Personalized marketing content strategy. 100’s of products, 100’s of industries, 1000’s of solutions
Messaging can never be everything to everyone. Personalization tailors content for multiple roles with different needs.
People expect it
Helps increases visitor engagement. Serving audiences content that resonates directly with them leads to increased conversion rates
Team
Myself — UX Strategist
Ryan Gordon — Web Optimization Specialist
Chloe L’Ecuyer — UX Designer
Example 1
Personalized banner images
Recently for a virtual workshop with attendees from around the world, we created a series of banners of key cities from their regions. Using their IP addresses, we served a hero banner that’d be relevant to them.
The global experience
Default version
It’s important to always have a good default version as some visitors may not see it if they
Did NOT accept cookies on the site
Used a VPN to mask IP
They were in the US
By default, we set the personalization to only appear internationally
Our process
We created a ‘personalized pizza’ strategy
4. Deciding
What elements within the page
3. Determining
Where we place personalized content
2. Defining
Why we are personalizing content. So what is the objective, and what KPI do we want to move?
1. Identifying
Who the audience is that we are targeting with personalized content
1. Who
Using Attribute data of Company we focused on a large global Engineering firm
Behavioral data
Audiences are created based on how a visitor behaved and actions taken on site
Pages, videos, blogs read
Downloads
Time on page
Scrolling
Attribute data
Visitors are segmented based on attributes
Location, country, city
Industry, company, role
Traffic source
The device, browser type
Relationship data
Visitors are segmented based on the relationship with the company
New vs Returning
Customer vs Non-customer
Sign in / out
Registered for actives
Products owned
2. Why
We identified content discovery as our goal. We wanted our audience to view custom content specifically created for them. We set up tracking on clicks, and page views for KPI’s to measure against the goal.
> conversion
> ave order value
< bounce rate
> upsells
Improve ROI
> retention
Content discovery
Repeat purchases
3. Where
To determine the optimal locations, we identified the top 25 pages they were visiting using site analytics.
We actually did not want to personalize every single experience or page, because the sites were often dashboards, or portals doing task-driven behavior. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
4. What
Home page - No new sections needed
There were sections that were already aligned 1:1 to the types of content we wanted to highlight, such as events and articles.
In this case, as we were able to choose components on the page that had the same content, we simply changed the copy and images to engineering content.
This is a subtle form of personalization but can make a big impact.
Product pages - New sections needed
We also looked at pages that didn’t have similar sections to the new information.
So instead of replacing, we added new components.
By placing this lockup on the bottom of each of these select pages, we didn’t obstruct any of the vital product or industry information.
Product resource pages - Both methods
We replaced content such as events and articles with our engineering focused content, as well as adding a new components.
This was a case of using both methods in order to get our relevant content on this highly trafficked page.
Do
-
Clear goals and objectives
we should know the objective for every single personalization, and also how it will be measured back to the main goals
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Be invisible
Personalization should be invisible. Our efforts should enhance the customer experience. But in a way that feels effortless. It will often go unnoticed by the visitor
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Be strategic
Help achieve key business objectives that aligns with your overall Marketing strategy.
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Test, validate, iterate
Once we have a personalization in place, we don’t just leave it. Review performance, and test the impact of making small adjustments, so we can continue to optimize performance
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Choose your moments
It’s important to remember that, just because we can personalize something, it doesn’t mean we should.
Don’t
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No strategy
Having a strategy in place will ensure your efforts are aligned with marketing objectives and deliver real, meaningful results
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No roadmap
Personalization without a roadmap will help you prioritize what is most important and also enable you to manage resources
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No testing
A/B testing personalizations is good practice, and will help you understand why a personalization is/ isn’t working
Example 2
A landing page campaign for Emergency Management Operations. We had four variations of content about features various solutions offer, that different roles would care most about.
Who?
Paid Per Click (PPC) Visitors
Why?
Increase form submissions
Where?
Campaign landing page
What?
Customize banner headlines
86% increase
in form submission rate
Icons by Noun Project