Website personalization hacks are a must. Personalization drives more click-throughs and results for your site and does more for your brand, too. As more visitors experience quicker and more effective ways of finding what they want, your site becomes more sought after. In fact, half of consumers say they would pay more for products and services from brands that prioritize personally relevant content.
How accessible is personalization? In this blog post, we’re sharing seven easy website personalization hacks. The great news is that they don’t cost an arm or a leg, but will help you create personalized website experiences.
7 Easy Website Personalization Hacks You Can Use Today:
Website Personalization Hacks
What is a website personalization hack? In simple terms, it’s a tactic that can be applied to the backend or frontend of your website that leads to more personalized visitor experiences. Website personalization hacks typically require the use of software to perform a specific task, one that leads to either gathering of information that provides insights on visitor behaviour, or provides recommendations to site visitors.
That said, while there are many types of website personalization hacks out there, these are some of the easiest to implement.
1. Gather Data
Any form of personalization must be based on data. And while there are many data points you can track, focus on simplifying yours to a list that is directly correlated to your key metrics. For example, if you want to increase your average sales value, look at which products are often purchased together and make recommendations for complementary products as upsells.
Another way to gather more qualitative data is through surveys. Yes, they mostly seem annoying when presented, but can be useful. According to Statista, survey questions are rated as one of the top-most content formats of website personalization. The secret with surveys is to offer them up after visitors have had a chance to engage your brand. Smart marketers will first develop a rapport with site visitors and then seek feedback. This way, your brand would have offered value and website visitors will want to reciprocate by offering helpful feedback.
Gathering data needn’t be complex either and you can use tools like RightMessage to quickly segment your audience, give them the right information, and collect valuable data about their preferences.
Source: rightmessage.com
Source: rightmessage.com
Source: rightmessage.com
Source: rightmessage.com
Key takeaway: gather data to find opportunities to personalise your website content and visitor experiences.
2. Bots
Bots are popular communication tools. They help streamline some of the most common customer/website visitor interactions, making it possible to quickly engage more people. They can collect leads, integrate with your CRM and also sell product making recommendations. Today, most bots use artificial intelligence, natural programming language and machine learning. Together, these technologies help brands create conversation flows that seem as close to natural as possible, giving visitors the level of interaction they need to complete specific tasks.
For example, SnatchBot is one of the most sophisticated chatbot creation tools available today. Bots developed on SnatchBots platform are capable of performing frontend and backend tasks. These range from measuring site visitor sentiment and using automatic speech recognition and switching between platforms while communicating with visitors (start on your website and continue on Telegram or WhatsApp). They also read and write databases, scrape data from the web, connect to APIs, copy and paste, complete forms, move files and folders, and log in and out of web and enterprise applications on the backend.
Source: snatchbot.me
Key takeaway: use bots to automate repeatable tasks and make recommendations.
3. Overlays and Pop-ups
Overlays often get a bad wrap but they are useful and effective. How do we know? Tons of websites still use them. And while most overlays and pop-ups seem irritating, some do more to enhance the user experience. But to create better visitors experiences, you’ve got to shift your approach from the conventional use of pop-ups and overlays.
Overlays and pop-ups are designed to get people to opt-in to your mailing list. What often happens when sites use them with little success all has to do with the offer and timing of their overlays. Today, using pop-ups based on exit intent isn’t a new idea, but most marketers make the error of presenting a weak offer like joining a mailing list.
The most effective overlays and pop-ups include strong and compelling offers that are based on where your site visitor is in their journey. For example, if a visitor is on a product page, offering a sign-up to your mailing list isn’t as appealing as a free guide on how your product solves the top 5 challenges your customers have.
Key takeaway: use overlays and pop-ups to make offers aligned with your visitor’s needs.
4. Remarketing Cookies
Truth is, few if any first-time website traffic will make a purchase immediately. And that’s what remarketing cookies help with. They are used to remarket your offer to site visitors on different platforms, from Facebook to Google’s display network.
But merely adding remarketing cookies to your site won’t do. You’ve got to be smart about where you place them and what your offer is when remarking to your audience. The best way to apply cookies is to think about intent and the buyer’s journey. At the top of your funnel and middle of your funnel, buyers are not ready to make a purchase. Instead, they need to better understand what problems they have (ToFu), and what solutions exist and how they work (MoFu).
This means that any form of remarketing should be focused on helping people solve problems according to where they are in the buyer’s journey. You can have them opt-in for relevant information (think reports and guides). When visitors arrive on sales or product pages, they are likely closer to making a purchase and that’s when remarketing offers with discounts, free trials and demos become perfectly aligned with their intent.
Key takeaway: use remarketing cookies based on stages of the content marketing funnel.
5. Email Triggers
Email triggers are one of the smartest and rather effective tools available today. They help brands segment audiences to offer personalized content. And what’s more, email triggers are easy to apply. Most email marketing platforms offer drag-and-drop functionality to help you build sequences for complete lead nurturing campaigns.
While email triggers are easy to implement, like all things marketing, you get the most out of triggers when using them correctly. You’ve got to have a good understanding of your audience and where they are in the buyer’s journey to make an impact with triggers. DigitalMarketer’s Customer Value Proposition System shows how to use triggers to take visitors from strangers to customers. Note how various conditions apply and the importance of nurturing before asking for the sale.
Source: digitalmarketer.com
Key takeaway: use email triggers to nurture before the sale.
6. Referral Sources and Content Optimisation
Marketers aren’t strangers to referral sources. They know that certain traffic sources produce better results than others, but often, the link between leveraging referral sources and results isn’t explored for optimum results. Referral sources can be used to serve-up custom messaging that can convert higher. And as you’ve guessed it, to get higher conversion rates you’ll need to connect the dots for your audiences as intricately as possible.
Marketing to visitors based on referral sources isn’t as complex as it sounds. Your goal is to segment visitors by channel, then offer content based on where they’ve come from, what messaging they have previously seen (at the source), and serve-up content aligned with their journey. This includes creating personalized landing pages offers and along with calls to action.
RightMessage does this really well. It allows you to build stronger and more effective website personalization experiences by focusing on your buyer’s journey. RightMessage can be used to build landing pages and offers marketers the chance to use conditional logic to direct visitors to exactly what they need.
Source: rightmessage.com
Key takeaway: market to visitors based on referral source and pay attention to their needs.
7. Video
Video has grown tremendously in the last decade. Today, more marketers have realised that without it their brands could miss the opportunity to remain competitive. Wyzowl reports that 99% of marketers using video will continue to do so throughout 2020.
And when it comes to consumers, video seems to make the consumption of information easier. A study by Livestream shows that video has become a highly effective marketing tool, with 80% of consumers opting to watch a video than read a blog post. Research also shows that 96% of consumers in the US are more likely to purchase a product or service if they have the chance to see a video beforehand.
How can you use video as a website personalization hack? Combine it with smart messaging within your content marketing funnel. As you can tell, timely messaging is a core theme in this blog post, and rightly so. It’s the foundation of all effective marketing. When it comes to video, you can create targeted content that can be with many of the website personalization hacks mentioned above.
DigitalMarketer uses video on its product sales pages because it converts. Video is far more engaging than text because it includes sound and visuals that can evoke emotions and drive action.
Source: digitalmarketer.com
Key takeaway: use video as a tool to drive conversions.
Wrapping Up
Website personalization hacks don’t have to be complex or hard to put into action. They all start with data and should be geared towards enhancing your site visitors’ experiences. Focus on using hacks that are directly related to key metrics to ensure that you spend time on what really matters to move the need for your business.
