Surprisingly Simple Personalization Problems You Can Fix Today

Personalization is a powerful marketing tool that can be harnessed for a wide selection of purposes, including building a brand, driving revenue and promoting customer loyalty. Despite its potential, just 20% of consumers think that brands understand them and care about their needs.

This demonstrates that marketers must do more to get personalization right. While some issues take a long time to fix, there are others that can equate to quick wins and will immediately help you to achieve your goals through a more targeted approach to dealing with your customers.

1. Create regional variations of your banner

While having a global audience offers up plenty of opportunities for custom, an international website can feel impersonal to many. One way to overcome this is to customize your banner for the different regions in which you operate. This can be through the use of language or cultural references, which will allow users in different areas to know that you're relevant to them. Once you have varied banners in place, they’ll appear on your homepage and landing pages as visitors in specific locales visit your site.

2. Extend personalized experiences from inbound links

The inbound source that’s brought a customer to your site can provide important context. The social media post they’ve clicked on or the email marketing you sent out will bring them to your site with a specific purpose in mind. Capitalize on this context and ensure the content they’re being shown is related to the original link to ensure their experience on your site is seamless.

3. Set up geolocation services

Simple geolocation services can help to pinpoint where a potential customer is accessing your website from. This allows you to offer additional context to their experience, such as detailing where the nearest retail store is to their location and its opening hours. This will cut down the number of clicks required for them to access the information they need and consequently increase the chances of conversion. Such a multi-channel approach allows customers to complete their transaction in a different form if it suits their needs.

4. Allow sign-in via social accounts

Allowing customers to sign into your website using Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn makes it easier for them, as they won’t need to remember an additional username and password. It has multiple benefits for you as a brand too. It opens up a vast amount of data about your customers, their interests and motivations, which could be beneficial for refining personalization methods going forward.

5. Implement a retargeting ad strategy

It’s been proven that the average customer visits a site six times before making a purchase, demonstrating the importance of retargeting ads. If you don’t encourage them to return to your website, you’re likely to miss out on potential sales. The levels of personalization possible through retargeting mean you can go into a lot of detail, but starting out with the basics means setting up tags as a good catch-all.

6. Introduce cross-selling at checkout

Cross-selling at the checkout is the perfect opportunity for personalization and many big retailers have proven how such a simple technique can reap benefits. ‘Frequently bought together’ recommendations are an effective way of showing your customers you understand their needs and turning their purchases into higher-value transactions. From batteries and lightbulbs to make products function to items that complement what they’re already buying, cross-selling can be lucrative.

7. Send out personalized coupons

Coupons are a popular method for creating brand loyalty and turning customers into ambassadors. Putting in place rules that automatically generate personalized coupons that are sent out by email or in the receipt after a customer makes a purchase is a time-efficient way of making them feel valued. Offering them as a reward for the buyer alongside a discount to share with someone else will help spread the word and show customers that loyalty isn’t overlooked.

8. Scale content creation with a natural language generation tool

The amount of content required to provide a good level of personalization on your website is phenomenal and beyond the resources of most teams to keep up with. One way to overcome this is through the use of natural language generation (NLG). Powered with AI, this tool allows you to scale content creation in a way that takes pressure off resources, such as manpower and time. NLG leads to more authentic engagement with customers on whichever platform they choose.