Same website, but your visitors all see something different.

Give your website the power to guide visitors with a personalised website experience, showing the most impactful and relevant information first based on data driven insights.

Web personalisation or content personalisation is the term given to the process of customising web pages for each user in real-time based on their behaviour, demographics, and preferences. It is a powerful tool that enables you to create a highly dynamic and flexible website, or as we like to put it - a website that goes the extra-mile.

“Web personalisation is an online marketing technique that creates pages with different content depending on the circumstances in which they are viewed. For example, you can build pages that offer special content for different types of visitors or dynamically change for each user according to the actions they performed on the website.”
_{- Kentico, Content Personalisation}

Delivering tailored user experiences in this way offers several benefits for both the individual visiting the website and the business or brand that is trying to form a relationship with that user. Personalisation also enhances the user experience, and as the digital world becomes increasingly competitive there is a growing need for personalisation to capture your customer’s attention.

Your users want it and everybody is doing it.

Contrary to the old school of belief, there is nothing shady about this, and in fact, it is very much the future of digital. It is a strategy to be encouraged as the user is the one who benefits as he or she sees content that is more relevant and useful to them. If you have an account with Amazon, eBay or even use social media, you’ll have experienced this personalised content in the form of being greeted by name and seeing suggestions of products, people or events you’re likely to be interested in.

“In an era of all things digital, consumers have higher expectations: they want their interactions with businesses and the products and services they buy from them to be personalised.”
_{- Deloitte, The Consumer Review, Made to order: The rise of mass personalisation}

Although we may seem heavily opinionated on the topic, we also agree it has its place and you have to be careful telling your visitors who they are and what it is they want.

As a marketer or business owner, there are many benefits to web personalisation:

• Build better relationships with customers and develop brand loyalty.
• Boost conversion rate with highly targeted offers and CTAs.
• Increase sales by cross-selling and upselling products and services depending on previous purchase behaviour.
• Tailor the user experience to present information on how you want it.

Web Personalisation requires accurate data to be successful. This data may come from several different sources:

• Demographics such as age, gender, and marital status – the customer may supply this information when they open an account, or it can be obtained from social media.
• Location – can be acquired from the user’s IP address.
• User behaviour – collected from past interactions with your website and other websites via cookies and tracking pixels, and from your user account information.
• Referral – customising content based on where the user came from is a simple technique but can be very effective.

To use this information in a meaningful way, a programmer must reference the database, web cookies, or other sources of data, and design the front-end of the website so that it adapts accordingly.

Use your CMS to create meaningful website personalisation.

This can be quite a complex task, and bespoke web personalisation can be both expensive and time-consuming to implement. You’ll also need an understanding of the basic components of your content pages such as web parts, web part zones and widgets. Depending on how your current website is built, this may be simple or complex to grasp.

Fortunately, some commercial content management systems (CMS) offer built-in web personalisation functionality in an easy-to-use format. This enables marketers and people without technical skills to create a website powered by web personalisation without hiring a programmer. Que shameless spill about how great Kentico is...but we will leave that to another insight article in coming weeks.

If you can't wait for our next insight article, or want a to have a free chat about ways to hack the performance out of your website, get in touch, we'd love help.