Onsite personalization: A personal approach

Imagine visiting an online retailer in search of a new pair of running shoes. Instead of landing on the brand’s main homepage, you’re ushered to a special place that is set up just for you. This page suggests the best models to consider based on your past purchases. It knows your shoe size, whether you run on trails or roads, and whether you’re a middle-distance runner or an ultra-distance athlete. While it may feel so, this isn't magic. It's one-to-one personalization in action, and before long every brand will need to learn how to do it right.

At a time when customers expect brands to know their individual needs, wants, and desires, yesterday’s generic shopping experiences fall flat. The new imperative to fuel your personalization efforts is to create hyper-personalized journeys that resonate with individual customers. In this article, we’ll explain the world of one-to-one personalization and why it matters to your digital marketing success.

Onsite personalization is when, according to McKinsey & Company, “seller organizations use data to tailor messages to specific users’ preferences.” Taking this explanation a bit further, we can think of a one-to-one marketing strategy as making data-driven efforts to tailor content and brand experiences for each individual customer rather than simply targeting groups, demographics, or customer segments.

To do this well, brands must leverage advanced behavioral data and AI-powered insights to deliver highly relevant omnichannel offers and personalized messages across channels — in real time. The results can range from successfully acquiring new customers to stronger customer relationships, customer retention, and unprecedented customer loyalty. (More on these and other benefits below.) It’s easy to see how one-to-one personalized marketing can be a critical driver of differentiation in competitive markets.

If you’re new to the concept of one-to-one onsite personalization, it helps to understand that personalization strategies can be divided into two main categories: explicit personalization and implicit personalization:

1. Explicit personalization involves collecting information directly from users, often through actions such as creating an account, completing a preferences form, or sending feedback via email or chat. This method relies on user-provided data to create tailored customer experiences.
2. Implicit personalization operates in the background, analyzing user behavior, algorithms, data analytics, and touchpoints to infer preferences without requiring direct input from the visitor. The brand can observe these actions in their customer journey, like click-through paths, time spent on certain web pages or channels, sentiment of past conversations, and purchase history to gain sight into the website visitor’s ever-changing interests. Implicit user data can help reveal their customer needs and desires that cannot be captured by explicit data.

While explicit personalization offers a more direct approach, implicit personalization harnesses the full power of data analytics to adapt a brand’s content based on customer interactions, shaping the customer profile as they browsing behavior patterns change. It provides a seamless automation-driven onsite experience that can delight the customer without requiring a lengthy back-and-forth communication thread to get input.

Ideally, you want to use both approaches for an optimized one-to-one personalization strategy.

One-to-one personalization unlocks a host of measurable business benefits, starting with its ability to build trust and foster customer loyalty. When customers have a memorable interaction that reflects their preferences, it builds a sense of connection. Whether the website serves up the next-best course to study or the right music playlist at that moment, these on-point user experiences add up over time to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

One-to-one personalization can also drive brand awareness as customers share stories of companies meeting and exceeding their expectations. Each time a brand innovates and evolves its approach to customer engagement, there’s an opportunity for the word to spread via social media.

Finally, don’t underestimate the role that one-to-one personalization can play in driving sales. An ecommerce storefront using personalized product recommendations can influence purchasing decisions in a big way. By tailoring offers to individual preferences and browsing history, companies can create a personalized shopping journey that not only boosts conversion rates but also maximizes the value of each transaction.

Plus, machine learning and AI-driven personalization can fine-tune customer experiences over time to enable brands to create a recommendation engine that anticipates customer needs or preferences. Brands like Netflix and Amazon are prime examples.

As you dive into the possibilities of one-to-one personalization, think about how you can make first-time visitors feel welcome and recognize existing customers from the very first click on every visit. These basic steps will generate easy wins, and you can build on the strategy from there.

Like any strategic initiative, best practices for implementing a one-to-one personalized marketing strategy on a branded website calls for stating your goals, adding data and defining business rules, and then iteration. Follow these eight steps to make sure you maximize the benefits of this effort: