What to Consider When Planning and Implementing Online Personalisation

Personalization of online customer journeys is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement and ultimately reach conversion goals within a shortened time. The more your website knows about the context of your visitor, the more exclusive you can make the experience to them.

Global eCommerce sales hit $6.6 trillion in 2020 and are expected to grow annually by 18.7% until 2028. Today, the augmentation of online products and services represents a huge opportunity, not just for B2C, but similarly for B2B businesses too. According to a report by Forrester, 74% of B2B buyers report researching at least half of their work purchases online.

Where do we start and what do we have to consider? These are common questions we regularly get asked. Here are three useful things to consider:

1. Select the right platform

Choosing the right Content Management System platform is crucial for any business and fortunately, these days there are several market-leading software providers (Kentico Xperience, Magento, uCommerce, and Sitecore) that offer solutions with a diverse range of capabilities.

For example, the Kentico Xperience platform has a comprehensive suite of inbuilt marketing and online personalization capabilities. The platform allows website administrators to create new content variants with ease, based on different options such as persona type, region visiting from, device type and much more.

Another great feature of the Kentico Xperience marketing suite is the A/B testing functionalities. A/B testing works by gathering website data from end-users on specific web pages. This then provides useful insight into which content online personalization variants are working and which ones are not.

The data gathered in the systems activity log allows clients to evaluate the behaviour of existing and potential customers. These activities can be linked to other events and triggers within the overall marketing campaign. They can also be used in combination with other Kentico Xperience marketing features and capabilities.

2. Consider what type of content you want to personalize

This will mostly be determined by your business objectives and consequently, the value you put on certain activities customers perform on your website e.g. landing page visits, form completions, newsletter subscriptions.

Another factor that will influence the type of content you personalize, is the depth of information you hold on your customers, such as their region of origin, previous purchase, previous pages viewed, product interest, etc. Generally, the more information you have the more options you will have when setting your online personalization rules and triggers.

3. Define Your Online Personalization Rules

Consider your overall goals and what you are trying to achieve, i.e. reduce cart abandonment, increase repeat purchases. This will help in determining which rules your efforts are best focused on. Look to the information you already hold to help determine the rules you should set e.g. product interest, purchase stage, location/region.

Coming up with the right online personalization strategies and putting them into action can be a little overwhelming. We always recommend starting small, this allows you to be more focused in your approach and gives you more room for testing and optimizing where required.

Our Online Personalization Approach

Over 80% of the solutions delivered by us here at i3 Digital have the Kentico Xperience platform at the core. We encourage and offer our help to our clients in implementing all online personalization practices via the many features accessible within the Kentico Xperience platform. We also provide User Experience workshops for our clients on-site or virtually. The workshops are carried out as part of the initial phase of the website project, this ensures that client websites accurately reflect the needs of the end-users from the very offset.

This results in our client’s gaining a much deeper insight into customer behaviour and trends, which in turn empowers them to engage more relevantly across all their online marketing activities and obtain more accurate values when it comes to measuring ROI.

Planning a project and interested in learning more? Get in touch today for a consultation with one of our experts.