Straight from Optimizely’s digital pen, “Personalization is the process of delivering a unique digital experience for each individual user by leveraging customer data and real-time behavior analysis.” It involves examining your customer behavior and interactions with your digital platforms and using that information to create made-to-order experiences that more fully engage the customer. Some examples could be highlighting or displaying complimentary products based on your customer’s previous purchase history or bubbling up content recommendations on your website or mobile app based on previous content they have viewed.
Optimizely Personalization is a feature within the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform that allows you to tailor your user experiences based on individual preferences, behaviors, and demographics. The process of personalization involves delivering relevant website content, product recommendations, user journeys, and other elements to enhance engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. Successfully utilizing Optimizely Personalization allows businesses to easily create and manage a cohesive omnichannel strategy across all devices, social media, and other touchpoints.
Optimizely Personalization can be used as stand-alone or in conjunction with Optimizely Web Experimentation to test your website design and content elements and tailor experiences to specific audiences simultaneously. For example, you could run an A/B test of your personalized experiences with customers using Optimizely Web Experimentation, create two versions of an experience in a campaign using Optimizely Personalization, and compare how well they perform.
How does it work?
With the addition of just one line of javascript code that Optimizely provides, marketers can be on their way toward providing highly personalized experiences for their customers. You’ll likely need a little support from your web team to install this javascript snippet in the <head> tag of every page that should run experiments or be tracked as a goal, but Optimizely Personalization is designed to be marketer-ready – meaning, you don’t have to know how to write complex code to make the magic happen.
Once integrated and configured, your website’s key pages, events, and tags begin providing data on your visitors’ behavior. You can use these behaviors with data from other resources to create audiences. Audiences allow you to deliver personalized experiences across all relevant webpages and create campaigns for different audiences on each page. For example, you may have a user who has recently purchased a hat. When she returns to your website, you could display images of scarves and gloves to her. Another user has recently purchased galoshes. When he returns to your site, you could present umbrellas and rain jackets as the primary images on the main web page. And you can do this all in real time, with data you’re collecting through the Optimizely Data Platform or your own third-party tool, without the involvement of your web or IT teams!
After you run a Personalization Campaign, you will want to measure its effectiveness. The results page for Optimizely Personalization measures the lift of your primary metric and other events you track over the life of your campaign. You can view these results by campaign or audience. Using those results, you can then decide how to refine your marketing strategies and tactics for maximum success. The bottom line – Instead of targeting an activity to a large group of users that you think have common characteristics, personalization allows you to cater to what is known about each specific individual user and use it to surface relevant content to web and app visitors to increase their engagement and reduce page abandonment.
How does it really work?
Let’s take a walk through a sample Personalization Campaign use case. For this campaign, we have been tasked by our CMO to reduce drop off on several key products pages of the website. Web analytics has shown us that we have an identifiable group of visitors who visit multiple product pages and then return to the home page without purchasing during their web session, and we want to incent them to complete the purchase process.
First, we start with the data. Optimizely collects data from various sources – user behavior on your website, historical purchases, user profiles, attributes integrated from your data warehouse, Optimizely’s Data Platform, and various web analytics providers. All of this data is used to help the platform understand your users’ preferences. Your platform administrator likely will have set up all of your desired integrations, but if there are other systems or data points you require, the Optimizely Web Experimentation Platform is designed to be easy to integrate with a number of tools, including many out of the box connections.
Once we have all of our integrations enabled, we turn our focus to our audience creation. Optimizely Personalization enables marketers to segment audiences easily based on attributes like demographics, geographic location, browsing history, and past purchase behaviors, and all with a drag and drop interface.
This segmentation is the key to creating targeted experiences. Audiences allow marketers to hone in on the attributes of key users or visitors and help them create a hypertargeted experience designed to drive clicks, and ultimately, purchases. For our example scenario, we will set up an audience of users who have visited specific product pages or a group of tracked product pages but do not have a purchase event within their session or whose last visited page for their session was the homepage.
Next, marketers can set up the rules and conditions for their campaign that decide how and when personalized content is shown to different segments. For example, a returning visitor might see product recommendations based on their previous purchases, while a new visitor might receive introductory offers. In our campaign scenario, for those users who meet the audience criteria, their next visit to our website will highlight the product they were last viewing on the main webpage along with a discount coupon code. All other site visitors will be exposed to their own standard or customized website experience, based on their user attributes..
In this way, Optimizely Personalization can subtly let your customers and prospects know that you know who they are, what their interests are, and underscore your desire to connect with them individually as they experience your buying journey. The platform can adapt in real-time to user interaction and ensure that the user experience develops organically as your user navigates your website or app. This dynamic approach both enhances relevancy and expands engagement.
Why does it matter?
Quite honestly, personalization matters most of all in today’s marketing landscape simply because customers expect it. They do not want a generic experience, especially if they’ve spent time on your digital properties dropping hints (aka attributes and logged events) about what they are most interested in hearing from you. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Personalization is key to a company’s marketing success because it:
- Enhances the User Experience – User experiences can be vastly improved by delivering relevant content and recommendations, minimizing irrelevant information, and streamlining navigation. By focusing on your customers and providing them an experience that caters to their individual preferences, you can foster a sense of connection and loyalty among your customers.
- Produces Higher Conversion Rates – Personalized experiences have a proven track record of driving higher conversion rates. Research from McKinsey shows that personalization can drive a 10 to 15 percent revenue lift at a minimum, and companies who do it well experience up to 25% lift. When customers are presented with content and offers that are tailored to their specific needs and interests, they are more likely to take action, and that’s good for your bottom line. Personalization also accelerates the time it takes for customers to complete the sales funnel, ultimately leading to increased revenue and growth.
- Increases Customer Loyalty – When customers feel valued, they are more inclined to develop a strong sense of loyalty towards a brand. Personalization nurtures that bond designed to enhance customer retention and advocacy. By consistently delivering personalized experiences, you can grow a loyal customer base that more readily makes repeat purchases and recommends your products or services to others.
- Gives You the Competitive Advantage – Let’s face it, to rise above the pack, you have to be the most relevant to your customers. Personalization has become a key differentiator. You don’t want to be left behind as your competitors embrace and actively leverage personalization strategies to enhance their customers’ experience and drive greater results. By investing in personalization, you can gain a competitive edge and be better positioned for long-term success.
- Provides Data-Driven Decision Making: Optimizely provides a suite of analytics tools that help to measure the impact of your personalization efforts, They can aid in refining your marketing strategies and create more informed marketing campaigns based on user data that you have collected across all of your digital properties. These insights can help to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not and provide a way to continuously optimize your personalization strategies for maximum success.
The bottom line?
In today’s marketing landscape, it is adapt or die. Optimizely Personalization is a vital tool in your marketing toolkit that allows you to take advantage of all the data you collect from your audience to generate advanced, hyper-personalized experiences. Creating these tailored experiences boost engagement and conversion and foster long-lasting customer relationships. In an increasingly competitive and digital-first world, personalization becomes more than simply a choice; it is a necessity for businesses to prosper and succeed.
Are you in the market for a web personalization engine? Or just getting started with Optimizely? Or need assistance strategizing how best to utilize Optimizely to achieve success? Regardless of your current point along the journey, Relationship One is here to help!
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About the Author: Emily Eubanks
