The Power of Personalization: 6 Ways to Personalize the Customer Experience

Nowadays, customers expect for companies to build websites and marketing campaigns around them, providing the right information that’s quick to access. In order to stay relevant, businesses and organizations must leverage the power of personalization. And this is certainly possible with today’s technology. By creating an individualized experience for customers, businesses have the foundation to answer customer questions and move these customers along the sales funnel to create and increase conversions.

Jim Yu from Search Engine Watch shares six steps marketers can take to create a real-time personalized experience for their customers, starting with:

1. In-Depth Buyer Personas – There are many different versions of an ideal customer. In order to be efficient in building a personalized experience for the right customer for them, marketers must work hard to identify a specific buyer persona. A detailed buyer persona goes beyond a basic description and identifies customer demographics, behavior, patters, motivations, and goals.

2. Develop the Right Content for Each Persona – Of course, organizations can have more than one buyer persona, they’ll just have to make sure they have a winning content marketing team that can create content that caters to these personas. Content marketing is a powerful force that can guide the customer along the sales funnel, especially at the beginning.

3. Use Big Data to Analyze Visitors and Qualify Leads – In order to create sales conversions, marketers have to figure out who is visiting their website as well as their motivations. This can be easily done using a marketing dashboard combined with a customer relationship management system (CRM) that provides information about when the customer is visiting the website, how long are they staying, what pages they’re visiting, what information or content they are seeking to find.

4. Build a Site that is Responsive to the Customer and Their Devices – A great website design is responsive or mobile-friendly to accommodate thee many customers that are now using mobile devices to access information online. A sophisticated marketing dashboard, such asHubspot or Sharpspring, or Google Analytics, will let you know if a customer is visiting from a mobile, tablet, or desktop device so you can make adjustments to marketing initiatives.

5. Use Machine Learning to Customize to the Individual – Machine learning, which is the process of searching through massive amounts of data in search of patterns, can be combined with marketing automation to really pack a punch in personalization. For example, marketers have an opportunity to analyze a pool of leads to determine which ones closed, were, lost, or still in play. They can then apply marketing automation to send the right message at the right time to these customers, even ones on mobile devices, without having to make manual adjustments – it’s all done automatically!

6. Take Customization Beyond the Website – When it comes to building an overall web presence, the presence doesn’t just stop at the website. Crafting the right message for the right persona can be done on display ads, landing pages, social media, video and content marketing, and email marketing as well. The possibilities are endless!

The Power of Personalization for Search

When Google ranks pages in search results, it’s looking at the quality of content produced and it looks to see how the customer will interact with the website. “Dwell time” or the amount of time the user spends on the website can be the biggest ranking factor for Google. Dwell time also includes the bounce rate (the times a user goes on a webpage and immediately leaves) and the click through rates to access other pages on the site. Dwell time lets Google know that the information the user is reading is quality information that can be shared with others and boosts the page’s ranking as a result. When content is personalized, quality content, marketers have an opportunity to improve user experience, boost engagement, and increase conversions.