Personalizing the customer experience is extremely important to every business and has a direct impact on customer conversion rates and the growth of each unit.
Personalization is one of the necessary strategies and has a significant impact on the growth of the business. A realistic figure indicates that 75% of businesses have experienced some form of personalization and 90% of them are aware of the importance of this.
According to Econsultancy – a strategy consulting firm and digital marketing solution in the UK, it realized that:
- 93% of businesses increase conversion rates after personalizing their search engine marketing
- The same thing happens with 94% of businesses that have personalized their website
- 92% of businesses have seen an increase in conversions after personalizing their email strategy
Clearly personalized customer experience has an impact on conversion rates. But only when applied correctly can businesses gain the full benefit it brings. The following statistics from Econsultancy also show that personalized customer experience is a difficult strategy to implement:
- Only 19% of enterprises in the Econsultancy’s study thought it was not difficult to do
- While there are 39% see this as a major challenge
It seems that most businesses see only minimal results from their efforts. If you want to succeed in driving conversions through personalization, your main focus should be on Personalizing the customer experience.
Personalizing the customer experience as a way to provide relevant experiences, instead of using other conversion tips. This means you need to focus on the smallest details of the customer experience that can influence their buying decision.
The importance of personalization in customer experience
- Increased revenue: According to statistics, businesses applying experience personalization strategies bring an average of 19% higher sales than non-applying businesses.
- Attracting potential customers: Personalized information will be accessed through social networks. Since then, businesses can easily convey the values and service messages to customers quickly, increasing the ability to attract potential customers to the business.
- Increasing customer satisfaction: 64% of customers are satisfied with personalized shopping information from businesses. In addition, over 69% of customers are willing to provide personal information to receive the most appropriate product or service suggestion.
- Retaining customers: Providing quality products, services and a buying experience that meets customer needs and goals will undoubtedly lead customers to choose and keep coming back to the store to have the same buying experience at the next visit.
To achieve that, businesses need to develop a strategy to personalize the sensible customer experience. Taking a look at some of the most effective personalization techniques applied to your strategy into your strategy will help you significantly increase your conversion rates.
Personalize the customer experience landing page based on access source
When a customer clicks on a brand link at an influencer’s social media post but is directed to a generic homepage that does not mention that influencer or products they mention. At this point, the customer will not know what to do next. This can be a frustrating experience for customers and can lead to them leaving the landing page immediately.
Instead, in order to prevent these unappealing experiences from coming to customers, businesses should design a clear landing page for followers of these influencers. Content can refer to the influencer and list out the products that they have proposed. Or perhaps highlight some of the influencer’s remarkable reviews about the brand of the business and thereby convert it easily into corporate customers.
That’s why you need to start creating personalized landing page content according to the visitor’s referral source – whether it is from social media, ads, emails or other websites.
Here are just a few ideas for personalized elements that you can add to each source:
- Pop-up
- Banner
- Title
- Unique landing page
Choose the form that works best for you and your campaign.
For example, Buffered, a VPN service, partnered with CNET to promote their services. CNET has created a list of the best VPN services for 2019.
Whenever someone clicks on the company’s link, they will be redirected to a single landing page for CNET readers. This page introduces an exclusive offer just for them
This makes landing page content more relevant to customers coming from different sources, thereby increasing their conversion.
In an interview with Crazy Egg by Tyson Quick, the founder and CEO of Instapage, he also explained that people from different access sources will have different thoughts and behaviors.
Typically, customers from Google AdWords typically represent a group of customers looking for a solution, and customers visiting from social media may only be in the awareness phase. This is one of the reasons why personalizing your landing page content by access source is so important.
Applying this method, Campaign Monitor (an Email Marketing solution) measured a conversion rate of 31.4%.
Display compatible content based on access time
Another effective personalization technique is to provide “Dynamic Content” (Dynamic Content) – a web content that changes for each person, based on the user’s behavior, preferences, and access time.
You can display relevant offers when customers visit the website at an event, a specific holiday, or at a specific time of day.
Even if your business does not host incentive events, you can still design an appropriate display of content based on the visitor’s visit time.
Assuming you own a restaurant, you can highlight your lunch menu when visitors come to your site between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm. Or if someone visits just before Valentine’s Day, you can display a pop-up encouraging them to book a room for that particular day.
Gladly, a Phoenix-based restaurant, used the Duda website-building platform to create a promotional banner displaying special offers for their customers during “Restaurant Week”.
Anyone who visits their website during that time can see this banner. This resulted in a 70% increase in CTA clicks in that month.
Similarly, instead of showing your phone number when the business is closed, you will provide them with the contact form. That way, you will not waste any potential customers but also impress customers.
Instead of letting your customers proactively call you, you certainly won’t be able to anticipate how they’ll feel if you’re having trouble making a call or calling after office hours. This will bring unhappy experiences to them. Instead, encourage them to fill out the contact form. They will not have to visit or call again to check if you are working.
Collecting important data from customers becomes easier with the timely presence of Form and Survey. These two tools are based on behavioral history that can improve data quality while providing valuable information. However, do not send surveys or forms from the first interaction, it can make customers confused and may give inaccurate feedback.
Personalizing the customer experience based on device
Device-based personalization seems like a very basic technique that people are using. But personalization based on device type is more than just designing a mobile compatible website.
Responsiveness on mobile devices can help improve site navigation, but it does not necessarily increase conversion rates. There are many other ways to personalize the experience of your mobile and tablet visitors for them to convert.
For example, you can help first-time buyers to make purchases easier by providing a social login option on the website. There are tons of WordPress plugins that allow you to add social login options to your site.
You can also display a call to call button in your contact page, social media page or landing page to increase the number of potential customers. According to 61% of mobile searchers, the call button is the most valuable during the buying period.
Here are a few tips to maximize device-based experiences:
- Button design only appears for visitors on mobile devices, while desktop visitors can view your phone number.
- In addition, make sure you only show this button during business hours to make sure that every call you have is answered.
- For WordPress websites, you can install the Thrive Architect plugin, which allows you to create and customize buttons to call.
You can also display this call-to-call button on your search ad. In this way, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has increased their monthly mobile traffic by 20%.
Previously, they only displayed their phone number in ad copy. But IHG has changed so mobile searchers can make calls with them more easily. Their click-to-call ads on their mobile devices have contributed about 40% of revenue to their mobile marketing strategy.
They do not change ads for desktop searches, because desktop customers can copy their phone numbers to their mobile phones and call them.
Google allows you to create call extensions and add them to your ads the same way IHG did. These extensions let people click on your phone number and call your business directly. You can even choose which specific ad group displays this call extension.
Use personalized experience in advertising
Creating ads that are more relevant and personalized to each customer remains a major challenge for businesses and marketers.
In fact, an Ascend study shows that data-based personalization is the most difficult tactic to implement. 63% of influential people in Marketing voted that this is their biggest challenge.
To personalize based on the most accurate data, you need to implement personalized ads according to each customer’s purchase history. This is a particularly important tactic that e-commerce websites should adopt.
Did you know that nearly 70% of online shopping carts are not paid? And it happens for many times, not necessarily because shoppers do not want to buy the product. Some people abandon their shopping carts because of the extra costs (shipping, VAT, service fees, etc.) or because they do not want to create an account.
Most customers give up on their purchases because of a complicated payment process. There are even people who abandon their shopping cart because of a website error. So obviously they liked this product, but could not complete their purchase because there were so many different issues.
In these cases, the promotional ads will be extremely suitable for those who have previously been interested in your product. This improves your opportunity to pull them back to your site, thereby increasing your website traffic because the products that they like is currently selling besides hot deals.
That’s exactly why Facebook launches dynamic advertising – Facebook Dynamic Product Ads, which allows you to:
- Record user behavior in your website via Facebook pixels
- Identify missed products at some stages of a channel
- And show a “dynamic ad” to users to showcase those exact products with exclusive offers.
In order for Facebook Dynamic Product Ads to work, you need to display similar messages on all the channels you are campaigning on. This will provide uniformity and prevent any discrepancies in your advertising message. Platforms like AdRoll that can help you create and manage personalized dynamic ads will increase conversions.
You should also automatically adjust your message with relevant promotions to suit the preferences of each shopper. Yamaha has done this to increase the conversion rate by 5 times compared to before.
Using dynamic ads, they automatically adjust their message and content for holiday promotions and remarketing previously viewed products to better suit the taste of the people.
Personalization based on visits
Personalizing the customer experience, Some businesses have started showing personalized content by the number of visits. You can display hot deals that attract first-time visitors or entice visitors to return with suggestions based on previous website visit history.
An idea to display content is to notify them of any price changes or any new deals that match their purchase history. In addition, you can also display a welcome window for first-time visitors, or offers for their first purchase to improve conversions. You can also attach a video or a message that will help them get familiar with your brand and website.
Chickidee encouraged more subscriptions by offering a 5% discount on new customers in the first order in exchange for their email address. This will not only help gather more customer information, it will help them drive more conversions thanks to discount offers.
If offering a promotion is not a viable option for you, you can encourage new visitors to check out some information, they will find particularly helpful for them. Even if these visitors cannot convert from the first time, providing them with valuable resources will help cultivate your relationship with them. This will result in many conversions in the long run.
Naked Wines Winery welcomed its first-time visitors to a quick survey in exchange for a free offer from them. After you take their survey and give them your email address, you will no longer see the previous welcome page the next time you visit.
HubSpot has a Smart Content feature that allows you to display relevant content based on the number of visits.
Using this feature, you will be able to display different homepage or landing page content depending on whether the visitor is a stranger, prospect, or current customers. According to Hubspot internal analysis, CTA with personalized content performed 212% better.
Use personalized geographic location to enhance customer experience
Personalizing the customer experience, Customer experience is extremely important in the transition. Any inconvenience that occurs during a purchase process can increase customer frustration and reduce conversion opportunities.
There have been a lot of inconveniences due to businesses unable to meet specific needs according to the customer’s location. That is why geographic location personalization can be an effective solution to promote conversion. Personalized geographic location will provide content, promotions and experiences related to each visitor’s location and thereby enhance the customer experience. At the same time, this also increases their conversion probability.
Let’s say you are an SEO consultant and you are implementing a 30-minute free consultation promotion for customers in the United States
You have a banner on your website. Customers just need to fill out the form, choose a convenient time and wait for you to contact them for advice. If you use the automatic location detection tool, you will set the ad to show only to visitors from the United States, help you attract more potential customers and avoid trouble or the feeling of discomfort from customers who are not eligible for the offer from you.
Or suppose you are an e-commerce business and you do not offer certain products to certain locations. A customer shopping from that location has gone through a long process of researching products on your site and picking out their favorite products. But once they arrive at the checkout page, they receive a notice saying that some of the items they have chosen do not support delivery to their location.
This can not only cause great frustration for customers but can also cause them to abandon their entire purchase. So, you missed an opportunity to convert them even for items that you can distribute to their location.
To fix this, you can automatically display content, providing relevant information based on the customer’s location.
For example, Home Depot will automatically detect your location (they will give you the option to change that location) or food delivery apps are also one of the examples for personalize customers’ experience based on geography.
The website or app will display shipping and stock information for certain products or the nearest eateries based on your location and they will proactively notify you of products whether they are available or not so that the products can be delivered to your place.
For Home Depot, you can also see if products are available at the store that is near your location and how many products are in stock. This saves shoppers a lot of time and avoids bad buying experiences. They can immediately switch to another product and continue shopping if the product they like is not available. Personalizing the customer experience
Above are some of the most effective Personalizing the customer experience techniques that you can use to increase conversion rates.
From the above analysis, to maintain the brand, develop revenue, create a unique style, businesses must focus on personalization so you can provide a real-time experience suitable for each customer. The more targeted your message, the more people will be able to convert.