Having the right marketing strategy to boost your product, service, website, or the entirety of your business is critical in achieving long-term success and better customer relations, along with increased profitability and revenue.

However, with complex marketing strategies and with the ever-changing needs and preferences of your target market, how can you be sure that your chosen strategy for your website is the winning strategy? Or perhaps, do you know what strategies you should be using to expand your reach and effectively connect to your target market?

For starters, personalizing your website and investing in site optimization are two key effective marketing strategies you must consider to stay ahead of your competition.

But why?

Well, people nowadays are very much inclined with the Internet. In fact, there are around five billion people in the world who use the Internet in their day-to-day operations. It is only expected that they would want to get a memorable experience when browsing through your website and navigate your website conveniently and interactively so they can make informed decisions—and even become loyal customers later on!

The formula for a better user experience and to drive more traffic is personalizing and optimizing your website. Do you know what these are? Let us help you understand.

What Is Website Personalization?

Website personalization means you need to offer your online visitors a custom experience to promote higher customer satisfaction, site visits, higher conversions, longer visit duration, lower bounce rates, better retention, and improved brand reputation.

You can customize their experience based on their geography, demographic, psychographic, past purchases, or behavior to reach your business purposes.

Website personalization is supported by various software tools that enable businesses to collect visitor/customer data, segment, target, automate, and more. Through personalization, you can have more opportunities to provide seamless, relevant experiences to your visitors when they access your website.

Here’s an example. Imagine going inside a department store to be greeted only with piles of items that are not what you came for. Let’s say you are looking for a can of mushrooms. But to get to that section, you have to navigate through a multitude of aisles. Isn’t it time-consuming and frustrating?

But imagine this. What will you feel if you get inside a department store and be greeted by the warm smile of a sales lady who already knows what you want and which days you visit the store to buy your needed items and will immediately take you directly to the canned mushrooms section? Convenient. Comfort. Satisfaction. Trust.

THAT IS PERSONALIZATION.

The better you address your target market’s needs and wants, the better the chances that your target market will convert into loyal customers and spread the word about your business.

Best Website Personalization Practices to Follow

You can personalize your website in different ways, including content, product recommendations, special offers, and more. After defining personalization and how you can use it to improve your website, follow these steps:

Practice One: Collect Your Visitor’s Data

1. Ask them for their basic information, such as name, age, sex, address, phone number, email, work industry, position, and company name, among others, through a contact form, subscription platform, registration fields, and more. These details will help you understand their background and contextualize their experience, hence, allowing you to connect with your target market easily.

1. Note your visitors’ behavior through page views, the time they spent viewing each page, engagement on your website’s content, the extent of their scrolling, and where they bounce off, among others. You can also evaluate their response to your promotions, whether they open, click, or dismiss your emails or view push notifications. The accumulated data will help you track the best steps to upscale the process of your website personalization.

1. Fetch authentic and reliable data from website cookies and web beacons. These tools will enable you to track your visitor’s browsing history on your site and analyze your target market’s interests, preferences, and next steps after browsing through your website.

1. Use your own company records to organize customer data. Dig deep into your customer service and sales records, customer interaction with sales and support representatives, and transaction histories.

1. Gather data through social media, such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, since it is a shared public platform accessible by anyone.

1. Track email activity to learn whether or not customers view and read your emails and get their needed information about your products or services.

1. Buy data from external data sources or third-party aggregators, such as declared data, inferred data, and observed data. These external data sources collect and analyze customer data responsibly and help sell customers and business data to companies. Through this, you can discover new business avenues and the target market that might be interested in your products or services.

Practice Two: Visitor Profiling

Create customer profiles to have a comprehensive guide about the right methods and techniques you must use to effectively connect to your target market. With this, you can formulate strategies that will cater to the needs and preferences of your target market and give them a tailored experience every time they visit your website.

Practice Three: Set Your Goals

Define your goals for your target market and website. It can range from reducing bounce rates, increasing conversions, driving repeat purchases, and improving upsells to facilitating product discovery and more.

Practice Four: Formulate a Strategy

Prepare fool-proof strategies to give your target market/visitors a remarkable customer experience. You can start adding a personalized touch on your homepage, product page, search results, and shopping cart page based on your accumulated visitors’ data.

Practice Five: Design and Execute Your Strategy

1. Identify and draft actual website personalization campaigns by listing all core goals, areas of improvement or for personalization, suggestions, and possible solutions and backup plans.

1. Prioritize campaigns that have the highest impact among others. Then, test your hypothesis before the ultimate decision.

1. Setup the right algorithms to refine your campaign. The right algorithms will allow you to give each of your visitors a more individualized experience.

1. Test and iterate your website personalization strategies to see if it meets your goals and create appropriate modifications to remove or reduce flaws.

Practice Six: Measure Your Success

Determine your return of investments (ROI) to see whether or not your strategies are effective in driving more conversions and promoting your brand.

Creating meaningful, real-time interactions with your target market through personalized communication across email, web, advertisements, and mobile is essential in engaging your target market towards knowing your business and offerings and driving conversions and higher customer satisfaction rates and referrals.

To achieve long-term success, you need to use and apply website optimization along with real-time website personalization.

What Is Site Optimization?

Website optimization or also known as conversion rate optimization is a tool used to help brands rank well in search results, speed up websites, increase traffic, boost sell-throughs, improve conversion rates, and ensure positive ROI. It entails a thorough process of combining various tools, advanced strategies, and trials to improve the overall performance of your website.

Website optimization increases your brand’s rank in search engine results pages (SERP) and makes your website more discoverable to your target market.

SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most critical aspects of website optimization. It enables your prospects to find your brand in the easiest manner possible.

When prospects search terms or keywords related to your business or brand, they will have a much better chance of discovering your website, navigating through it, purchasing your products or services, and converting into loyal customers.

There is also on-page optimization—another critical aspect of website optimization that ensures every prospect that lands on your website get the best user experience. This tailored experience entices them to purchase your products or services and convert from visitors to customers.

Best Website Optimization Practices to Follow

There is too much information on the internet, and this can make it challenging for you to start optimizing your website. Focusing on the basics will help you maximize your website optimization efforts.

If you want to rank well in search engines and be more discoverable by your target market, follow these steps:

Practice One: Analyze Your Website’s Data

Examine your analytics and look for pages within your website with poor performance or high bounce or exit rates. Collecting data will help you find patterns that point out the flaws of your website that need optimization. User behavior reports, Google Search Console traffic data, and referral sources can tell you a lot about your target market and contribute greatly towards developing your optimization strategy.

Practice Two: Prioritize Optimization Ideas

Brainstorm and jot down the potential causes of poor performance and website optimization strategies you need to test to resolve this issue. Then, rank them based on their anticipated impact, your confidence in the efficacy of the strategy, and how easy it is to implement the change.

Practice Three: Test Your Optimization Strategies

A/B and multivariate testing will help you better identify the problems in your site, record and retain the strategies that improve your site’s performance and eliminate those that do otherwise.

Practice Four: Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

Various tools can help you obtain and filter keywords related to your brand and business. Find long-tail keywords that would fit your target market’s intent. Start with a broad keyword, then break it down into specific keywords for a wider reach.

Practice Five: Create Lengthy, Value-Rich Content

Although length is not be-all-end-all, creating long content signals Google that you are producing more information. The ideal word count for a blog post is 1600 or more. But, before deciding the maximum length of your content,

search your primary keyword through Google and visit the top 10 results in the search engine results pages. If your keywords rank high, then the better your content’s chances to rank higher.

Practice Six: Optimize for On-Page and Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO shows appropriate website optimization strategies when developing specific pages. Headlines, subheadlines, URL slugs, and meta tags are included in this category.

Apply the primary keyword in your headline, slug, and at least one subheadline. Primary, secondary, and related keywords must be used simultaneously throughout the body copy, subheadlines, and image alt tags.

Off-page SEO or off-site SEO shows appropriate website optimization via external sources. Engaging in social media activity, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and brand mentions can all boost your site’s SEO.

Practice Seven: Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Responsive designs focusing on mobile-friendliness can help your website rank better and connect to potential conversions since billions of people are now accessing websites through mobile devices.

Practice Eight: Speed Up Your Pages

Improving page speed is crucial if you want to rank higher and drive conversions. The fast loading speed can leave positive feedback from your target market, promote retention, and reduce bounce-off rates.

Practice Nine: Get Quality Backlinks

When researching backlinks, be sure to target well-respected publications. Building a solid backlink profile will signal Google of your website’s credibility. It also helps your pages to rank higher.

Summary

Website personalization and optimization may be complex and time-consuming, but these are key marketing strategies that guarantee a positive return on investments.

Developing a tailored user experience and optimizing your website help you meet your target market’s needs and preferences, convert prospects into loyal customers, increase your audience reach, and boost your rank in search engines.

By collecting data from your target market as much as you can, using the right software and tools, and with thorough research, you can connect to your target market better, convey your message, give them a seamless user experience, increase conversions, and generate traffic.

Following the best practices on personalizing and optimizing your website can help you achieve long-term success. Make sure to partner with the right professionals in this process.

For inquiries, do not hesitate to contact us at your convenience.