Content Personalization That Drives Customer Action Webinar Recap

Our recent webinar with Acquia, How to Personalize Content to Drive Customer Action, offered an overview of techniques and best practices for incorporating content personalization into your marketing strategies. If you missed the live webinar, you can read on for a recap or you can watch it on-demand here.

Marketers have found that personalization is a powerful tool for inspiring and empowering users to take specific actions. According to a recent study, the majority of consumers agree, with 61% stating that they feel more positive about a brand when marketing messages are personalized. There are many ways to leverage data in order to create a personalized experience, but before you get started you’ll need to segment your audience to understand the type of content that is important to them.

Personalization: Delivering Relevant Content to the End User

There are many flavors of personalization, some more complex to implement than others, which allows marketers to incorporate different techniques in accordance with their resource availability and content management system capabilities. Types of personalization include:

• Regional segmentation – ideal for serving up events and news local to the user

• Search based personalization – leverage the information users are providing you in their search and incorporate that data into their user experience

• Recommendation engine – offer the user personalized content based on their browsing behavior or past purchases

• Leveraging personal brand – tie in the user’s social graph as an overlay onto your brand to build trust and relevancy

Data Collection for Personalization

Progressive profiling is an effective way to gather information about your users over time. Studies show that users will abandon a form with more than five fields at a rate of 50%, so marketers have learned to spread their information gathering out over multiple interactions rather than asking for all the user details up front. This technique requires user tracking, such as cookies, in order to serve up ongoing data collection.

Measurement of Personalization Efforts

Before you begin implementing your personalization strategy, you’ll want to establish benchmarks on your key performance metrics so that you’ll be able to measure against them to determine the success of your efforts. In addition, outlining the goals you want to reach as a result of providing personalized user experiences is important to analyzing your results and developing next steps.

What Type of Engagement Are You Driving?

Identifying the type of engagement you want to drive is integral to developing your personalization strategy. Marketers typically use personalization to increase conversion, monetary spend, and social sharing, or to inspire advocacy. There are various techniques that can be employed to meet these goals:

• Requesting user generated content

• Leveraging social channels

• Implementing gamification 

While there are technical considerations that must be accounted for when building a personalization strategy, the return often outweighs any challenges that may arise. Above all, keep in mind that the depth and granularity of the personalization you incorporate into your digital properties should be decided based on your level of effort weighed against measurable results.