About the Guide

How web personalization can benefit you

In an increasingly competitive market, customers expect more than a universal website experience can offer. Buyers today are better informed, making them more selective and quicker to click away if something doesn’t speak to them. The solution comes in the form of web personalization. A recent report by VB Insight found that 87% of companies see a lift in key metrics (such as conversion rates, engagement rates, and lead generation or average order value) when they employ personalization. In spite of this, it’s largely an untapped market, with fewer than 20% of businesses utilizing web personalization as a marketing strategy.

Web personalization is a mission-critical marketing activity that creates a meaningful experience for your customers and also generates better business results. This means understanding and meeting your buyers’ interests, tailoring your website to fit their profile, and ultimately providing the best message, content, or offer—one that is specifically relevant to them. When you identify, segment, and target visitors with personalized messaging, you unlock boundless potential.

Tailoring the website experience to a customer’s specific needs results in accelerated engagement and conversions, and improves customer retention. Providing personalized messages makes recipients feel welcome and understood, and can build a strong brand preference against competitors. Personalization also provides invaluable data to better understand your visitor’s buying behavior, optimize future campaigns, and drive sales.

What’s in the guide?

• **What is web personalization?**Web personalization refers to creating a dynamic, relevant website experience for your prospects and customers based on their behavior, location, profile, and other attributes. You’ll discover how a seemingly complex process can be simplified and implemented by any marketer to increase the efficacy of your website and cross-channel marketing efforts, regardless of the type or size of your organization.
• **How does it help marketers?**Web personalization helps marketers move the needle by enabling them to deliver a continuous, personal experience to visitors at scale. Personalized experiences result in increased brand preference and loyalty, better understanding of your visitors, improved conversion rates, and ultimately helps nurture, engage, and upsell to your customers.
• Create your strategy Go step-by-step into how you can best fit web personalization into your overall marketing goals. We’ll provide you with use cases and walk you through how to refine your customer journey and identify early metrics to track your progress. Access a helpful worksheet to organize and outline your goals so you can determine the best way to create personalized content to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
• Choose the right ways to personalize We’ll cover six main types of personalization that you can use to engage your target audience: geolocation, behavioral, activity tracked by contact data, vertical-based industry outreach, account-based campaigns, and predictive web personalization.
• Integrate cross-channel marketing into your strategy Web personalization goes beyond your website, so your efforts need to span across every channel throughout the customer lifecycle. Master the ways marketing automation can be used to drive personalization that is woven through your existing channels and campaigns to create a cohesive experience on your website, digital and mobile ads, email, and offline marketing.
• Create a personalized experience with content Discover how to develop and serve personalized messaging that drives engagement across the entire customer journey. We’ve included our campaign program matrix to help you outline new customized content, and make the most of existing assets by recreating particular sections, changing visuals, or modifying calls-to-action (CTAs). You’ll learn what makes effective content as well as best practices for content placement and predictive content recommendations.
• Testing and optimization After you establish your goals and use cases, think about what success will look like for your organization, and then set up metrics so you can create a benchmark before you implement your web personalization campaigns. Review how to create a testing environment in order to monitor and improve your web personalization strategy, how and what to A/B test, and how to integrate with your analytic tools.
• Measurement Review the three stages of measurement: early-stage metrics; mid-stage metrics, like action, quality, and ROI lift; and late-stage metrics like revenue attribution. Explore how to use these metrics to measure the success of your web personalization activities from engagement to conversion as well as the ROI of your entire channel.
• Building your team Your web personalization marketing starts with creating a strategy that addresses and supports your organizational marketing goals. Then, you need to learn how to best structure your resources to keep your web personalization activities up and running with any small, medium, or large team.
• Building your toolbox Web personalization is a critical component of how you talk to customers as individuals, and web personalization tools can make that process easier. Use our checklist to determine what to look for in a web personalization app that best suits your needs.

If you’re not using web personalization as part of your marketing mix, you’re missing out on enormous potential, and this resource will provide you with the knowledge you need to hit the ground running.