Personalization Talks by Anna Ambrozevich
Our founder Juliana Amorim recently had the opportunity to give an interview to the CRO and Personalization blog, by Anna Ambrozevich!
In this discussion, she illuminated the significant funds that can be wasted without proper testing, the importance of embedding personalization into the natural customer experience, and why focusing on home page personalization only could be a strategic misstep.
Keep reading to check the full installment!
We hand-pick the best content on experience optimization so you don’t have to.
Why do companies need to implement and use personalization?
In today’s world, growing a digital company has become more challenging than ever. Running paid campaigns alone is no longer enough to drive growth.
Surprisingly, even though over $900 billion is spent worldwide on advertising every year, merely 0.1% of it is used to test its effectiveness.
Just imagine how much money goes to waste.
In the past five years, customer acquisition costs have increased by over 90%. It is evident that companies must find a solution to make their growth sustainable, and paying an increasing amount of money is not a long-term answer.
Successful brands have recognized the importance of utilizing data to tailor experiences that match each user’s buying journey stage. Personalization has emerged as a solution to this challenge, and big tech giants such as Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon have been implementing it for some time now.
Personalization can tremendously impact your business, making your customers feel more valued and creating a more enjoyable experience overall. It’s incredible how something as simple as changing your homepage banner to match their location or suggesting content based on their browsing behavior can make all the difference. By doing this, you’ll not only increase your conversion rates and revenue, but you’ll also build a loyal customer base that genuinely believes in your brand.
What is your favorite personalization example?
To me, the perfect personalization strategy does not come across as marketing, catches the user by surprise, and is applied to their experience naturally without causing disruption.
My favorite example, by far, is personalization based on users’ interests. You can infer what users are intrigued by in so many ways. There are always signals of which content is more appealing and brings better results for the business.
This approach can be based on visitors' search history and implemented in general marketing communications. You can highlight an offer in a banner or on the user interface to help guide consumers on their browsing journey. It can even be more subtle, like pre-selecting the most suitable options in a form.
What is crucial to keep in mind when working with personalization?
Personalization involves delivering targeted messages while respecting users' privacy.
It is crucial to avoid using sensitive personal information or bringing up topics that can be uncomfortable for the user. For instance, consider a person undergoing medical treatment that leads to hair loss. They might search for solutions to this side effect, but it would not be pleasant to be bombarded with content constantly reminding them of the issue. Sometimes, they may just want to forget about it for a while. Setting such limits is necessary to build user trust, increase brand engagement, and foster long-term relationships.
Also, segmentation mistakes can put users in the wrong clusters and generate bad experiences. Offering winter clothing to users who live in tropical regions, sending satisfaction surveys to users who haven’t yet converted, showing products that are of no interest to the user… These errors are often due to poor data analysis. Knowing how and when to use specific data is essential to prevent such issues. If there are any doubts about the effectiveness of the content, I always encourage running AB tests on a smaller portion of the audience to validate the personalization approach.
Note: my coworker Mariana Bonanomi has written an excellent article about this and other mistakes to avoid.
From what do you recommend companies to start working with personalization?
Creating a good browsing experience on your website depends highly on looking at what users want and need. While you may have an intuition about the parts of your site that will impact users the most, analyzing your traffic data is the best way to identify which pages are most important to their journey.
While the homepage is often a good candidate for personalization, it may not always be the most critical page. Marketing campaigns may direct users to other pages, resulting in fewer visits to the homepage and less engagement with its personalized features.
We worked with an e-commerce client who initially focused on testing a personalized version of the homepage banner. However, after two weeks of testing, less than 25% of user sessions were impacted by this personalization. We analyzed the traffic data and discovered that most marketing campaigns were linked to product pages.
Additionally, surveying users and examining their feedback can provide valuable insights into the type of content that best resonates with them and what keeps them on your site longer.
As a final tip, I would recommend running AB tests whenever possible. Your assumptions on what personalizations would bring the best results might not always be correct, so you can AB test different variations of your website’s content in small portions of your traffic.
Which roles in the company should be involved in the successful personalization project?
Here at Croct, we see that CRO and growth marketers are usually responsible for crafting personalization strategies. Copywriters and designers are also part of the workflow since changes to content are some of the main tasks.
But including other roles depends on the platform you choose. Some personalization processes require daily deploys and data analysts to ensure there isn’t any outdated or siloed information.
On the other hand, there are platforms that include analytics and make it easy for marketers to adjust content after the initial setup. This ones help you structure your data and save devs from making frequent changes.
About Croct
Croct is the go-to solution for a wide range of website personalization and optimization challenges. It empowers growth teams to quickly and affordably bring ideas and strategies to life as it takes care of everything they need so that they can focus on the strategy, not the tech.
Croct makes personalization as simple as using Stripe for payments or Mailchimp for email marketing: our headless CMS empowers you to AB test your hypotheses without relying on developers to decide the best way to present a personalized experience to each user.
We’d like to thank Anna again for the opportunity. If you want to learn more about website personalization and AB testing, create your free account and try Croct today!