What is content personalization?

Today’s websites are now becoming increasingly more personalized, and this is by no means an accident.  It’s hard for businesses to attract customers, and the smarter ones are coming up with ways to make sure that when you arrive, it is, as much as possible, tailored towards what you actually want to see.  Businesses now create different versions of their site to target different audiences and go through an A/B comparison journey to see which ones are successful and which ones are not.  They then move to use what works and leave behind what doesn’t.

In the early days of Internet adoption, businesses would build a website and then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.  With so much competition, today’s successful businesses use their website as their shop window.

Data collection

The smart E-Tailors will ask you to join as a member.  They will use that membership information to entice you back, give you encouragement to share with those that you know, ask for recommendations and offer incentives if you do.  Refer them to a friend and you will both get something in return.  If you click on the referral link and they ask you to enter your friend’s email – they have it anyway.  They may not use it to target them directly.  However, if they do sign up afterwards, they know that your recommendation worked.  Actually, it was their offer that you saw that lead you to the recommendation.

This kind of data collection is key to understanding what works on a web page and what doesn’t.  A website page may go live and get visits but not many sales.  Change it – do things get better or worse for the business?

There is built up an entire industry around this with companies offering to add this kind of extra capabilities to every website selling products or services.

Call to actions

Enticements on a page are called Call to actions.  Click here and use this voucher code on checkout, is a classic call to action.  The website is asking you to do something after dangling that carrot in front of you.  If you go to checkout and then don’t buy, the business owner can follow that up with targeted enticements to offer you to checkout with further discounts.  They may warn you that stocks are getting low, that demand is high, the price may go up in the future.

These behavioural marketing techniques have given eCommerce owners new empowerment, armed with sophisticated tools like website personalization software to increase their sales.  Understand what works and what doesn’t work and adapting to suit.

Following a sale, the data is there to be used to get a repeat sale.  As mentioned, obtaining a customer can be difficult, building trust is a key part of selling online.  Customers who have already purchased are the best customers as trust has already been won.  Send them information based on what you know they already like is smart and means that website content is often personalized to show you what you want to see.