You might have noticed… it’s harder than ever to grab the attention of your prospects and potential customer. The web is packed with tons of free content providing helpful and valuable information to anyone needing it. So, if your goal is to leverage content to build your business, how, exactly do you make your content stand out?
One method that's been gaining traction not only grabs attention but also helps you build a stronger bond with your prospects. And that's personalized content. You've probably encountered it using sites like Amazon or Netflix where they serve up automated, personalized content and recommendation for you. They're offering you content based on what you've purchased or watched before using data they've collected about you to provide further content based on your taste and past behavior.
And the thing is… this kind of personalization isn't limited to big companies. There are technologies out there to enable just about any business using a website or online marketing platform to create a more personalized experience for their prospects and customers.
Don't Just Insert Their Name
Now I want to be very clear about something. For starters, personalization might involve inserting someone's name or their location onto a landing page you've sent them to (thanks to the magic of something called account-based marketing).
Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, here's an example. My friends over at Refer.com sent me an invitation to participate in a pilot program they've recentluy launched. And to get my attention, they created this custom video pulling data from my Facebook account…
But I want to be clear that, while personalization content might start with things like name and location, limiting your custom content to those kinds of data variables can only take you so far. Where personalization becomes far more engaging and valuable is when you personalize content based on behavior.
5 Expert Personalization Insights
I've been testing various personalization strategies in my own business over the past several months, and am starting to see some real traction. It's been especially useful as I'm guiding email subscribers through an automated sequence of emails. Depending on what they open and click on (or don't open and don't click on) I'm able to guide them to subsequent emails, landing pages, and offers which are best suited for their needs.
Here's an example of one of my current automated campaigns:
But while I'm exploring uses for Personalization in my own business, I'm far from an expert on the topic.
So to better guide you through the world of creating better website conversions through the use of personalization, I've compiled five articles which I think will really get your mind racing.
The Homepage is Dead: A Story of Website Personalization
This is a really insightful article about not just how effective Personalization can be, but what happens when you test different variations against one another. Cara Harshman is widely known as a proponent in both these areas.
Personalized Landing Pages: Key to Customer Satisfaction & Conversion
In this post, Chelsea Baldwin breaks down the benefits of account-based marketing. Just out of screenshot in her article is a statistic she sighted from Insightera that this approach can yield as much as 4X more conversions that the conventional broad audience approach.
Hubspot is one of the industry leaders in marketing automation. When they redesigned their site in October, 2016, part or the project involved overhauling their copy. In this post, Conversion Copywriter Joel Klettke details the process, and provides some really useful insights into how customer research and feedback affected the content (re)creation process.
How “Message Match” Can Lift Conversion Rates by 212.74%
If you're running pay-per-click ads to your content (or offers), this one might be useful for you. Brad Smith looks at personalization from a different perspective as he explains how to employ message continuity from the ad to the landing page. Be sure to read the part about dynamic text replacement and advanced custom fields to see how the behind-the-scenes tech works.
Don’t Start Website Personalization without these Best Practices
If the above articles feel overwhelming to you, Julie Ritchie breaks it down really clearly in this article, where she demonstrates the building blocks of effective personalization. She also has a terrifically useful shortlist of best practices (at least one of which I completely neglected to consider).