I was evaluating two skincare brands to make a decision on which one would be the best fit for me. I remember receiving generic emails from one luxury skincare brand that simply spoke about their achievements and who they were. It felt impersonal and lacked the emotional connection I was looking for. On the other hand, I received emails from another luxury skincare brand that were personalized to my preferences and skin concerns. This level of customization not only showed that they cared about my individual needs, but it also made me feel valued as a customer. 

And this got me thinking – as much as brands love the idea of using personalization in their marketing efforts, not every brand gets it right. 

Personalization isn’t just about sending out random discounts or automated birthday greetings. It’s about understanding the customer, their preferences, and behavior across different touchpoints and delivering a tailored experience. 

This is where visitor or customer data lays the foundation of kickass personalized campaigns. If brands don’t collect and bring together customer data, they’ll be light years away from acing their personalization game.

In this blog, I discuss why and how you can use data to get personalization right so you connect with your audiences and improve their experiences with your brand. Let’s begin then. 

What Data Should You Track?

Long gone are those days when businesses could rely on just identification data to create basic-level personalized content. 

Today, you need to track everything a customer does across their buying journey starting from awareness to purchase and even post-purchase. So, here are the types of user data you need to collect to deliver personalized experiences.

1. Identification Data

This type of data provides basic demographic information about a person.

• Name
• Location
• Contact
• Age
• Job title

2. Descriptional Data

This data centers around where users work, their habits, and their lifestyles. 

• In which company do they work?
• What is the size of the company?
• What’s the salary they get?
• Lifestyle, habits, and hobbies of visitors.

3. Contextual Data

Contextual data shows a visitor’s unique properties and gives context to their session on your website. 

• Are they using a desktop, mobile, or tablet?
• What is the location of the device?
• Which browser do they use?
• What day of the week did they last purchase?
• What time of the day do they purchase?

4. Behavioral Data

Behavioral data tells a great deal about a user’s interactions with your brand. Such data will answer questions like:

• How many times has a user purchased from your website?
• Has any user brought the same product twice?
• What products do a user search for the most on your website?
• Has the user clicked on any upsell offers?
• How many times does a user interact with a live chat?
• How many times a user has opened the monthly newsletter email?

When you combine the power of all types of data, you unlock the real magic of personalization. 

How Can You Track & Use Data For Personalization?

Collecting data from multiple customer touchpoints is challenging already. Using this data in the proper context is even more difficult. Wondering who can make the job easy for you? The answer is simple – a Customer Data Platform.

If you want to strike a chord with your customers through your personalization efforts, then a CDP is going to be your true friend and guide. Here are some reasons why CDPs are a must-have for modern businesses.

1. Collect & Unify Data

Collecting and bringing together all the data is step one in the personalization game. From what your users are searching for on your website to how they’re interacting with your email campaigns, to even if they clicked on your targeted ads or checked out a product demo in-store, your CDP can scoop up data from everywhere.  Whether you want to keep tabs on what your visitors are up to, track their behavior, or see how they react to different things, your CDP brings it all together from a ton of sources (like DMPs, CRMs, ABMs, browsers, and so on). Then it unites them all together in its database so you can use them to send out personalized campaigns across channels through any third-party platforms you want.

2. Single Customer View

With the data all consolidated and brought together, the CDP can now create a Single Customer View (SCV) where you can find everything related to a visitor in a single profile page – properties, attributes, segments, and experiments they are part of. This view hosts real-time and accurate data on each visitor that allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to deliver the right message at the right time to each individual.

Okay, let’s think back to my experience with the luxury skincare brand that sent generic emails. If they had a super smart single customer view with all that extra data, they could’ve easily sent me tailored offers or content based on my preferences or concerns. Not taking advantage of all that data to connect with customers at the right time is a big loss, right?

Further, having a centralized view ensures that all individuals within your organization know where to access customer data. This streamlines the process and eliminates the need to spend time searching for and verifying data, thereby increasing its usefulness and value for your company as a whole.

3. Segmentation

Okay, now that SCVs are ready, it’s time to figure out who your key website visitors are so you can better cater to their needs. Segmentation is a surefire way to do that. Let me give you an example to help you understand.

So you’re the owner of an online shoe store and you’re curious to see how well your new orthopedic shoes are doing in Canada. Based on the data drawn from SCVs, you group customers aged between 40-55 sharing a common interest in this type of shoes in a single cohort. Within this, you further see that most of them are women. All you want to know now is where they’re finding out about your product, and it turns out they’re coming from organic search results. Now that you’ve narrowed it down to a very specific segment, you can start an ad campaign aimed at these customers who looked for these shoes but didn’t buy anything yet.

 This is how a CDP allows you to unlock the power of data, fine-tune your customer segmentation, and launch targeted campaigns for maximum conversion. Also, this is just one way to use customer data for personalization. You can also use it to make all sorts of personalized campaigns, like email, website content, and push notifications.

Listen to this interesting conversation we had with Joost Kuijlaars and Bas Cuperus about leveraging data from CDP for your personalization strategy.

Why VWO For Data And Personalization?

VWO Data360 is the robust customer data platform you need to add to your martech stack. Of course, there is a multitude of choices available in the market. But when you opt for VWO Data360, you enjoy the benefits of some fantastic features that set this platform apart from the rest. Here are some of them:

1. Houses Advanced User Behavioral Insights

VWO has a host of behavioral analytics tools like heatmaps, form analytics, session recordings, and survey analytics. You can use behavioral data from here to feed into data collection in Data360 and therefore create accurate and up-to-date customer profiles. 

2. Allows Creation Of Custom Business Metrics

From average order value to lifetime value per user, you can build and track complicated metrics like these by applying rules on the user’s page-level engagement. In fact, any numerical data that is seen to impact your business goals can be turned into a metric only on this platform!

3. Integrates With Other VWO Capabilities

VWO Data360 and VWO Personalize work hand in hand to deliver the ultimate personalized experience. Data360 collects and consolidates data from all sources, creating a single customer view. This data is then seamlessly integrated with Personalize, which allows you to segment your audience and launch tailored campaigns based on their interests, behaviors, and attributes. 

An example of how personalization with VWO works

Imagine yours is a hotel booking website, and you’re using Data360 which collects data from various sources and consolidates them to create SCVs for every visitor. 

Based on data collected by the CDP, let’s say you create a segment of visitors aged between 30-45 looking for hotels that offer cab rentals in Manhattan, one of the premier business districts in the US. Next, you head over to VWO Personalize to launch a personalized website banner where you offer 20% off on booking business hotels with cab rentals targeting this user segment. 

Here’s another scenario. Say you want to promote the Las Vegas romantic package your company has curated very recently. You can use CDP data to create a segment of audiences from the US who interacted with your social media post announcing the launch of this new package. Through Personalize, you can set up a campaign where you show a pop-up that reads – Discover why Las Vegas is called the Romantic Capital of the world. Individuals who engage further with this pop-up may be given a discount if they make a booking for this package. Driven by data from start to end, this is a step-by-step process to nurture leads and ultimately push them down the hotel conversion funnel.

No matter in which industry you operate, the collaboration between Data360 and Personalize makes it easy for you to deliver a data-backed seamless personalization strategy that drives results. 

What About Data Privacy?

Data and privacy go hand in hand and there are no two ways about it. This is why VWO is built on a privacy-first approach that adheres to global data protection standards and regulations. 

Its Data360 feature uses secure architecture and tight privacy controls to protect visitor data. Enterprise-grade encryption is used to hash unique user IDs and PII is automatically removed from profiles. Additional filters and rules can be added for further data security. All data is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform and distributed across multiple global locations. 

Along with other stand certifications, VWO is compliant with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

Your Journey To Data-Driven Personalization Starts Today

If you don’t mind me being a little dramatic, I’d say data and personalization are a match made in heaven. While you need data to personalize, you need to personalize to make sense of all data, otherwise, it’s like a bunch of Legos serving no purpose when scattered but giving rise to something meaningful when organized properly. 

With VWO Data360 and VWO Personalize, you can harness the power of data like never before. And the best part is you can make the most of other VWO capabilities like behavioral insight analytics, experimentation, deploy, program management, and so on. Take a full-featured trial to chart your path to data-backed personalization. 

Think about it. 

Ideally, when we are in the process of choosing a gift for someone, we consider various factors like the person’s age, what they like, things they love to do, their hobbies, and so on. 

Even if it’s a last-minute purchase, we try to ensure that our gift is something that the other person will find useful and hope that it will also benefit them for a long time.

Similarly, when a consumer lands on your website, it’s almost like they have opened a gift box. 

Inside this box, they are hoping to find something useful, valuable, and more importantly, something that can solve a specific problem of theirs. Moreover, every potential visitor who lands on your website is expecting you to deliver a gift that matches their requirements.

So, how do you ensure that your website offers the perfect gift to your consumers? 

The answer is… via personalization, implemented the right way.

CRO and Personalization

When we talk about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), we look at it as a way of increasing the number of visitors that perform the desired action. 

At first glance, this might seem like a fairly simple task, however, as we dive deeper into the world of conversion optimization, we realize that it is a tricky one but also has the potential to offer a whole lot of benefits in the long run. So, not only should you keep up your CRO efforts, but you should also focus on amplifying the same.

And personalization is something that helps you to upgrade your CRO strategies and boost your CRO performance. 

‘Presuasion’ and its impact on the conversion mindset

The best way to implement personalization is to use what you know about your customers and ‘presuade’ them to arrive at a ‘conversion mindset’. 

The idea here is to take your customers on a journey through your conversion funnel without them even realizing it. 

For example, IMB Bank noticed that a large number of visitors were dropping off the first page of their personal loan application form. With the help of VWO Insights, they realized that the instructions mentioned on the form were unclear and people were finding it difficult to navigate through the steps. 

In order to rectify this issue, IMB Bank introduced various elements to optimize the application page such as 

• Time taken to complete the steps
• Awards won by the bank
• Improved design
• Clear instructions for each step  

They tested these changes and a few other modifications on the loan application page and were able to increase their conversion rate by 36%. Here, IMB Bank ‘presuaded’ or helped users to be in a mindset where they were willing to take the required actions. 

Grab your free trial of VWO and discover hidden opportunities for customer engagement today.   

Having this type of ‘conversion mindset’ is what tilts users in favor of your ‘gift’ and prompts them to take the action you want them to take. 

With that being said, let’s have a look at the three common challenges that you must address in order to successfully ‘presuade’ your visitors to arrive at a conversion mindset.  

1. Understanding your first-time visitors

The problem: Having the same landing page for first-time visitors arriving from different campaigns.

Let’s say you are running multiple ad campaigns on Google Search. Whenever someone clicks on any of these campaigns, you take them to a specific landing page in the hope of converting them.

The problem here is that there is no continuity between the messaging of the ad campaigns and the content they see on the landing page. You see, all these campaigns have varying headlines that have been designed to target different audience personas. 

However, the traffic from all of these campaigns is sent to the same landing page. 

So, when someone finds a particular campaign interesting, they are most probably going to see a page where the communication is somewhat different from the ad that they just clicked on. 

Moreover, this issue is also carried forward to the various elements being displayed on the page such as the call-to-action button or the user reviews section. 

This is quite worrying as your visitors will experience a disconnect during their first interaction and might just drop off due to it. 

The solution: Optimize the post-click experience for your visitors.

How? By using data to your advantage. 

And, this is where personalization can come to your aid. You need to build your website in a way where you can modify a landing page to display content based on the research that you’ve done and the ad groups that you currently have.

In simpler terms, you need to have multiple versions of the main landing page. 

By doing so, you will ensure that each group of visitors is shown a unique, personalized landing page, based on the campaign that brought them there.

One of the ways through which you can easily implement this idea of personalization is by using UTMs. These are special codes that are added at the end of any URL to track the performance of a particular campaign or activity.

By using UTMs, you can identify the platform through which a particular visitor is coming from. Based on this information, a variation of your original landing page, with a different headline & more personalized content, can be shown to the visitor.

This means that all of the traffic that is coming from various platforms is sent to a single page, however, based on the UTMs being used, they all are shown different versions of your landing page. 

For example, in the image below, the text on the landing page is modified according to the search term entered by the user. This method is known as dynamic text insertion and is used by brands to build relevancy and trust with potential visitors. 

Once you are able to implement these ideas successfully, you can easily target various audience personas by just making minor changes to the headline or other elements on the landing page. 

So, when someone lands on your website for the very first time, they will enjoy a seamless, high-quality, personalized experience, without even sharing any kind of information beforehand. 

2. Personalize for the returning visitor

The problem: Important data about the returning visitor is lying scattered.

When people visit your sites, they leave behind important data points such as the device they were on, the browser they were using, whether they were first-time or returning visitors, and so on. 

These data points are like notes or messages that customers have left for you to study and understand. However, most brands fail to understand the importance of these messages and almost 73% of this customer data goes unused for analytics. 

Therefore, leveraging this data to your advantage is a must if you wish to take your personalization campaign to the next level and achieve business growth.  

The solution: Optimize the on-page experience for returning visitors.

How? Build ICPs and opt for location-based targeting.

Building various ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) or customer segments is a great way to personalize your website for all visitors. This is done by gathering information from various data points and then creating a customer segment or profile based on it.

With tools like VWO Personalize, you can gather all of this data to create specific customer segments and offer personalized experiences for each of them. 

As people explore your website, you can use this tool to trigger certain offers, messages, or pop-ups based on their profile. Also, you can track how people engage with these personalized elements and then improve their performance accordingly. 

Take a free trial of VWO today and create personalized experiences for each visitor. 

This will help you to build unique customer-focused journeys while also allowing you to target important audience segments at the right time. Gradually, you will be able to create a large number of personalized experiences for all types of visitors which, in turn, will help you to boost your conversion rate as well. 

Location-based targeting is another way to amp up your personalization campaigns. 

Instead of having a generic landing page, you can tweak the communication to personalize it for specific users according to their location. This simple method will help you to connect with your potential customers on a very personal level.

For example, when Hype Digital implemented location-based targeting for one of their clients, they were able to substantially increase the conversion rate for one of their landing pages. 

The change was simple – instead of a generic headline that said “Reach of millions of buyers”, they replaced it with “Reach millions of Australian buyers” – and the conversion rate grew from 4.5 % to an impressive 7.2%.

Image source: Hype Digital

This also brings into focus the importance of having a good conversion optimization strategy that acts as a solid base for these personalization campaigns that you are running.

So, even when there are small, incremental changes like the one mentioned above, you will see some amazing results just due to the number of visitors that you are converting.  

3. Cross-sell or upsell to existing customers

The problem: Unable to build customer loyalty after conversion.

By the time a visitor decides to become a customer, you have already created a tailor-made, personalized experience for this person based on their behavior, ad group, ICP, etc. 

However, your personalization campaign should not end here. Instead, you must ensure that the customer stays with your brand for as long as possible and, more importantly, has an amazing experience during this period.

The solution: Optimize the post-conversion experience by upselling or cross-selling to loyal customers.

How? Use the available data to recommend relevant products and services.

It is easier to upsell or cross-sell to loyal customers as they have already gone through the journey and are aware of the type of quality and experience that you have to offer. 

So, by using the data that is available in your system, you can easily target these customers again and slowly turn your existing pipeline into your secret upsell weapon. 

For example, with the help of a site search tool, you can get a clear idea of the exact terms that people are searching for on your website. By using this data, you can then promote or recommend relevant products for different customer segments.   

Also, you can use tools like VWO Data 360 to monitor how various customer profiles are engaging with your site along with the type of actions they are performing. 

Start your free trial of VWO now and get a 360-degree view of your customers on a single platform.   

Once you study this data and gain a better understanding of all your customer profiles, you will discover some new, exciting ways of targeting your customers and building brand loyalty.    

Take a deep dive into personalization

Miles Hoogwerf, Head of CRO at Hype Digital, recently hosted a VWO webinar where he spoke about the future of personalization and explained how brands can drive business performance by using the right tools for CRO. 

We’ve curated actionable insights from the webinar and combined them with VWO’s unique perspective to write this blog. You can watch the webinar to gain a more in-depth understanding of personalization.

Conclusion

When you successfully implement all of these personalization strategies, you will notice the leads that were earlier coming in through your campaigns have now automatically turned into higher-qualified leads. 

This is because you have personalized their experiences to a greater extent and have also smartly ‘presuaded’ them to arrive at this conversion mindset. 

Gradually, with the right tools & strategies, you will be able to increase their lifetime value and arrive at a position where these customers will then speak fondly of your business for a long time.

So, kickstart your personalization journey today and get ready to explore the unlimited opportunities for growth that come along the way. 

Such a business will not flourish because as a customer, you need to buy into the experience before you pay for the product. In this digitally dominant world of business, you will judge the product based on the website’s experience and leave instantly if it is not up to the mark. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The foundation of a high-performing website with the finest experience is based on three pillars: Optimization, Personalization, and Testing. Most of us understand these terms in theory, but their impact on the website depends on the correct execution.

Although optimization, personalization, and testing techniques should align with your business objectives, here are common best practices that can be utilized as a reference regardless of industry or business size.

Best practices in website optimization

Website optimization is about improving the performance of the website in terms of speed, traffic, and design using various strategies and tools. It involves reviewing, experimenting, and optimizing areas like SEO, copywriting, UI, analytics, CRO, and web development. Let’s explore some of the best practices: 

Reducing website loading time

A fast-loading website creates a smooth user experience, which leads to a higher conversion rate and higher ranking on the SERPs. You should aim for 2 seconds of load time; the reason being the threshold set by Google for dynamic websites like an eCommerce store. 

Although using cache plugins and minifying HTML and CSS is common, you can speed up the website with advanced measures. Following are some suggestions in this direction:

• Work on reducing redirects for the landing page
• Upgrade the hosting to reduce server response time 
• Remove rendered-blocking JavaScript
• Enable G-zip compression

Studying visitor experience with heatmaps and session recording

Everybody with a website uses some analytics tool to understand user interaction. But, to create a strong position in this cut-throat competition, it’s crucial to use advanced tools like dynamic heatmaps and session recordings. 

A basic analytics tool will point out a high bounce rate or low duration on a particular page. But, a heatmap and session recording will tell you at what point on the webpage users are leaving and how the website elements are performing on the heatmap. They will give precise information on the visitor’s experience with different elements, content, and media on the website. These advanced tools answer what to optimize.

Making it user and intent-friendly

The practice to create a landing page stuffed with keywords is obsolete. The user intent has taken center stage, and targeting the motive behind the search will ensure success in contemporary times. One of the simplest ways to understand the intent is to analyze the top 10 SERPs for a particular keyword as search engines have evolved to understand intent and rank pages. 

For example, if we search for second-hand cars on Google, we get SERPs with “used cars” in the title, and the content of the pages intends for transactions rather than sharing knowledge.

Thus, before creating content to target any keyword, a simple analysis of SERP can help understand the intent. Also, including modern features like text-to-speech, and voice search will keep you ahead of the curve.

Focusing on conversion rate optimization (CRO)

A website owner in these modern times must run CRO campaigns that intend to analyze and optimize each stage of a conversion funnel. CRO helps in making data-driven decisions when optimizing content, web design, and elements such as calls-to-action (CTAs). The focus of CRO should be to optimize the complete user journey rather than just the landing page or the website. On top of it, the future is all about customer data platforms (CDP), and it’s something to explore to scale up the website optimization process. 

Regularly SEO auditing your website

High-growth brands audit their websites at regular time intervals. Visitor behavior is dynamic and changes quickly with time; regular SEO audits help keep your website up to the mark. Here are some tips to do an SEO audit:

• Check for indexing issues, mobile friendliness, and core web vitals on the website’s search console.
• Look for duplicate versions of your website.
• Analyze keyword queries on the search console or any SEO tool such as Semrush and Ahrefs. Check low CTR/impressions ratio and low rankings.
• With tools like Semrush, analyze and remove broken and low domain authority internal and external links.
• Analyze your site’s speed on different devices. You can use Google’s Pagespeed Insights to get suggestions to improve speed and core web vitals.

Example of website optimization

Yelp, a crowd-sourced business review platform, saw a decrease in page speed due to an increase in the number of steps in the ad purchase flow. The development team at Yelp did some initial optimization and found that an increase in page speed lifts the conversion rate by 12%.

Thus, the team started with tools like ChromeDev to find frontend development issues and Google Lighthouse to get suggestions on the speed. After a series of front-end and server-side optimization, the browser rendering of the content improved by 45%. The whole optimization effort led to a 15% improvement in conversion rate.

It just shows how website optimization improves the user experience and positively impacts the conversion rate.

Best practices in website personalization

Website personalization tailors visitors’ experiences based on preferences and past interactions. Here are some practices to ace website personalization.

Collecting data on user behavior and creating groups based on similar characteristics

Collecting data on the visitor journey is essential for creating a successful website personalization campaign. It allows you to understand how visitors perceive your website and what factors influence their decision to convert. The data should yield insights into conversion factors such as offers, product quality, or customer support. The insights can be used to create a hypothesis and visitor segments that guide the creation of a personalized journey. 

For example, consider an eLearning platform that gathered customer information using a customer data platform (CDP). The data showed that some current learners visited a newly launched course, browsed the offers section at the checkout page, and left the platform. These learners can be grouped as discount seekers, to be targeted laterwards with a tailored campaign that informs them of discounts for the new course.   

Gathering and using customer feedback to improve personalization

Collecting customer feedback can provide valuable insights for your next website personalization campaign. While behavioral analysis can reveal user behavior, direct communication with customers can give a more precise understanding of their needs and preferences. Surveys, email campaigns, and chatbots are all effective ways to gather customer feedback.  

One of the good practices is to deploy surveys based on specific trigger conditions, such as an exit survey to understand what users expected at different stages of the journey. Here is one example, a survey gets triggered when a user intends to close the tab. 

The feedback from the user helps in formulating a hypothesis for the next personalization campaign. Also, you can segment users based on their responses and target them laterwards. 

Experimenting with different versions of personalized experiences

Combining experimentation with website personalization is like pairing milk and chocolate; they complement each other well. Experimentation can boost the performance of website personalization. 

For example, you have a personalized floating widget on your eCommerce store that recommends new deals on products that are frequently bought by a customer. A/B testing the widget’s headline, image placement, and color of CTA can further improve the conversion rate. 

Understanding the significance of personalization metrics

Tracking the right personalization metrics is a challenge for many firms. A key metric is like a signal that tells whether personalization campaigns are giving a fruitful output or not. So, it’s important to study the significance of each key metric before delving into website personalization. 

For instance, consider a firm that provides an on-page SEO analysis tool. They have now introduced a technical SEO checker with a $5 increase in the subscription fee. The company initiated the rollout with a targeted campaign aimed at its loyal customer base, detailing the new feature.

In this scenario, measuring metrics such as Average Revenue per User (ARPU) is vital to assess the campaign’s effectiveness. A rise in ARPU indicates that the personalization campaign aligned with the customer’s needs and preferences.

Complying with the regulations

Ensuring data privacy and cybersecurity is a top priority in today’s dynamic digital environment. Personalization requires access to customer data, and there are regulations in place to protect this information. It is crucial to secure customer data for website personalization, not only for ethical reasons but also to comply with laws. When selecting a third-party tool for personalization, make sure it meets the standards and regulations set forth by organizations like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

Example of website personalization

VWO is a trusted platform around the globe for experimentation. Here is how the landing page looks:

Prospects from various industries visit the homepage of VWO. These prospects can be segmented based on their industry, and a tailored experience can be created. Suppose, we personalized the homepage for an eCommerce lead with VWO Personalize. Here is how it will look:

Notice the personalized headline. Likewise, the headline will change for a SaaS, Edtech, or any other prospect. Personalization enhances brand positioning with such tailored communication. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Best practices in website testing

Website testing is the process of comparing two or more versions of the webpage to find out a better-performing variation in terms of conversion rate, engagement, or any other metric. A/B testing, Split URL testing, and Multi-variate testing are widely adopted methods of website testing. Here are some of the best practices for website testing:

Testing based on data-backed hypotheses

Website testing should not be an output of a hunch but a data-backed hypothesis. Before testing, you should do an extensive analysis of visitor behavior with real-time analytics tools.

The analysis helps understand the leaks in the sales funnel, baseline conversion, and information on the non-converting user segment. The dataset then leads to a hypothesis, which guides the testing campaign.  

Create an experimentation roadmap

You just don’t show up at work and start experimentation. It should be a planned, ongoing activity that is part of your organization’s culture. After an extensive study of visitor experiences, and hypothesis creation, it’s good to prioritize test ideas based on easiness, impact, and confidence in getting a result. Your roadmap should be available to all stakeholders within the organization for accountability and cross-team collaboration of ideas. 

Don’t make changes to a running test

It is not recommended to make changes to a running A/B or split URL test, as doing so can skew the results and make them less accurate. It is best to let the test run its full course and, if the results are not satisfactory, start a new test with the desired changes.

Create mutually exclusive groups while running multiple tests

When running multiple tests on a homepage for visitors, it is important to ensure that the tests do not overlap or conflict with one another. For example, if one A/B test is offering a discount on a specific product, and another test is offering a flat discount on all products, a visitor becoming part of both tests could get confused. To ensure the accuracy of the tests and avoid confusion, it is crucial to create mutually exclusive groups so that a visitor is exposed to only one test at a time.

Document learnings from the experiment

If you are new to experimentation, the whole process of experimentation is itself a learning experience. You must document the process, along with the results. It helps a lot for future experimentation campaigns, especially if the team working on it changes. The notes on mistakes, learnings, and secondary KPIs that showed changes, can set the tone and hypothesis for future experimentation campaigns. 

Example of website testing

Contorion, a B2B online marketplace utilized VWO for A/B and Split URL testing. Contorion ran an A/B test to determine the effectiveness of a site-wide banner for promotion, which helped them increase the conversion rate during promotional periods by 5%. Similarly, they ran a Split URL test to compare the new design of the product page with the old one. The variation performed better, with a 2.4% increase in the add-to-cart click rate.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website, personalizing its content, and testing its performance requires effort and investment. However, the results are worth it as they create a positive impression on your customers. 

Improving the speed and relevance of your website content and conducting an SEO audit enhances the user experience. It’s like regular maintenance for a car to ensure a smooth ride. 

By testing and personalizing your website, you can bridge the gap between your perception of the digital property and customers’ expectations of it. But many times, website owners hesitate due to sudden monetary demands to carry out experimentation. Investment in an experimentation tool or development team means spending money even before understanding its nuances. But not anymore.

VWO allows you to create data back hypothesis, run tests like A/B, split URL, and multivariate test, and personalize website experience for user segments. Features like Visual Editor mean less time spent conversing with the development team and more time for optimization. What’s amazing is that you don’t have to spend a single penny on starting experimenting.

VWO offers an all-inclusive free trial of all its capabilities so that you can gather data, test, and personalize. If testing is what you want to start with, VWO has a free starter pack on web testing for 50k monthly traffic. Check out the details of VWO’s plans and pricing. 

To measure personalization success, you decide to keep track of a certain metric. But the metric tells you about the progress in weight lifting, and there is no clue about the improvement in cycling time. Without any idea of your cycling performance, you enter the race. Do you think you will win the competition?

While it’s a no-brainer that the situation and your chances of winning will be odd, this example teaches the importance of tracking the right metric. The right metric navigates you toward your goal and prevents you from getting lost on the wrong path. 

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Metrics measurement has the same importance when it comes to the personalization of consumer experience. Each metric has its significance and contributes differently to personalization success. Thus, it’s important to know when to track a particular metric depending on the goal.

So, let’s dive into metric measurement and its relationship to the success of a personalization campaign. We will then look at ROI tracking of personalization because a positive ROI is the ultimate aim of any business, and it decides the continuation/repetition of the campaign.

Personalization and its significance

Before going forward, let’s understand personalization and its significance in your marketing strategy.

Personalization is customizing the experience of returning users to make them feel more connected. The whole process of this customization is based on data gathered from past interactions, behavior, and customer background.

The reason personalization is so important is that it makes the customer feel special and see things of interest at different touchpoints. Thus, making the customer stay for a longer time, increasing the lifetime value of a customer, and reducing the customer acquisition cost. 

Now, let’s move on to the crucial part of measuring personalization success with the key metrics.

Key metrics to measure personalization success

Forrester conducted a survey that included 372 business decision-makers. The survey revealed that only 30% of firms have the right metrics to measure the success of their personalization program. The key metrics are equivalent to understanding your customer’s response to your digital communication effort. Some of these key metrics are as follows:

Here’s an explanation for each of the metrics –

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

It is one of the key metrics that is mainly used in the SaaS industry. This metric is tracked when you roll extensions and packages tailored for customer segments. For example, say a company offers a SaaS marketing tool with an off-page SEO analysis feature. Now, the company is rolling out an on-page SEO analyzer with a $5 increase in subscription for its loyal customer segments in the initial stages. In such a situation, tracking ARPU becomes crucial to know the effectiveness of the campaign to roll out the extension. 

An increase in the average revenue per user means that the personalized campaigns to suggest extensions and packages have successfully aligned with the customer’s needs and interests. Thus, this metric summarizes the ROI of the marketing campaigns. 

Here is the formula for ARPU calculation:

Cart abandonment

This metric combined with past customer behavior data helps understand your customers’ purchase behavior. For instance, say you have a group of regular customers that buy whenever there’s an offer discount, and in a recent buying journey, they abandoned the cart because there were no new promotions or offers. This particular behavior helps in segmenting the group as discount seekers. You can personalize the upcoming campaign with offers for this specific group and again track the cart abandonment rate to check the success of the personalization measure.

Also, sometimes due to a lack of payment options, users drop out at the last step. Thus, when you test your payment gateway page with new payment methods, tracking the abandonment rate helps in knowing their efficacy. 

So, this key metric is vital when you enrich your customer’s experience with new favorable payment methods or offers on the product. Also, this data is required for segmenting users, who can be targeted with custom digital marketing ads and communication.

The equation to calculate cart abandonment is as follows:

Churn rate

Churn rate helps you gauge the dissatisfaction in customers while using your product or service in the follow-up interaction. When you want to increase the revenue from returning users, then tracking this metric is vital.

Churn rate tracking before and after personalization helps in knowing whether the tailored experience is keeping up with customers’ expectations. 

Here is the formula for the churn rate:

Click-through rate (CTR)

A website, whether a SaaS or eCommerce platform, has multiple call-to-action buttons which guide the customer to make a decision. Tracking the CTR of these buttons is essential when the goal is to understand the effect of UI/UX on the customer’s decision. CTR tracking of buttons like add to wishlist, add to cart, read details, etc. helps pinpoint where the customer is finding ease or difficulty in navigation. 

CTR tracking in personalization becomes vital when the returning customer sees the product catalog based on interest and past purchases. Thus, tracking CTR buttons before and after personalization aids in making the UI/UX and product recommendation better, which in turn affects sales. 

The formula to calculate CTR is as follows:

Conversion rate

Conversion rate gives you a complete picture of your sales cycle and its weak points. This metric helps in testing hypotheses related to gaps and personalization measures. 

It also tells you about the impact of the product recommendation mechanism, especially when the revenue has a significant chunk from returning customers. 

You must track this key metric for personalization when you see a stream of traffic but lowering/ stagnant sales and if you are testing new features for a custom experience.

Here is how you can calculate the conversion rate:

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV is tracked when the long-term association is in view with multiple transactions between a customer and the company. Personalization success monitoring with this key metric determines whether the experience was as per customers’ needs. You track it not just for one campaign but for a larger picture.

The formula for CLV measurement is as follows:

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Increase in average order value

This metric is essential when you want to improve cross-selling, subscriptions, and related course sales. The success of the personalized products section on the webpage is known through this metric.

One example is Bear Mattress, which utilized VWO to redesign the cross-sell flow and personalize the recommendation based on purchase behavior history. The goal to increase order value and key metric tracking helped them increase revenue by 16%. 

An increase in average order value is calculated as follows:

User progress and usage

A metric that is the heart of eLearning website analytics, you must measure it after the personalization of study material and courses for the user. It helps validate hypotheses for personalized course recommendations.

The formula to measure user progress and usage:

Now, that we know the importance of metric tracking in personalization success, let’s move on to an overview of the ROI of personalization measurement. Personalization is worthy only when it positively contributes to the ROI.

Keeping a check on the ROI of your personalization campaign

There is no doubt that personalization increases revenue. As per Deloitte, Starbucks once carried out a personalization campaign that included 400k personalized messages. The campaign saw a threefold increase in the offer redemption.

ROI from personalization must be checked on a dashboard with pre and post-personalization campaign results rather than in silos. To check ROI, go through the Conversion Rate, ARPU, and Average Order Value of the control group to whom you showed the personalization campaign and compare it with your previous data.

Also, it’s necessary to monitor human resource involvement, third-party tool usage, and disruption (if any) in the regular flow of work while measuring the ROI. 

In the end, to improve the ROI of the personalization program, the foundation needs to be strong. This means you must have a robust data strategy that fills all the gaps and creates a strong visual of the consumer journey.

Measuring personalization success with VWO

VWO Personalize makes personalization easy and effective. It helps you trigger unique experiences for specific audiences at the right place and time by – 

1. Leveraging visitor data 
2. Prompting experiences via triggers that are based on visitors’ persona or events like when one refreshes a page
3. Helping you create experiences via the visual editor without relying on developers each time 

With VWO Personalize, you can track how your personalization campaigns impact the conversion rate for the metrics associated with the campaigns. Our platform allows you to track the following goals:

1. Page Visits 
2. Form Submits 
3. Clicks on Link 
4. Clicks on Element(s) 
5. Revenue 
6. Custom Conversion 
7. Engagement

The VWO Personalize report dashboard shows real-time conversions and is easy to read, which assists in better business decisions. The ongoing personalization journeys can be optimized based on report observations.  

Conclusion

The true potential of personalization is unlocked with the right metric tracking. It’s like becoming a pro in bike racing, measuring your cycling performance each time, analyzing faults, and making more personalized efforts to grab the competition trophy, while your competition is still measuring weight lifts or making efforts without any analysis.

In the growing business competition, your trophy is a loyal consumer base, and personalization measured with the right metric is your effort. Metric tracking will help you personalize and become the true server to a loyal consumer base. 

Let VWO Personalize become a partner in your journey, and it will do the heavy lifting of bringing you accurate reports on your key metrics. Also, create 1000s of consumer journeys, run A/B tests, create variations with an easy-to-use visual editor, measure ROI, and get behavior insights on a single dashboard. Grab a free demo for all the VWO features and capabilities including personalization.

Have you also spent hundreds of hours gathering and analyzing website data to build experiences that show no change in conversions?

If this is your story, I’ve got two good news for you.

First, you’ve arrived at the right place. And second, you’re not alone!

The case of missing uplift in conversion and revenue

Take the case of an online phone accessories retailer who recently launched a new line of customizable, superior quality phone covers. Despite offering the best products, they were not even close to meeting their conversion goals. 

The team decided to find out what was going wrong by tracking visitor behavior. Heatmaps and session recordings showed how visitors interacted with their new offering. After studying the data, some key findings surfaced:

• Visitors dropped off on the customize phone covers page
• Visitors who dropped off spent the most time on the phone specification & personal details pages
  

Looking at this data, the team narrowed down actionable insights – 

• Reduced the number of steps on the customize phone covers page
• Make phone specifications more visual
• Reduced form fields on personal details pages 

While this worked, it did not get the expected uplift in conversion, and the team struggled to find reasons and fixes.

Does this sound familiar to you?

While chasing data to fix isolated friction points in the funnel streamlines the buying journey, it does not make the journey contextual or relevant to user segments. Visitors expect relevant experiences and want to feel valued at every touchpoint. 

A delightful experience is a mix of experience optimization and engaging with your audience at the right touchpoints. Personalization aids in achieving the latter by helping you release sharp audience-specific contextual and personalized interactions based on user journeys. For instance, rather than simply reducing form fields to reduce drop-offs, the phone accessories retailer can leverage personalization to auto-filter and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on the device they’re using or auto-fill details for repeat customers, and so on.

Similarly, if a visitor on your website is from the US while another is from Germany, the German visitor might expect a local language experience on your website. Or, users who have an affinity for luxury brands are likely to be put off if the most relevant results show discounted brands on the product listing page.

Besides this, visitors also need contextual information relevant to their journey to make a buying decision quickly. Personalization enables this. For example, you can nudge someone visiting a product page forward by showing positive product reviews as a notification triggered at the right time. 

While these are some common examples of how businesses can create personalized experiences, there is no limit to what you can do. Irrespective of what your unique use case is, personalization always starts with your users’ data.

Data in personalization – All you need to know

Websites gather a vast amount of raw visitor data that has the potential to unlock valuable personalization opportunities. But to make the most out of the data you already have, knowing what type of data enables personalization is paramount.

A single view of enriched and intelligent data lets you craft experiences that convert. With digital advancement, surface-level personalization is not enough. The above data empower marketers to create behavioral micro-segments of website visitors, so they get personalized experiences at the right time in their journey. This data is collected from multiple sources and unified at one central customer data hub so that you can visualize and learn from your visitors’ behavior and leverage it in your optimization campaigns.

Let’s look at some ways you can define your audiences using raw customer data:  

1. Pre-defined segments

You can build visitor cohorts using pre-defined behavioral, geographical, demographic, and contextual data in this segmentation method. You can also create micro-segments combining one or more of the above data sources. 

The phone accessories online retailer mentioned earlier can use pre-defined data points (like device and browser used, location, behavior on site, past purchases, etc.) to create user cohorts, plan segment-specific campaigns, and only show them relevant content.

For example, they can segment visitors and deliver personalized content to reduce drop-offs on the customize phone covers page. Or show first purchase offers to new users to motivate them to complete the purchase. A micro-segment of iPhone 13 Pro users visiting the website for the first time and through a Chrome browser can be shown a special discount to nudge them to complete the purchase.

2. Custom attributes-based segments

Segmentation based on custom attributes helps deep-dive into visitor behavior and ascertain how specific segments respond to your experience. Contrary to pre-defined segments that cover generic visitor attributes, custom attributes help build cohorts using non-standard, domain-specific attributes that match your campaign goals. These are extremely flexible and allow you to create hyper-personalized interactions by filling in the gaps between pre-defined segments.

Imagine you are an eCommerce store collating and analyzing conversion rates. You notice that premium members convert at 10%, whereas general buyers convert at 2%. Using this data, you can go very specific, run targeted promotions for the general buyers to nudge them further into the funnel, and increase conversions from this segment.

Similarly, you can create custom segments based on attributes like visitors’ last visit to your website, guest visitors vs. members, monthly spends, buyer personas – discount, impulse or FOMO, frequent flyers, loyalty customers, top 5% ace gamers, and more.

3. Third-party data-based segments

Another data source that comes in handy when segmenting visitors based on external parameters is third-party tools and integrations. 

For example, using Mixpanel, you can create cohorts of inactive users who haven’t used your product or app in the last week, craft re-engagement campaigns, and deliver personalized content to them for higher retention.

Similarly, using Clearbit’s data, like a company’s IP address, you can deliver personalized content on the homepage banner to visitors from a specific company or industry. B2B companies can leverage Demandbase to identify companies that match their defined ICP, create a segment of high intent prospects, and deliver meaningful information that helps convert companies on their very first visit to the website. 

4. Uploaded visitor lists

Uploaded visitor lists consist of external data like stored cookie data, POS data,  URL query parameters, premium user lists, etc., that you can import and use to create deep visitor segments. You can then run hyper-personalized marketing campaigns for these segments. 

Let’s assume that you are an online gaming company. You want to target the top 10% of users of your game for a particular campaign. Working with the engineering team, you can get a list of every user that qualifies with their unique cookie value. You can deliver the desired experience using robust experimentation engines that let you upload this list onto its database.

These data sets create an invaluable collection of insights that can enrich your visitor interactions at every touchpoint. But knowing how and when to use them is critical to ensuring your campaigns’ success. Let’s look into some industry-specific use cases of personalization that help businesses create a differentiator from their competitors.

Personalization is for everyone

Whether you’re an online retailer looking to increase AOV, a SaaS firm striving to reduce churn, or a publishing house looking for more subscriptions, personalization helps businesses across industries gain deeper behavior insights and design delightful experiences that resonate with every visitor. If you are an online business looking to maximize ROI from existing traffic,  build stronger visitor relationships and ultimately drive growth by delivering relevant experiences, read on to know how you can leverage personalization to activate your audience.   

eCommerce

A study by McKinsay suggests that  80% of online shoppers want personalization from retailers. These potential buyers on your website that you want to convert come from varying geographies and demographics looking for various products. The same shopper may like shoes from Retailer A but not their joggers, some visitors may only shop during sales, and so on. And there is a cut-throat competition to acquire these prospective buyers. With personalization, you can dive deep into granular buyer behavior, and design tailored experiences so they choose you over your competitors.

Micro-segmentation for increased revenue

Using data like geo-location, past purchases, product affinity, etc., you can curate personalized offers and category pages, recommend products to cross-sell, upsell, and more. 

For example, you can auto-apply filters on category, listing, and search pages, so visitors only see relevant products. This makes it easier for them to navigate through the products and increases sales.

SaaS

All SaaS companies aim to keep churn at a minimum. Their subscription-based model demands building long-term relationships. Leveraging personalization to design and deliver tailored experiences for visitors rather than a general spray and pray approach shows that the company values them and helps inculcate brand loyalty. 

Personalized pricing and content for increased revenue

The pricing page is one of the most critical elements. You can create segments based on attributes like company size, revenue, etc., and craft experiences that match visitor expectations. For instance, you can personalize the pricing page to hide self-serve pricing and only show the “contact sales” CTA to Enterprise businesses while showing pre-set pricing to SMBs.

Marketers who evaluate a SaaS product conduct thorough research to find social proof. Using data from third-party tools like Clearbit, you can detect the visitors’ company/industry and trigger relevant logos, testimonials, and success stories. You can also track if the visitor has signed up for a free trial and craft the messaging so they only get content that nudges them further into the conversion funnel – from free trial to paid. 

Travel

The travel industry caters to a diverse customer base. The needs and expectations of travelers keep evolving. Hence, it’s crucial to understand each visitor and curate personalized experiences.

Demography & purpose-driven personalization

A majority of people travel for business or leisure. Once visitors enter travel details like date, destination, number of travelers, etc., websites can use the data to show them purpose-specific travel options & information. 

For business users, show easy cancellation policies, boardroom facilities, how to get an invoice, etc. For leisure users, show activities, spa options, pool timings, 24-hour room service, discounts, etc. You can further break down the leisure demographic into more targeted groups.

You can also pair cookie data with previous purchases, pre-select options in the booking flow, or change the ordering of search results to show the most relevant result first.

E-Learning

People respond more positively to personalized content – interacting, watching, reading more, and ultimately converting.

Personalize learning flows

Many e-learning platforms offer a multitude of courses. But, only a few of them manage to retain learners. Personalization enables e-learning platforms to break away from the linear approach where every learner follows a pre-set flow. 

You can personalize learning flows with dynamic feedback and/or contextual pop-ups. For example, you can ask learners to take a quiz at the beginning of the course to assess their abilities and recommend the next steps. This creates a personalized flow for each learner that matches their skills and expectations.

You can also offer dynamic feedback that reinforces good behavior or applauds achievements. For example, once a learner completes 50% of the course at a good pace and shows progress, you can trigger personalized pop-ups encouraging them to complete the course. 

Leveraging contextual data about visitors, e-learning platforms can curate personalized pathways for each learner, thus giving them more control over the course they pursue.

Media

Personalization has already revolutionized content consumption and monetization. It helped Netflix become one of the largest OTT platforms. It has brought huge revenue uplift for social media giants like Instagram and TikTok by pushing content and ads based on what users engage with most on their platforms.

Personalized recommendations for increased subscriptions

When users easily discover content they like, they continue using your platform. And when they find value in your content, subscriptions skyrocket. 

For instance, an online editorial news portal can increase readership and subscription by using behavioral data to show relevant news items first. If a visitor mostly looks for sports news, it can show them sports-related content first. If a visitor often reads political updates, show similar content to get them hooked.

How to personalize with VWO?

At the start of this blog, our phone accessories retailer had actionable data but lacked the means to design and release the right experiences across every touchpoint at scale.  

To bridge this gap and empower businesses to deliver hyper-personalized journeys at a scale that accelerate growth, we recently launched VWO Personalize. With this latest addition to the suite of VWO products, we aim to connect every aspect of personalization so businesses across industries can unlock infinite growth possibilities. You can create multiple tailored experiences and target each of them to a different visitor segment in one single campaign without depending on your development teams. 

VWO Personalize starts with helping you build cohorts using raw visitor data. It then lets you curate and release experiences using the widget library and code editor in our powerful WYSIWYG Visual Editor:

– Create personalized experiences in a couple of clicks using our Widget Library, where you can access a range of pre-designed, ready-to-use widgets. Drag and drop any existing template and design personalized experiences quickly. In the library, you can find widgets for banners, modals, scroll to the top, countdown timer, social share, and more. You can also use dynamic texts in the content to further hyper-personalize the web page catering to individual segments. 

Suppose you want to run a sale campaign on your homepage for a specific visitor segment. In that case, you can go to the Widget Library in the VWO Visual Editor, select the type of banner you want to add to the page, edit its content, and voila!

Similarly, if you are an online retailer looking to increase sales in the US region, you can add a sale countdown to specific product pages and deploy it for visitor segments you want to target. With our Widget Library, you can design as many hyper-personalized experiences for your visitor segments within minutes.  

– When you want to deliver something unique, create custom templates with our Code Editor. Insert custom Javascript codes and variables into your website and build your own unique widget and experience that match your campaign goals.

Let’s say you want to add a hover effect on your product pages. Using our Code Editor, you can simply write a custom CSS or Javascript code and deploy it on the pages you’d like. Take a free trial or request a demo with our product experts to understand how VWO Personalize can help your business achieve unprecedented growth.

Personalization vs. privacy – Striking a balance

Throughout this article, we’ve discussed how visitors leave behind data trails with each online session. Companies capture this data daily to use it to personalize campaigns and interactions. But, the amount of data gathered also calls for concern about misusing visitors’ data without their knowledge. Inevitably, while visitors prefer personalized, contextual experiences, there is an inherent fear that couples it.

The question facing companies is how to use this data for personalization without breaching privacy and security. Many regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have been implemented to address this. 

But companies need to take the onus of responsibility. To win visitors’ trust, they must do more than just fulfill the regulatory requirements.

Companies must ensure that their personalization practice is always compliant by adopting a privacy-first approach that ensures privacy and data safety. They must constantly update security controls with evolving data protection regulations and reforms. 

Maintaining transparency about data collection, storage, usage, and what businesses do to ensure its safety is critical. 

With VWO Personalize, you run data-driven campaigns and release hyper-personalized experiences while ensuring absolute data privacy. It is designed with a privacy-first approach, complies with global data protection norms, and comes with airtight controls that ensure your visitors’ privacy.

What next?

Customized covers of superior quality were the USP of our online phone accessories retailer. The irony was that most visitors were dropping off on the customized page itself. The changes made didn’t help since they were non-targeted blanket changes. Personalization fills this gap. 

With personalization, our retail guy can:

• Implement auto-filtering and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on demographic data like age or gender & contextual data like phone model used
• Trigger location-specific payment options 
• Trigger offers and dynamic content based on the buyer stage a visitor is on

This list is not exhaustive, and the possibilities to personalize are infinite. Visitors expect personalized experiences. If they don’t get it on your website, they will move on to the next available option. So don’t lose out on any more business. Start your personalization journey and unlock unlimited growth opportunities to scale your business now.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Some of these answers have been forwarded to us by Rodolfo while a few have been written jointly by us. We hope they dispel the many myths that accompany personalization’s hype cycle.

Q. What tactics can I use to get content owners to be supportive and provide content and use cases for personalization?

– Rose Baldevarona, Microfocus

TL:DR – Deploy existing content to demonstrate early wins and drive the mandate for future programs.

[Rodolfo] At Okta, it dawned upon us early in our buying cycle that content personalization will serve as one of our tactical pillars. Content syndication is a key component of enterprise purchase and our hypothesis was that specific content tailored to marque industries should impact engagement and conversion metrics.

Instead of goading our content team to produce fresh content, we decided to invert our process. Our content team firms their editorial calendar in advance – to extract fresh content without proof of success would have been tricky.

We decided to handpick existing content written specifically for the BFSI audience. Luckily, we found enough existing quality content addressed to buyers at different life-cycle stages. Some were success stories addressed to buying committees from a Bottom Of The Funnel standpoint whilst a few pieces addressed research questions from a Top Of The Funnel lens (sidenote: Okta is an Identity Standard platform)

As one of our first few experiments, we decided to replace our generic content track on the homepage with BFSI content. By integrating Demandbase with VWO, we have been able to ingest VWO with industry data attributes, thereby allowing personalized content to be on display when a BFSI visitor arrives.

We got lucky. Till date, the experiment has netted us a 250% uplift in Click Through Rates for BFSI content tracks. Once we shared these results with our content team, driving shared content goals for personalization experiments was a breeze. After all, we all want big wins against our names!

Q. How do I incorporate personalization and on what platforms will it work?

– Diane Urban, AON

[Rodolfo + Bhavya] Before personalization captures your mindshare, it is important to know the biggest reason behind the high failure rate of most personalization projects.

For any personalization program to delight customers and your executive team alike, a marriage of the following three components is the flywheel of success

• Data
• Insights
• Experiences

Successful teams have realized that the following schema works best

Whereas a majority of projects fail because their operational model looks like the following

That today’s enterprises have no dearth of data is a lightweight statement. We don’t feel the need to reiterate upon the observation. What is noteworthy though is the unfortunate fact that few organizations fail to build a feedback loop between their insights layer and the personalization engine. Let’s revisit our BFSI example from above – using VWO’s heatmap capabilities we realized that over 90% of visitors were scrolling down to the last fold quartile of one of our BFSI whitepapers. The whitepaper was previously languishing in one of the most remote corners of Okta’s website. Almost immediately we exposed the said whitepaper on the homepage for delightful experiences.

Insight: 90% BFSI visitors scroll down to the last fold of our BFSI whitepaper
Associated Personalization Action: Move the said document to the homepage

Okta’s personalization tech stack – Demandbase (for account data attributes), VWO (for personalization delivery and curating insights), Google Analytics (for conversion & engagement data)

Q. How can I measure the impact of personalization?

– Sarah Koch, Massiveart

TL:DR Compare converion rates and pipeline from personalized experiences vs. generic experiences.

[Rodolfo] This one is easy. At Okta, we do not serve personalized experiences for each visitor. There are a few focus industries and geographies that are ripe for personalized experiences in Okta’s context. Before we commence our weekly marketing sprint, the team compares conversion rates for our default generic version vs. personalized pages. I can’t reveal specific numbers but let me just put it this way – personalized pages convert at a ginormous rate than generic pages. For wholesome analysis, we also compare pipeline formation through personalization-induced conversions vs. conversions from our generic pages.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Q. What is the optimum level of personalization? Too much will create the risk of inconsistent messages laying around plus the difficulty of managing it.

– Hooman, Steelhouse

TL:DR Okta only personalizes for handpicked industries to minimize inconsistent messaging.

[Rodolfo + Bhavya] Great question. We always recommend a ‘low frequency-high impact’ personalization program. Like most enterprise sales distribution patterns, Okta is no exception to Pareto’s principle – 20% of industries contribute roughly 80% revenue. This helps us focus on a few Lines Of Business (LOBs). By downsizing the list of possible industries to a select few, we have already eliminated the risk of ‘personalization-induced fatigue’. We hope the explanation answers your question from a program lens.

At the individual campaign level, it is important to note that less is more. At Okta, we have strived to look at personalization from a ‘delight’ pedestal. If your sock subscription service is aware that you have weak knees for black socks (data from your past purchases) and presents you with a range of black socks, you will most definitely engage better. But if the same company is also aware that you subscribe to their foot deodorant products for stinky feet, will they reinforce the dark truth on their webpages? We highly doubt.

Extreme personalization does not work. It induces mistrust between the visitor and your brand. We have ensured that most personalization attributes are value-additive and not destructive. We experiment with personalized content, territory-relevant logos, CTA text and lifecycle stage content. Any more and it falls under ‘extreme personalization’

Q. How B2B personalization differs from B2C personalization and what are other personalization types?

– Jurijs Trallis, Picanova

B2B personalization is IP-centric while B2C personalization is cookie-centric.

[Rodolfo + Bhavya] Before we abstract the difference between B2B & B2C personalization, it is important to note that most personalization programs have a common bedrock split into two constituents

• User context
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Device type etc.
• User behavior
  • Banner clicks
  • Cart abandonment
  • Content downloaded etc.

However, any similarities between B2B and B2C personalization end here. For all practical purposes, the single biggest difference between the two personalization modes is

B2B personalization is IP-centric while B2C personalization is cookie-centric.

Most B2B Identity Resolution platforms like Demandbase & Clearbit have invested in acquiring organizational IP data, at scale. Their proprietary systems match IP addresses of visitors with their respective organizations. Along with the organization’s identity, these engines also inject multiple other data points like industry type, SIC codes, number of employees etc. for teams to personalize upon. On the other hand, B2C Identity Resolution platforms like Liveramp enable organizations to stitch disparate data silos and map them to a uniform consumer identity. Cookies are the binding force here.

Q. What is a quick approach to experiment with personalization for a SaaS business, which demonstrates its value & can help align the whole org behind this tactic?

– Ayush, Browserstack

TL:DR Okta started with content personalization for BFSI visitors. They did not create fresh content; instead they deployed existing content tracks that were in the highest quartile from an engagement standpoint

[Rodolfo] I have answered this above. At Okta, we did not create fresh content but utilized existing content for BFSI visitors. Once we were able to showcase a dramatic uplift in CTR and lead conversion rates, we were able build long term business cases.

The author would like to thank Rodolfo Yiu for enthusiastic collaboration in co-authoring this piece.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Netflix’s Secret Formula to Personalize Customer Experience

Everything Netflix does is driven by data and powered by smart AI algorithms. The company is always brainstorming and testing ideas to ensure that whatever is disseminated on its platform matches the exact thought process of its users. And, its efforts are pretty much evident. 

Let’s understand how it’s personalization mechanism is doing wonders for Netflix and what can we learn from the online video streaming giant. 

1. The Use of A/B Tests

No one understands the technique of A/B testing better than Netflix. As per Todd Yellin, Vice President Product, Netflix, the company runs about 250 A/B tests every year. Each of these tests presents two different versions of experiences to users to see how they react and respond to the suggested changes. On an average, Netflix chooses around 100,000 users to test its hypothesis. One of the reasons why no two people have the same experience on its platform.

Following an empirical approach here, Netflix ensures that whatever is shown on the platform (content, images, and videos) is driven by actual data collected from the A/B tests it runs and not based on one person’s opinion. 

Netflix’s landing cards are a perfect example to quote here. Landing cards are typically images or video teaser visible to a user browsing through the Netflix’s category of recommendations. Now how can these cards make a difference? The concept is pretty simple. Images as well as videos have a greater impact on the minds of customers than the content (meaning words) drafted around them. People are more likely to watch a video if they are shown images or teaser that are attractive and compelling. 

A/B testing these landing cards allows the platform to understand the psychology of its customers, further using the gathered data to personalize their experience in the most effective way possible. 

2. The Use of AI to Power Recommendation Engine

Similar to Amazon, Netflix too is vested much in using AI and machine learning to power up its recommendation engines. The company uses customer viewing data, search history, rating data as well as time, date and the kind of device a user uses to predict what should be recommended to them. Statistics show that, Netflix in 2014 used 76,897 “altgenres” or unique ways to determine the type of movies and shows it should recommend to each of its users to not only personalize their experience but also make them come back for more.  

Further, the company also uses customer data to create unique homepages for each of its users. It shows content it believes would best match the interest of its users as well as enhance their overall experience with the platform.

The crux – strong recommendations powered by AI and machine learning not only allow you to provide your users with a personalized experience they’ll love, but also reduce your churn rate significantly.

3. The Use of Right Content at the Right Time

Set aside algorithms to fuel recommendations, content has the prowess to make or break the overall experience and relationship of a user with your platform. And, Netflix understands this very well!

The online video streaming giant uses content to map the success or failure of its recommendations on the basis of how users are liking or disliking them. For example, if a user is vested much in watching horror movies like The Ritual, The Babysitter or Apostle, Netflix would recommend similar movies to keep the user hooked to its platform. It cannot outright recommend comedy movies which, looking at the user’s browsing data, seems like a very vague suggest.

In addition to this, Netflix also uses time as a strong variable to recommend shows to its customers. Meaning, the platform will suggest shorter programs or the ones you’re halfway through when you log in late at night instead of recommending shows with longer durations.

What we understand here is that displaying the right content at the right time can not only help increase customer engagement on your platform but also enhance the user experience significantly.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Amazon’s Comprehensive Product Recommendation System

Amazon’s transformation journey began in 2010 when it started recommending products to its customers through its “Customers who bought” widget. This gave them a huge leap back then and is still doing wonders for the ecommerce giant. As per the company, nearly 35% of its sales comes from such personalized recommendations, even today! And, nearly 56% of them are likely to turn into repeat buyers as well.  

Its attempt to personalize a customer’s shopping experience didn’t just stop there. Amazon has made some remarkable personalization advancements in the last couple of years with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics.

Here’s what to learn from Amazon personalization efforts.

1. The Use of AI and Deep Learning Technique

Login to your Amazon account and you’ll see that the platform always has something new to recommend, which, agree or not, matches perfectly your interest. How does it do that? The answer is Deep Learning!

An extended arm of AI and machine learning, deep learning uses algorithms to naturally understand human behavior and deliver results accordingly. In Amazon’s context, deep learning helps the platform analyze which product(s) a customer is likely to buy next, further recommending the same to them while they’re there on the site or when they login again. Here, the technology takes into consideration the products and product pages a customer has viewed, bought, rated, and reviewed.

2. The Use of Product Recommendation Analogy

One thing that the company teaches us (and as evident from the stats mentioned above) is that recommendations have the prowess to skyrocket sales. 

Adding a sophisticated recommendation engine powered by AI gives Amazon the ability to leverage ‘discovery’ – showing people items they are most likely to buy (basis their on-site behavior data) and also shed light on items they are probably unlikely to discover on their own. Website personalization plays a crucial role here.

3. The Use of ‘One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All’ Approach

Another thing to learn from Amazon is its unique ability to indulge with each of its customers on a personal level. Meaning, every time a customer lands on the ecommerce giant’s site, they’re greeted with a homepage that seems especially designed for them. These changes aren’t a one-time affair, but something that happens on an everyday level and on the basis of a customer’s real-time behavior on the platform. With this, Amazon constantly delivers a personalized experience with relevant, recommended items that keeps users coming back for more.

Amazon hasn’t just changed the way customers shop, it has spoilt them for an experience that is distinctive and personalized. Pretty much evident from the fact that 57% of customers claim that Amazon offers them more product information, their features and quality, which enhances their overall shopping experience. 

Are you feeling inspired? Watch the webinar to learn how to fuel customer data for personalization.

The Hunger to Evolve

With over a thousand companies competing in the online marketplace, one thing that makes Amazon and Netflix the companies to get inspired from their constant hunger to evolve. From behavioral targeting to deep learning, content personalization to conversion rate optimization, there’s nothing that the two giants haven’t explored and used to their advantage. Learning from their experience and the way they’ve dived deep into the concept of personalization can help you grow exponentially and carve a niche for yourself in today’s customer-driven market. Take a free trial of VWO Personalize or request a demo from our product experts to understand how VWO can help you with the same.

As a valued customer, we’d like to…

For many eCommerce companies, the first personalization project begins with FNAME. We have become really good at personalizing emails because we know that it works. Emails personalized with recipients’ first names increase open rates by 2.6 percent.

Shoppers are more attracted to marketing that targets their interests and purchase patterns. This doesn’t only apply to emails – using personalization in your eCommerce branded store is the best way to build a relationship and keep customers converting.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

The more often customers return, the better you become at delivering relevant suggestions and content for them. According to an Adobe study, 40% of online revenue comes from returning customers…who only represent 8% of site traffic. Using personalized eCommerce recommendations, enterprises can build a stronger, more profitable relationship with their users.

Now is the time to optimize revenue opportunities and become better at selling to the right customers at the right time. Read on to learn how to use personalization to drive up average order value, or AOV.

Importance of Good Data

Personalization doesn’t work if you don’t know anything about your customers. The more relevant and accurate data you gather, the more refined and detailed picture you can draw. Customers are happy to help you get to know them too. 75% of shoppers like it when brands personalize products and offers, while 74% of online customers get frustrated with a website when content that appears has nothing to do with their interests.

When customers sign up on your site or check out for the first time, use this opportunity to collect information. This will help you with informed promotion and planning recommendations in the future.

As your relationship grows, you can continue to learn more about your customers.

• How often are they buying?
• What is their AOV?
• What campaigns have converted for them?

Finally, customers have the most information about themselves. Allowing them to personalize their own experience by sharing their gender or interest information is a simple way to ensure that you aren’t showing them irrelevant information or products.

Customer data can come from anywhere, and it’s necessary when personalizing experiences. In summary, look for the following data points:

• Location/IP address
• Channel of entry (social/email/Amazon)
• New or Returning customer
• Previous searches
• Shopping history
• Shopping patterns (based on parameters such as the AOV)
• Customer segments (people who are like them)
• Customer-provided information (gender, interests)

Enabling social logins like Connect with Facebook will also help you get demographic information about your customers, without them having to provide it themselves.

Now that we’ve got a good picture of our customers, we can start personalizing their experience. There’re three main ways to do this—by segmenting, history, or trend analysis.

Personalization by Segmenting Customers

There are several ways you can personalize a customer’s experience even without asking for any information. When customers land on your site, you already know more about them than you might think.

Practical Tips

Use geotargeting to show the correct language and currency.

Right now, I’m in Austria, so Wool and Gang default to Austria shipping rates and are showing me prices in Euros. This reduces concerns international customers might have about shipping abroad or currency exchange. Reducing concerns means an easier checkout experience, which means better conversions.

Using cookies to know if a customer is new or returning.

If they are new customers, prompt them with a pop-up module to sign up and get a discount on their first purchase. Welcome them to your site, explain who you are, and save their email addresses for future selling opportunities.

Spearmint LOVE offers 10% off for first-time visitors if they sign up for the newsletter. It’s a little bonus that later helps convert visitors at a higher value.

Segment on the basis of individual shoppers vs. wholesalers

“Wholesalers” is another segment of customers who have different needs. Individual shoppers want quick, one-off purchases and may not be as likely to sign in or create accounts on branded sites.

But catering to wholesale clients by allowing them to sign in to receive special discounts and review orders without calling an account management team makes the experience much better for them. Clarion Safety sells industrial-grade safety labels. This organization has created a special experience for wholesale customers that allows them to use different check-out options, such as “charge to the account.”

Identify and segment by the channel as a source of entry

Different paths signal different intents.

If they found your products through Pinterest, they are looking to browse and are more visual. If they clicked an email coupon, they could be price conscious and should be shown more sale items. Get inside your customers’ brains and show them what they want to see—this will provide you the highest chance of a conversion.

Personalization by Previous Activity

After a relationship has been established between you and your customers—whether that’s just through visiting or years of purchasing history—you have information about them from their previous activity. Use this information to customize their experience, and upsell and cross-sell products that are relevant to them.

Practical Tip

Before purchasing, visitors go back and forth with regard to an item when not sure. They might visit the same site multiple times in a week. A surefire way to get them to convert is to show them their recently viewed items whenever they visit your website. If you’re able to offer a discount on products that they’ve viewed multiple times, it might help you seal the deal.

EpicTV combines this strategy with the least purchase amount for free shipping. This means that visitors will usually add something from their recently viewed list just to achieve that perk.

When customers are viewing their carts, at that instance, you can use previous searches or purchases to suggest complementary items. Red’s Baby uses this method to suggest accessories for the main purchase and incrementally increase the AOV. I added a stroller to my shopping cart, and this site suggested matching accessories—all under $50. At this instance, suggesting other types of strollers wouldn’t be effective.

Think about what it’s like meeting customers in the real world. The more you see them, the more history you have of them. You might know that they have kids or that they like to play squash on weekends.

This context makes personalized recommendations and upsells easier. Try and replicate this online. Shopping at an eCommerce retailer doesn’t need to be impersonal, and it shouldn’t be.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Personalization by Building Patterns

Taking the time to build a better recommendation engine makes sense and helps generate additional revenue. According to Barilliance and data based on 1.5 billion online shopping sessions, personalized on-site product recommendations constitute 11.5% of revenue through eCommerce sites. That’s a big chunk of revenue to miss out on!  

Practical Tip

To optimize across all customer visits, dive into analytics and look for purchasing patterns. Do shoppers tend to return often if they buy a specific item? Do many shoppers buy a combination of items at the same time? Finding and taking advantage of these opportunities can help drive up AOV.

For example, recommending products that other customers bought helps crowd source the best options. Check out these suggestions by Blue Tomato when viewing an item. 

Flash Tattoos speaks their customer’s language and makes their Recommendation section fun. “You’d also look good in” is a flattering way to suggest similar products across different styles.

If customers have viewed the shipping policy and not purchased, they might be hesitant about shipping costs. Try offering free shipping at a certain cart value to convert potentially cost-sensitive customers. Finding these patterns that expose reasons for cart abandonment helps create a better experience for your customers. They’ll feel like you are addressing their concerns before they even ask!

Final Tips

Now that you’re ready to start personalizing the shopping experience, we’ve got a few final tips for you:

When you’re suggesting or upselling, use your screen space wisely:

Remember the purpose of each screen, and don’t distract customers from completing their purchase. On the checkout screen, the single Call-to-Action should be to convert and pay for what they’ve selected. Cluttering the screen with additional products can reduce your overall conversion rate.

Personalization isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it tactic:

You need to constantly reevaluate your metrics, hypotheses, and experiments to keep getting better at selling to your customers. Don’t be afraid to try things out and get personal! Your customers will love it and reward you for it with higher AOVs.

Over to You

Have more ideas on how to increase AOV and conversion rates with personalization? Send us your feedback and views at marketing@vwo.com

If you would like to know how VWO Personalize can enable you to build delightful, contextual experiences, take a free trial or request a demo with our product experts.

• The in-house marketers who are personalizing their web experiences see, on average, a 19 percent uplift in sales.
• About 94 percent of customer insights and marketing professionals across multiple industries suggest personalization is “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important” for meeting their current marketing objectives.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

While enterprises understand how important it is to craft relevant content and experiences for users, how do they go about doing it? For those interested, this blog post chalks out a 4-step approach for implementing website personalization:

• Identify the segments to target.
• Plan the personalization campaign.
• Implement the campaign.
• Measure success from personalization efforts.

Identifying the Segments You Want to Target

Segmentation begins with knowing who your visitors are and segregating them into different segments, based on certain traits or characteristics. Google Analytics, for example, is a great tool to help you do that. You can slice and dice your visitors’ data, based on various attributes to identify segments that drive significant traffic to your website. Further, Google Analytics can give you a lot more than just traffic numbers. If you have “revenue tracking” in place, you can identify specific segments that bring you the highest conversion rate as well as absolute sales figures. These are the segments you should be targeting.

If you have a CRO program in place, you can also look at the past A/B test results to identify segments that you might want to target. Run post-test segmentation and drill into the results to look at individual segments that won higher conversions, or find hidden winners. For example, you could run post-test segmentation and find out whether social traffic got you more conversions compared to direct traffic.

Creating thorough customer profiles is a traditional method of segmenting visitors. A customer profile could be based on the following:

• Demographic information: Age, gender, location, ethnicity, and marital status
• Psychographic information: Interests, values, hobbies, and likes/dislikes
• Firmographic information: Company name(s), size, industry, revenue, and roles

While demographic and psychographic information is important for consumer marketers, firmographics are used by B2B marketers. You can extract psychographic information by using website cookies. On the other hand, you can ask users directly for firmographic and demographic information.

For instance, the following image shows an ideal customer profile for an automobile website. It lists important information which is required for creating profiles of target customers—demographic information of the users, the type of engagement shown on the website, and the type of products they intend to buy or already own.

Enterprises also need to understand why it is important to target a certain segment. Is it that the segment that they want to target drives the major share of revenue for your website? Target your most valuable visitors to achieve your personalization goals.

• If an eCommerce enterprise observes that people in their mid 20s account for 70 percent sales of their sports equipment, it could run a campaign for that segment showing a separate section devoted only to sports goods on the home page.
• B2B marketers can target segments per industries such as healthcare, BFSI, or government. These segments can be targeted by either offering a product with personalized messaging or offering different products to different segments.

Enterprises can also run personalization when they have a segment-specific business goal in mind. For example, if the objective is to increase hiring from a specific region, visitors from that region should be targeted with a personalized message or content on the website. Here’s a case study on how geo-targeting helped VWO increase the CTR to its careers page by 149 percent. Similarly, if an eCommerce enterprise that caters to global markets wants to introduce a new product for a specific region, it can run personalization on its website for visitors from that part of the world.

Planning the Personalization Campaign

Enterprises planning for personalization needs to consider its “how” and “where”:

How Should They Target the Segment

One message does not fit all. For instance, an eCommerce enterprise can target two different subsegments from a certain main segment, that is, women aged between 20-30. The first subsegment can be of “fashion-conscious and impulse” buyers. The other subsegment can be of those women who make only carefully thought-out, high-end luxury purchases. Both the subsegments drive a large percentage of sales to the accessories section of your website.

User behavior information such as “number of sessions to transaction” by using cookies can help classify users into these segments. An impulse buyer would complete a purchase within a single session, while a carefully thought-out purchase might take multiple sessions before a visitor converts.

For the first segment, you can run personalized cross-sell campaigns on products for which they show the intent to purchase. For the second segment, consider targeting a lookbook that shows how your high-end products such as platinum/diamond jewelry can seamlessly blend with their outfit and add a charm to the wearer’s personality.

Here is another example. A B2B software company first might want to show a basic product video to a first-time visitor on the website. Later, the company might target a one-to-one live product demo offer to someone who has visited the site multiple times and looks highly engaged.

A Hubspot post which lists 3 examples of personalization, talks about how Lynton personalizes its home page for new and repeat visitors. The CTA on the home page shown to first-time visitors says “Learn About Inbound,” while the CTA for repeat visitors reads “Start Your Project Today.” Hubspot’s hypothesis behind running this personalization campaign could be that while new visitors might be interested in knowing more about inbound, the repeat visitors might already have explored enough on inbound and now need to start their learning. With the goal of increasing clicks from both new and repeat visitors, they showed personalized CTAs to both segments.

Another widely used method is geo-targeting visitors from different countries, using their native language. A post on QuickSprout talks about how Neil Patel increased search traffic by 47 percent by translating his blog in 82 languages. 

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Where on the Website Should Personalization Be Implemented

After identifying the segment, you should target and craft a messaging strategy for them. The next thing that enterprises need to find out is where to place personalized content on their websites.

Identify the pages that you should be running your personalization campaign on. Should it be the product page that has a large amount of traffic? Probably yes. Should it be the checkout page for eCommerce? Probably not. Look at your website analytics data (in Google Analytics, for example) to identify pages that drive high traffic. You could also look at specific pages where the segments are browsing/arriving mostly.

The next step is to identify areas on your webpages that fetch maximum attention or engagement. Scrollmaps and Heatmaps, for example, will show the scroll depth of your page or help identify the sections of the webpage that are highly attention grabbing. These tools help you understand:

• On your B2B website, whether the eBook you have targeted to get more sign-ups from your eCommerce clients should be placed in the middle of the website scroll or pushed to the top.
• On your eCommerce website, whether you should place the lookbook for your fashion-oriented segment of women on the top of the page or on the left.

Running a Personalization Campaign

To run a personalized campaign, using a preferred tool, enterprises can design and modify different variations of their website for varied segments they want to target. For example, one of the personalized variations of your website could be targeted at mobile traffic. This variation can be a modification that displays less content compared to the content that the desktop version displays. (The hypothesis is that “mobile users want to go through minimal content.”)

With VWO Personalize, you can trigger numerous personalized experiences for your website visitors at the right place and at the right time. You can make these experiences relevant and contextual with VWO Personalize being deeply integrated with your data layer. You can build delightful customer-focussed journeys by prompting each experience campaign at the right time. Those triggers could be based on visitors’ persona or events like when one refreshes a page, when they’ve scrolled a certain depth, to the time they’ve spent on a page, among others. Take a free trial or request a demo with our product experts to understand this personalization platform in detail.

You can also test your personalized experiences by setting up target segments within your personalization tool. In VWO, for instance, you can either choose a predefined segment or define a custom visitor segment for different variations. Next,  set up a conversion goal that you want to track on running the personalization campaign. Tracking CTA clicks on a variation that has been personalized or tracking revenue from the personalized home page variation created for business-class travelers—the goal should be exactly what you want to achieve with your personalization efforts.

When the segmentation is applied to the created or modified variations, you are ready to run your personalization test campaign.

Measuring the Impact of Personalization

A/B testing is one approach to measure the success of your personalization campaigns. You can run your personalization campaign as an A/B test. If your campaign delivers a win, you should replicate its success by planning and running more campaigns on similar hypotheses. If it fails to achieve the goal, identify and record the reasons for what went wrong. Maintaining a repository of learning is essential to refrain from committing the mistakes of past A/B tests and running smarter campaigns in the future.

Google Analytics conversion funnels also can help measure the impact of personalization. To see how successful you have been in your personalization efforts, compare your target metrics for the period before you implemented personalization with that of the period after it. Gauge the same conversion funnel for the same amount of time, and see the difference in results if any.

Conclusion

Running personalization requires enterprises to answer a number of questions regarding for whom and why the personalization campaign being run for, how and where on the website will the campaign be run, and what results will the personalization efforts reap. With our 4-step approach to personalization, you can effectively implement your campaign.

Are you personalizing your CRO campaigns? Write to us at marketing@vwo.com