How to personalize content

Content personalization can drive customer loyalty by helping people find the right product or service for them. Personalization can deliver ROI, boosting conversion rates by 67%, according to Forrester. But how do you get started with personalized content, what’s it got to do with customer data and demographics, and what are the challenges to look out for?

In this guide:

• What is content personalization?
• Why do you need it?
• What is the role of data in personalization?
• Always consider your customers’ expectations
• Determine your personalization capabilities and goals
• Popular ways to personalize content
• Common challenges
• Getting started

What is content personalization?

Content personalization is a digital marketing strategy that uses data about consumers to deliver personalized experiences to them when they interact with your brand.

With these data points, your algorithms can understand who is visiting your website or social media accounts and who is receiving your emails, among other touchpoints.

These algorithms then tailor the personalized content to customers in specific audience segments, so the messaging matches their needs and preferences. It could be via customized landing pages or a homepage, personalized emails, or by sharing relevant content at different touchpoints.

At its best, a content personalization strategy brings both value to your customers (and potential customers) and benefit to your business, driving customer engagement and creating a stronger relationship between you both.

Why do you need personalized content?

Successful brands do more than show up online — they use online channels to create the kinds of digital experiences that keep customers coming back. And customers don’t do that unless they encounter relevant and valuable content every time they interact with a brand.

It’s no longer possible to dictate the precise sequence of events in any individual customer journey.

Buyers tend to:

1. Discover content
2. Do additional research
3. Return to a web page
4. Complete a purchase over different channels and devices

At every point in this journey, buyers expect brands to know what they want — and most importantly, to know where and when they want it. They expect you to understand their pain points.

To keep up, marketers need to use data to update content in real time.

You might have great content, but it might be hard to find and deliver when your teams are working on different channels with different information. Especially when they need to pivot in response to steady streams of individual customer behavior.

The role of data in personalized content

Demographic data

This tells you who your customers are. It’s the sort of personal data most people are familiar with, including age, sex, geolocation, income, employment details, and interests.

Contextual data

This comes from a customer’s environment to tell you how, where, and when they are interacting with you. It might include the device or browser they use, platforms and sites they are coming from, their social media interactions, their local weather, and the time of day. It’s contextual data that lets an international website default to your native language when you visit.

Behavioral data

This is gathered from someone’s activity on your website and other brand touchpoints. It’s centered on purchasing patterns (when customers buy things and for what activity or occasion), the benefits they’re looking for, and loyalty. This data lets you know how customers interact with your brand and which content they consume.

Like demographic and contextual data, behavioral data helps you develop personalized content. You can combine information from one or all these types of data to create an even more compelling customer experience with messaging that targets individuals.

Always consider your customers’ expectations

Customers want relevance and convenience, but they also want respect for their privacy. That means applying the data they’ve provided voluntarily in ethical and useful ways. Here’s a breakdown with examples of the customer expectations you should meet:

How to meet your customers’ expectations

Determine your personalization capabilities and goals

While the personalized content you deliver is designed with customers in mind, marketers ultimately need to ensure that their efforts are tied to larger business objectives. They also need to select the right KPIs to determine how well their target audience or audiences are responding.

When building your personalization strategy, you may want to consider:

• Customer profiles. How complete a view do you have of your customers and their interactions with you? What internal data and third-party data are available to you?
• An integrated platform. Do you have a centralized source to design, launch, and measure campaigns, landing pages and customer experiences at scale?
• Security. How secure are your experiences?
• Privacy. How personal is too personal? Do you know what privacy concerns your customers have?
• New media and channels. How prepared are you to incorporate new or emerging media and channels in your experiences?
• Efficient process and collaboration. How efficient are your processes? Who owns what? How well do you understand each other’s roles and collaborate with other teams?
• Updates and adaptability. How adaptable are your experiences? How easy is it to create and update these experiences?

Effective ways to personalize content

1. Personalized web pages

These give your online visitors a site experience built just for them. Instead of a single approach to content leading to one generic experience, website personalization lets you present dynamic landing pages that change based on individual real-time data points. With content tailored to each visitor’s profile, interest and engagement go up.

2. Product recommendations

Customers see products related to their searches, like discounts or offers for specific categories or similar purchases other customers have made. Data for these product recommendations can come from previous website searches, including specific page visits.

User-generated information from account settings, surveys, and behaviors can also contribute, as can knowing the type of device someone is on. Real-time data, including where a customer is and what time or day of the week it is can also help you to tailor your messaging and personalized experiences.

3. Retargeted ads

Reach specific demographic groups or get a second chance at making a sale to recent visitors with retargeted ads and marketing. Social media platforms give you access to demographics, including age, gender, location, and special interests, so retargeting is simple.

You can create posts that appeal to your target audience, then serve them directly to those customers as they browse their social media accounts. Or you can retarget people who visited your site previously but didn’t complete a conversion — for example, they browsed but didn’t purchase anything or fill out a contact form.

4. GPS-based map apps

These apps allow content personalization by targeting customers where they are at that moment. Think of the times you’ve searched for a type of store “near me.” Your business can be ready to respond to similar searches — consumers with apps like Google Maps get suggestions from local businesses on places to shop, dine, get gas, and more.

And if you’re a retailer with, say, locations all over Florida, but you’re having a sale only in your Miami store, you can target previous shoppers and web visitors just in that area.

5. Email personalization

This lets you show customers they’re not just another name on a mailing list. Personalized email can be as simple as including their name in the subject line with a personalization token or as extensive as multiple email marketing campaigns segmented by customer type. This tailored content connects with your customers more individually, so it’s more likely to drive them to your website and take the desired action.

Understand the tools you need

To successfully implement and roll out a personalization strategy you need the right tools. Two of the most important are:

• Content management system (CMS): A CMS provides an interface for marketers and other team members to add and modify content on a website without waiting for coders to make changes manually.

Learn more about the Adobe Headless CMS

• Digital asset management system (DAM): A DAM works behind the scenes, where a wide variety of content needs to be stored, organized, accessed, and used appropriately and efficiently by multiple team members.

Learn more about Adobe Digital Asset Management

Ensuring your CMS and DAM are integrated

When your CMS and DAM are connected, you have a pipeline for personalized content. You don’t need to waste time connecting the data points between teams, channels, and systems when you have tools that can do it for you — in real time.

Common challenges of personalized content

The impact of the GDPR

Consumers now have more rights as to how companies use their data. In 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in Europe, marking the first broad attempt to regulate marketing, advertising, and sales operations using personal information.

In essence, it established individual rights around how companies can use citizens’ information — including a person’s right to limit the use of their data. You’ve experienced the effect of GDPR when you accept a website’s cookies, and the regulations also affect large, complex platforms dealing with huge amounts of data.

Transparency around data usage

Transparency around data usage and protection presents another challenge. A global conversation on privacy and security has evolved around unsecured data and the frequency of security breaches. We have all lived with technology long enough to appreciate its benefits but also to understand its drawbacks, especially when personal data falls into the wrong hands.

The trust consumers once had — like accepting terms of use without any second thoughts — is over. Today, companies must continue to show that they will use consumer data in ways that are safe, legal, and enhance customer experiences — or legislators could target them next.

Use personalized content with care and consideration

These emerging data regulations and widespread security concerns are important to be aware of and understand, but they shouldn’t deter you from personalized content marketing. Content personalization — done right — benefits everyone.

Getting started with personalized content

Personalized content builds stronger relationships with your customers and increases the likelihood of them engaging with your brand, returning to your site, and re-purchasing from your company.

When you’re ready to get started with personalized content, begin by analyzing your audience. Make sure you understand them and their needs so you can begin creating content that is specific and useful.

Using a combination of A/B and multivariate testing, Adobe Target works as an optimization engine across screens and channels and makes it easy to perform testing, measurement, and optimization — all without writing code.

Watch the Adobe Target overview video to learn how this personalization tool delivers a personalized online experience to every customer at scale.