Personalization strategies can come in many forms. Some large scale personalization campaigns take a lot of time, effort and marketing resources to get started. And that’s just on the marketing side. On the technical side you might be using massive amounts of data to generate unique experiences for your customers.
But not everyone has to be like Netflix! We are going to share with you four quick personalization tactics that you can start to try for yourself today.
There are a few things you need if you want to try these quick personalization tactics for yourself.
We are going to assume you have a website, a Google Analytics account, a content management system, social media profiles, some very basic customer data and a little bit of time.
Know Your Customer
Starting to think about a personalization strategy does not have to be complicated. In fact, you probably have a lot of the information you need to get started.
Think about how you talk to your customers. This could be in person, over email or via IM. Do you interact with customers on social media?
In all these interactions, think about the questions customers ask you. What terms do they use when speaking about your product? How do they like to be spoken to?
Many businesses are sitting on an absolute treasure trove of data that they could use to build tailored digital experiences. You can use these interactions to help you generate your website content and refine your “call to actions” to directly speak to your audience, possibly changing them from browsers to buyers.
Start With Segmentation
If you have Google Analytics set up, you can start doing some segmentation.
Out of the box, with no set up, Google Analytics can provide you with some anonymised demographic data (age and gender) and some data around interests.
In GA (default view), “interests” data is split into different silos. These are called “Affinity categories”, “In-market segments” and “other categories”. Affinity categories are generally users that are high in the purchase funnel, just beginning their purchase journey. “In-market segments” are users further into the funnel, near the end of their purchase journey. The difference between these two in the data is quite easy to spot. For example “travel buffs” is an “affinity category”. But “Software/Business & Productivity Software” is an “In-market segment”. One is very broad, one is much more specific.
You can use this very basic segmentation data in a number of ways. If you’ve got a Google Ads campaign set up, you can use this data for ad targeting based on specific interests. But, if you don’t have the budget, you can also use this data to target your website content towards users that already visit your website. So you can create an experience that really speaks to your users.
Creating Your Content
So you know your customer and you’ve got some basic segmentation data. But there is one more thing you can check…if you have access.
Search Console is a fantastic tool and it’s not just essential for SEO. It gives you access to some of the queries that send users to your website.
And if you have that, combined with some basic demographic data and segments you have real insight into how your users think. You know some basics around what makes your users tick and how they found you.
Look at the queries in the performance tab on Search Console. You’ll see the queries that your site ranks on. You can use these queries to inform your content. Is there a question your customers asked Google and found you? Answer that question in your content.
For a deeper level of personalization, that does not take too long to set up, you can use all this data to create landing pages targeted at specific types of customer.
Once you have one or two of these pages, you can get testing…
Get Experimental
A/B personalization testing for SEO can be tricky. On Google Ads it’s much easier to A/B test, if you have an account. But if you’ve followed the steps above and crafted some content you can do some very quick testing on social media. For this test to be effective you should commit a budget to this, even if it’s a small amount like 500 THB (around $16) or less.
If you have created two landing pages using the steps above you can post them to Facebook and boost them. When you boost them you can also match the interests from GA into their equivalents in Facebook. So now you have two pages aimed at two interest groups. You can then see which is more effective and which gains more traction.
You can also refine your call to action text throughout the purchase funnel on your website. Call to action text is part of your key messaging. By making it more effective you can move your users from the consideration phase of the funnel, to the purchasing phase. And if they aren’t ready to buy right then, maybe take their details so you can communicate with them at a later date.
Talk to MAQE
Tried these quick personalization tactics but still need some help with personalization? Want to create a better commerce experience for your customers? Get in touch via [email protected] to hear how we can help your business give your customers what they want.