Website Personalization Best Practices

There’s always a fine line between adding an appreciated personal touch to the browsing and shopping experience and coming across like a creepy stalker. Just because you’re operating in the online arena doesn’t mean you can afford to neglect personalization efforts, nor can you play fast and loose with customer data and overstep the bounds of privacy.

Finding ways to balance your efforts and skirt this fine line of personalizing the marketing experience without scaring customers away is no easy feat, but with the help of an experienced Asheville branding and marketing services agency, you can learn best practices and come up with successful strategies that help you to reach goals and improve conversions. Here are a few things you need to know about website personalization best practices.

Responsive Design is a Must

Are we still saying this in 2019? If you have yet to upgrade to responsive web design, you are woefully behind the times. Google has been pushing its mobile-first agenda for a while now, and they finally made it official July 1 of this year, when they enabled mobile-first indexing by default for all new websites.

This means websites that aren’t optimized for mobile users will be indexed differently than up-to-date competitors, and it will impact rankings. Even worse, however, a failure to upgrade to responsive design means you’re leaving mobile browsers to deal with content that won’t auto resize for smartphones or tablets. Wondering why bounce rates are increasing? This could be a major culprit.

According to Statista, mobile now accounts for nearly half of all traffic on the internet globally, and that’s not including tablets. If you’re not optimized for mobile, you could be alienating half of your audience or more, and that number is only likely to increase over time.  Website personalization should start by providing easy access to your online portal. Throwing money at branding and marketing does you no good if half of your audience can’t properly view your pages.

Tracking and Analyzing

The major benefit of operating online is that you have myriad tools at your disposal to learn about your audience, starting with how they interact with your website. The right tracking tools can provide data on how long customers stay on a page, how they are funneled to your page and the progress that leads to conversions, and even how their eyes roam over the content.

All of this can help you and your Asheville internet marketing company track trends and come up with a plan for how to create an experience that appeals to the widest range of customers, as well as options to personalize for specific customers (with targeted ads and suggestions, for example). The idea is to get to know your audience, understand general tendencies and preferences, and make adjustments that help you to create positive experiences and increase conversions.

Remarketing

Bringing in targeted traffic is always ideal.  You naturally want to cater to consumers that already have an interest in your products, services, or brand, rather than randos who happened onto your page by accident. This isn’t to say that you can’t gain conversions through non-specific traffic, but the chances increase significantly when visitors are already seeking what you have to offer.

So, what happens when interested customers abandon carts or simply browse and then bounce? This is disappointing, of course, but it gives you valuable information about what they’re interested in, which you and your branding services agency can use for the purposes of remarketing or reminding shoppers what they left behind. This form of personalization could lead to repeat traffic and other conversions.

Product Suggestions

One of the best forms of website personalization to emerge in recent years is product suggestions, which consider items a shopper has browsed, put into a cart, or purchased, and uses this data to make recommendations about other, similar products they might like. This feature is like a personal shopper for your customers, and it can help to make them feel catered to, as well as increase sales.

That said, you need to be careful just how specific your suggestions getWhile you certainly want to help customers find new items they’ll like, you don’t necessarily want to limit the items you show them – you want to encourage them to branch out so they don’t get bored with too many items that are too much like what they already have.

Target Groups

Putting yourself in a customer’s shoes is always a good plan to determine the best way to meet their needs and earn their patronage. When planning your web design, though, it’s simply impossible to please all the people all the time.

What you and your Asheville internet marketing partner can do, however, is target groups of like-minded customers to create a handful of interactive experiences likely to suit each demographic. This will help to personalize interactions just enough to please most visitors without placing an undue burden on your branding and marketing resources.

If you need help updating customer interactions to create more personalized experiences, contact the experts at Storypowered today at 828-450-2551 or online to find out what we can do for you.