What’s more impacting to you, a email marketing newsletter directed to the general viewership or an email that is addressed directly to you? The latter, clearly, and that principle carries over to every facet of marketing and customer experience optimization. The more personalized the experience the better the results on your end, which is why website personalization is so important. But if you’re still a little uncertain about the facts, let’s go a little bit deeper into the how and why of the process.
Website Personalization, Why You Should Make Your Website Sing True to Your Buyer Personas
Give the People What They Want
Customers are on your site because your advertising and marketing efforts have paid off. Whether they were led there by word-of-mouth, with a link from one of your tweets, or a Google ad on their Gmail there is one thing they all have in common: they are there to shop for something they need. You have an industry you are a part of, and that industry as a rule has its own major demographic. People who shop in the fishing industry are a whole lot different than people looking for video games, and even though there will be some overlapping you have to play the numbers and appease the majority.
This means dust off your buyer personas. If you don’t have some then make some, because you want to know who is shopping on your site and what they want from you. Reports show that 74% of online shoppers get frustrated when sites don’t have what they want, meaning they’ll leave your site real quick if you don’t get them what they want and get it to them fast. Those 74% are people who have gone to your competition and given them their business instead of you. Listen to what they need and plan accordingly.
Immediacy
It’s not enough today for people to just know that you have products and services for them—they need to get to the meat of the matter quickly. That’s where landing pages and such come in handy, because once you figure out what your buyers need you have to figure out how to guide them there as quickly as possible. Personalize your site and your content to your demographic and then create a simple and automatic guiding system to keep the traffic moving through your site. Landing pages will get buyers exactly where they need to go in the fastest way possible, so invest in them. If the first page your customers see isn’t a landing page, you’re doing something wrong. And make sure to guide your customers through with some properly placed CTAs (calls-to-action) and personalize those too. As it turns out, view-to-submission rate was 42% higher when CTAs were personalized to the visitor rather than just a general one.
Website personalization not only gives you better viewer to customer conversion rates, it also gives your website some personality. A comfortable, easily navigable site is key to driving traffic and business to your doorstep, and taking small steps like personalizing each user’s experience is a simple way to start seeing some powerful increases in your numbers.
