Personalized Experiences Lead To Higher Conversions

Evergage performed a study that determined personalization is on the rise. Among some of the benefits of delivering a personalized experience are increased visitor engagement, improved customer experience, increased conversion rates, and more.

When you go to a website, like Amazon or Facebook, you enter in some credentials and they show you content specific to you.

If you go to an online store and add something to your cart, they're now personalizing their website for you. There's probably some indicator that your cart has stuff in it, right?

Or some websites geo-locate traffic and show local listings and events specific to the visitor (like Yelp and Meetup).

Doing this, though, often requires extensive coding. Often, lots of it using teams of developers.

It's obvious that we want to tailor content on our websites to reflect the user - e.g. showing "2 items in cart" or listing local events, but what if we could also change the messaging?

Personalization is nothing new.

If you and I met in person, I'd speak to you based on what I know about you.

Are we chatting at a business conference? You'll hear the business owner in me.

A development conference? I'll talk code.

And so on.

People expect the person talking to them to personalize what they're saying.

A lawyer talking to a client who got charged with a DUI yesterday is going to talk specifically about traffic law, even though the firm also offers corporate law, personal injury, medical malpractice, etc.

Personalization just hasn't yet been easily accessible and available on more "static" mediums, like web pages.

Traditionally, you also need super high volume to make personalization work for you. The same is true for A/B testing since a lot of data needs to be accumulated before any sort of statistical certainty can be established.

But the same is not true of personalization (you don’t need tons of web traffic to see results).

Someone emailed me today saying they get "8 people a day to their website", so personalization was probably premature.

He's getting 8 unique individuals, each with their own needs and desires, visiting his website. Each of these people could turn into customers, especially if they felt like they were at the right place and were being offered the right product. So why not do your best to try to speak directly to each visitor?

Getting Started With Personalization

Before you launch a personalization campaign, it’s important to establish your goals upfront. Like any marketing campaign, you need to determine your goals and metrics.

Here are some common personalization goals that you might engage in …

• Increase sales (for your product or course)
• Increase first-time visitor sales
• Encourage up-sells and cross-sells
• Encourage repeat purchases (consumers repeat that they’re more likely to “spend more money” when their buying experience is personalized)
• Creating a better (stickier) on-boarding experience for new customers
• Increase your lead conversion rate (webinar opt-ins, ebook downloads, new blog subscribers)

Over to you …

What areas are you looking to improve? Maybe you already have a lot of subscribers, you just need to increase your free trial to paid customer conversion rate.

Or maybe you already have a large customer database. Can you upsell or cross-sell any additional products?