing who’s in your target audience, you also want to identify their pain points. What problem do they want to solve, or what frustrates them in their daily life? When you know their pain points, you can show them how your product or service will solve their problems.

2. Display a Custom Message on Your Homepage

Create a custom message on your homepage for your visitors. When users visit your site, you want them to feel unique and valued. A custom message can help personalize the experience for them. A simple personalized message like “Hi [name], check out our latest summer collection” to greet them can do wonders. 

It’s a small gesture of personalization, but it can have a significant impact on your audience. It can make your audience feel welcome immediately, as well as expedite the shopping process by directing them straight to products they’ll love.

3. Create More Intuitive Signup Flows

For many online businesses, the sign-up flow is the bread and butter for the business. If it messes up, all of the traffic that the marketing team drives to the site simply does not matter.

A high conversion rate is what drives long-term business growth. And one of the many goals tasked to UX/UI designers is to reduce friction points during this important customer acquisition moment.

The signup flow is one of the first customer touch points to engage and amaze a user. If the customer walks away from a sign-up excited and itching to use your product, you’ve done a great job at creating a potentially long-time loyal brand advocate. Try including personalized copy and personalized content into each step.

4. Offer Personalized Recommendations

By using data you’re likely already capturing on the backend, you can display demographic (about the users), firmographic (about the company), or behavioral (about the user’s actions on site) data on the front-end to build a more engaging product. If you’re working on designing a project for an e-commerce site, this could be accomplished by suggesting another product based on a visitor’s past actions on site.

5. Create Distinct Call to Actions (CTAs)

CTA buttons are critical for helping your audience take the next step. Many businesses fall short with their CTA buttons because they’re generic and don’t excite leads about their products or services. Seeing a CTA button that says “click here” isn’t exciting for your audience; it doesn’t catch their attention, nor does it tell them what happens if they click. These generic CTAs make the user experience feel lackluster. You need to spice up your CTA buttons to help you provide a better experience for your audience. 

You can improve CTAs by personalizing them. Creating more personalized CTAs can help you increase engagement with your audience and make them more likely to interact with your business.

6. Combine Tailored Content

One quick and easy method to design personalization into a site is to create swappable content modules for visitors based on their behavior or characteristics. All visitors are different, and for that reason you can expect them to want to consume different content media as well as different headlines. If you’re working on a content site, you could shoot the visitor to a relevant new piece of content based on what they just completed reading. The ability to think through what will be most top of mind for a visitor is a perfect way to add an extra bit of engagement and warm the visitor to your brand.

7. Delight High-Value Users

As a designer, you’re tasked with visually capturing your brand. Usually you approach this design challenge by creating a page that captivates all visitors. But what if you wanted to go above and beyond for a certain high-value group. Another way to embrace personalization is to roll it out to a specific subset of your visitors. Optimizely, an A/B testing platform, does a great job of integrating custom experiences for high-value visitors on their homepage.

The overall experience, while more time-intensive than other personalization tactics, can be great if you’re looking to impress a specific, high-value visitor to your site.In today’s highly competitive online market landscape, being personal, timely, and relevant is the key to making your brand stand out as well as prove to customers that you have the right products and services for them. Wanna know more about website personalization? Talk to our experts.

Read more about Pros and Cons of Website Personalization here