Crystal Clear Communications Blog

By 2020, personalization of the customer experience will become the foundation of any business. It will even overtake technology and innovation factors.

Personalization is the trend of the future, so you should start to introduce it into your business processes now. Content personalization is just one step in the whole personalization strategy.

This blog explains how to personalize content to win more customers and interact with existing ones in the most effective way.

Are your clients ready for personalized content?

This sounds unbelievable, but according to a survey by Janrain, 25% of adults are ready to give up chocolate for a month to receive content that meets their needs. And 21% of those polled said they were ready to give up their smartphones for the whole day.

These findings suggest that people enjoy personalized information — content that adapts to the right person at the right time. People get bored with the content that does not meet their expectations.

According to research by VB Insight, 78% of all companies view web personalization as one of the most important growth factors for key success indicators. At the same time, 40% of them have already seen the growth of their key metrics by more than 20%.

The risk is: if you do not establish direct contact with your clients through content personalization, you lose money.

Content personalization can be simple

Zappos, Virgin Group, Amazon, AliExpress, and many other market leaders use content personalization brilliantly.

One of the easiest examples is Booking.com. Anyone who once booked accommodation on this site knows that the site remembers information about the hotels you visited. The site will:

• Warn you about the number of available rooms.
• Remind you of the dates of your previous visit.
• Recommend hotels based on your preferences.
• Offer to send documents in the form you choose.

Important first steps to personalize your content

Content is a key component to the success of your personalization work. Instead of developing new personalized content, it is better to optimize content already created.

This approach will save you both time and resources. You can personalize content by changing the title, calls to action, and the meaning of certain parts of web pages.

The trick is to reorient what you already have to customize it according to the needs of each customer segment.

Here are the key items to consider changing for good content personalization:

• Headlines. This is one thing the reader always sees. Change the title so that it resonates with the needs of the visitor.

• Call to action (CTA) elements. The call to action must reflect the intent of the target segment.

• The essence of your articles and statistics. Use only the results of studies that are relevant to the interests of a particular target audience.

• Structure and form of content presentation. We perceive content better if it is divided into several shorter parts. 

The role of the material on the main page is obvious – to establish primary contact with the visitor and to intrigue them. As contact adapts to the preferences of each visitor, the chances that each person pays more attention to your content will be higher.

Placing personalized content on the internal pages of the site enables you to offer customers material based on how they became interested in a particular section of the site or which page was the first for them.

In many cases, people do not begin to explore your site from the home page. There is a higher chance they will follow a link to an internal page.

Knowing which page the user started on enables you to get to know that user is better and offer relevant content.

Localize content too

If you work in several multilingual markets, make sure you localize content in addition to personalizing it. In this context, localization is a broader concept than personalization, because it takes into account the general characteristics of the target audience.

Marie Fincher, Head of Content at TrustMyPaper, says. “Personalization will not work if you have not localized content for perception by target audiences from different cultural groups. You need not write, check, personalize and write once more but make your articles fit the features of different nations and mentalities.”

Landing page content

There is a big difference in how personalized and non-personalized landing pages convert visitors into buyers. This also is noticeable when optimizing email marketing and advertising campaigns.

Well-targeted advertising messages will attract people to your landing pages. But if the page is not personalized, the connection between you and the visitors will break.

If the page continues the conversation that you started at another site, the conversion rate will be higher.

9 services to help you with content personalization

• DriveBack is a platform with a designer to create individual personalization scenarios. It contains opportunities for audience segmentation and A/B testing.

• Barilliance is a technology for website personalization, product recommendations, and newsletters.

• Optinmonster helps create unique offers based on geographic data and indicators of interaction with your site.

• Richrelevance is useful for content personalization, navigation, recommendations, and search.

• Softcube helps create product recommendations and personalized mailings.

• HucksterBot contains functions for setting discounts, powerful analytics, segmentation, and filters by region.

• Personali gives you the opportunity to personalize discounts and offer the buyer to bargain.

• RetailRocket personalizes website and mailing lists.

• Target2sell is a self-learning module of individual recommendations, personalization of mailing, and content filtering for the user.

• TriggMine is a service for personalized email marketing.

While the price was a decisive factor in the past, today users want to feel that they are so important that their wishes are anticipated. Creating individual content for everyone is one of the best ways to tell customers that their desires are important to you.