Author: Frank Passantino
As any marketer can tell you, the nature of commerce has dramatically changed in the last decade – in fact, it’s changed a lot in the last year. One of those changes is that customers and prospects expect more highly customized experiences of your products and services than ever before.
Organizations are now tasked with tracking massive amounts of data from diverse devices—including computers, tablets, and mobile phones from an always-accessible customer base—in order to provide customers with highly individualized experiences. It’s no surprise that, according to eConsultancy, 94% of companies agree that personalization is key to their current and future success.
The combined access to customers (through their devices) and the data they generate (with those devices) has become increasingly valuable to organizations of all sizes. But how can organizations extract information at a deeper level, and gain the most from the in-flow of data? How can marketers turn that data into meaningful, actionable insights?
To translate this data into action, marketers need to check off these four boxes:
Marketing automation
Persona based marketing tools
Reporting and visualization of the customer
Real-time, behavioral based predictive analytics
Lastly, all four of these elements must operate within the customer’s live environment.
How Website and Landing Page Personalization Creates Relevance
Organizations across a variety of industries are increasingly viewing hyper-personalized interactions with their website visitors as a key core competency. They use marketing automation technology to gain an enhanced understanding of their customers, continuously optimize their marketing campaigns across all channels, and personalize each of their customers’ website experiences using data-driven insights.
As a very basic example of how Marketo does this, take a look at how we customize our website homepage for visitors, using data from our marketing automation tool combined with real-time personalization.
Here’s the homepage presented to new visitors or prospects:
Here’s the homepage presented to customers:
Notice how the bottom row of buttons is relevant to the visitor’s experience—a current customer doesn’t need a free trial or demo, but they might want to register for our user conference, check out upcoming events, or log directly into our product.
Here’s another scenario to consider: let’s say a third-party car dealer sends out an email blast to all of its known contacts. The email’s banner includes an embedded link, inviting contacts to visit the dealer’s website.
But not every contact is going to be interested in the same vehicle. One may have shown interest in economical vehicles made by Dodge; another may be looking for something a bit more sporty, possibly a Ford. The dealer already has some insight into the contacts’ interests based on previous website activity (which can be tracked with marketing automation).
Now let’s assume both contacts click on the banner in the email, which directs each of them to a landing page.
The contact interested in the practical Dodge vehicle lands on this page:
The contact interested in a sporty, high=performance vehicle is directed to this landing page:
Each contact has landed on a page with the most relevant possible content, according to the car dealer’s information, increasing the overall chance of these contacts becoming customers. You can see why these kinds of strategies, which combine marketing automation and real-time personalization, have already proven to be a serious game changer, industry wide.
Is your organization creating personalized, relevant experiences for your website visitors? If not, what’s standing in your way? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Meet the New ‘Status Quo’: Personalized, Customized User Experiences was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com