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Get Tactics, Tricks, and Tips for Marketing Personalization

Personalize to optimize engagement with your online audiences

The cornerstone of any relationship is meaningful engagement.

Picture it: you’ve swiped right and are on your first date. How likely is it that you will commit to a second if the person you’re spending an entire evening with doesn’t take the time to tailor their questions to you or connect on a deeper level? Despite an increasingly digitized society, humans are still programmed to create intimate bonds and enjoy personalized experiences.

As you seek to improve and expand upon your web presence, it’s crucial to recognize that your visitors want to feel like the only person in the virtual room.

Your site visitors want the warm, intimate feeling that you understand their wants and needs, but they’ll run for the hills if you give off stalker vibes by violating their privacy and trust.

Consumers are savvy these days. They expect sophisticated and subtle personal touches that will seamlessly enhance their web experiences.

Here are some tactics, tricks, and tips to help you personalize the web experience for your audience like a decent human being (and not be creepy):

Visit Number

It’s happened to all of us… You meet someone, and then on the second or third encounter that person has completely forgotten you and introduces themselves all over again. Don’t make that mistake! Instead, take advantage of site visit personalization.

For each unique visitor, tailor the greeting.

Example:

First visit: Hello!
Second visit: Welcome back!
Third visit: How can we help?

Don’t be afraid to get personal. You can start small and tailor your messaging to your top persona.

If your organization is tech-focused, and you’re targeting someone working in DevOps, your greeting should be duly unique. As you gather more data and become more adept at personalization, you can keep creating other messages and updating existing ones to match additional personas.

This will generate a truly personalized experience based on the visitors’ respective interests.

Device Detection

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to access a website from your phone, only to be thwarted by a page layout that hasn’t been customized for your particular device.

You should take the time to consider specific attributes for each device a visitor could be using and then make sure your content is accessible for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Customizing a site to detect if a visitor is accessing from a tactile screen is also a nice touch (pun intended).

Speaking of mobile users, another opportunity for personalization is using device rules to personalize the experience to bubble up the tasks that a person on a mobile device is most likely trying to accomplish when they are away from their laptop or desktop computer.

Real-time website personalization: date/time

One aspect of implementing predictive personalization is targeted session attributes. Whether a user is accessing your site from either coast in the United States, Europe, or any other continent, when that specific visitor lands on your site, their predictive profile can automatically populate with content they find most relevant.

For example, if a site visitor is accessing your content in the morning, they might appreciate a targeted “good morning” message on the home page (even if it’s technically 7:00 pm in your time zone).

Or, if there’s an impending deadline for paying an invoice or submitting a presentation topic, it can be helpful to bubble up other relevant, time-based content based on a specific date and time that matters to your site visitors.

Real-time website personalization: Location/Geo Targeting/Internationalization

You can adapt your messaging based on a user’s physical location. Changing the language, currency, or other country-specific details are table stakes, but user-specific imagery is another small yet significant detail.

If a surfer in Hawaii is accessing your site, it would make more sense to tailor some of your site’s imagery to reflect that – a cresting wave or a picturesque beach would make more sense than a snowy mountaintop.

In real life, everyone appreciates a friend or co-worker remembering personal details, and the same can be said for your site visitors. Thoughtful gestures that show customers you’re paying attention will go a long way. They’ll feel more comfortable and confident while searching your site and will get the impression that you are working to make their web experience positive and meaningful.

At HexIQ, we use Pulse.app to help our clients personalize content in real-time based on the characteristics of the neighborhoods they are coming from.

Real-time website personalization: Explicit data matches

Permission marketing, which relies on explicit data matches, is the modern version of its dated counterpart, interruption marketing.

Think of how you construct any real-life, meaningful relationship. Will you have more success if you randomly bombard a potential friend/colleague/love interest with uninvited conversation, or if you take the time to incrementally create a connection?

Let’s (broadly) apply Newton’s Third Law here: for every action a visitor takes, there should be an intelligent and creative reaction. Some ways to capitalize on permission marketing, and mimic the way humans naturally build relationships are as follows:

Filling out forms (zero-party data that visitors proactively share with you)
CRM integration
Mobile Apps
Alexa Skills
Commerce
POS
PIM
ERP

Perhaps a user fills out a form. Once you’ve captured that explicit data, make it work for you. Based on the information they provide, you could then offer other premium content matched to their interests or preferences on subsequent visits.

Pattern Matches

No, we’re not talking about bad habits or the debate on wearing plaid with stripes. We’re talking data. Data that will give us insight into personal interactions and consumer behavior.

Based on how your visitors interact with your site, you can create profiles that will help you keep track of pattern-specific behaviors and even start implementing pattern cards to define steps in a marketing automation campaign.

By quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing your site visitors’ patterns, you will cultivate better insights and in turn implement and execute strategies faster that will allow you to stay ahead of the curve.

Goals/Outcomes

While we’re not explicitly talking about the state of your New Year’s resolutions (how’s that yoga class coming along?), focusing on your website’s goals/outcomes is good practice.

DO move your user to the next logical goal. DON’T repeat content for goals that you’ve already achieved. If a visitor has already signed up for your newsletter, focus on the next offering that will retain their attention and keep them coming back to your site.

Don’t stop there. This is the time to really focus on the big picture and consider how each goal you set is contributing to your overall business objective. If you ignore your visitors’ actions and keep proposing the same old thing, chances are they’ll develop a wandering eye.

Campaigns

These are among the best ways to reach your site visitors through personalization. Essentially the shapeshifters of digital marketing, these campaigns can take on several forms – with all of them helping you on your quest for near-perfect personalization.

Some of the more popular forms include:

Online (Pay-Per-Click)
Offline campaigns (trade shows)
Product-specific campaigns

“Campaign” is a broad term in the marketing world, but it is good to break this up into small achievable pieces that you can test out and revisit if you aren’t getting the results you want.

Maybe you are using a PPC campaign, which is great because you are saving a little money and only paying when someone clicks on the ad, but you aren’t getting as many impressions as you might with a paid social media campaign. Although option b is more of an old-school approach, you can still use tools like analytics, specific URLs, and geofilters (among others) to measure how your offline marketing is driving website traffic.

Asset Download

Your website more than likely includes multiple downloadable assets that your visitors can access and enjoy at their leisure. While that is great, you probably want to know how those visitors are interacting with the media items (PDFs, videos, other documents) that you so thoughtfully added to your website.

Some things to consider:

Related content
Format of content
Specific piece of content
Number of downloads

Knowing that a spreadsheet template asset was downloaded along with five or more other assets is valuable data. Even just knowing which asset has the most downloads is valuable. You can use this information to spark ideas for other potentially valuable content your visitors may be seeking.

If you have an infographic that is accumulating repeat downloads, but a premium content counterpart with the same information has no views, you can use that data to your advantage. Perhaps your visitors prefer infographics or videos to long-form blog posts.

If that is the case, you can jump on a prime opportunity to customize that content and create a deeper and more personal connection.

Search Keywords

On-site search is a strong indicator of a visitor’s intent to return to your site and something you should be aware of. You can also use the information obtained from this feature to display related content to your visitors.

Additionally, traffic that comes in from your paid search campaigns through Google or Bing can give you an easy personalization opportunity to match the messaging from the ad that brought your visitor onto your site with the form they need to fill out to get lead magnet you’re hoping to entice them with.

If you don’t personalize the landing pages your paid search campaign traffic enters through, you’re leaving conversions on the table.

Social Media

Catering your content for different social platforms is a key component to personalization. Globally, and across a variety of social media networks, people share the most intimate details of their lives; it’s an essential component of modern relationship building.

Example: your website has published a podcast. A site visitor finds this podcast and likes it enough to share on X social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok). Not only have you just created a meaningful relationship with a visitor, they have just become and advocate of your content and advertised your site. Everybody wins!

Retargeting on Viewed Pages

Oh no! Someone visited your website, didn’t convert, and went about their day as usual. This is the marketing equivalent of swiping left.

Fear not! There are some nifty ways to retarget those who have rejected or forgotten you, giving you a second (or third or fourth) chance to win them over.

Retargeting will allow you to reinforce messages and reiterate Calls to Action. Modern retargeting has become fairly sophisticated. Through advances in filtering and configuring, it can produce highly personalized results, which in turn offer your site visitors that meaningful connection they’re expecting across the web.

There you have it: Simple tricks, tips, and tactics to help improve your marketing personalization strategy!

All of these tips have one common thread: offer your visitors an immersive and intimate experience. They will feel more comfortable with you as a brand, and you will enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship.

Regardless of your approach to personalization, it should essentially strive to emulate healthy human relationships. Strike up a conversation, don’t be too pushy, engage on a meaningful level, and continue to cultivate mutual trust.

Find Out How You Should Get Personal with Your Audience

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