Basics of Real-time Personalization – Relationship One

May 9, 2021 Stan

Real-time personalization is the ability to customize content delivery to visitors on your website using information you already know about them. This is a great tactic for ensuring visitors stay engaged by tailoring content to their needs along the buying journey. Serving up more relevant information to customers will help increase engagement as well as up-sell & cross-sell opportunities. The idea is to create a more unique experience for visitors that guides them to what we think they’ll like to see.

If you’ve collected some amount of demographic or behavioral data on a person that would help enable the personalization process, you can get started. For example, knowing the industry, country, or previous buying history would be useful in creating personalized web content for visitors. That backend data will power the ability to show different content for one viewer that may be of more interest versus other generalized content.

Benefits of personalization across the board in emails, prepopulated forms, and microsites have proven to perk the level of interest and time a prospect or customer may spend viewing your company’s information. This often results in high campaign success rates, longer page viewing time, and ultimately, supports the sales pipeline flow. It makes sense that if content is personalized to your particular interests in a timely fashion, that you’d be more likely to engage, and for a longer period of time. Marketing automation studies have shown personalization can increase conversion rates in some cases by over 300%. Serving up too general or irrelevant information can lead to diluting the marketing message in an effort to grab the attention of the masses instead of prospects that are truly interested in purchasing a solution.

Real-time personalization can be exceptionally effective if you’ve created buyer personas, as these can be used to power the customized content. Other great options for this tactic are using it for account-based marketing, regionalizing content based on language or country, or targeting specific industry needs.

Personalization can take many forms, but here are some common ways to present it:

Inserting actual pieces of data related directly to that person or company (name, purchase history, etc.)
Customizing by demographics such as country
Rendering ‘in language’ or regional specific content
Use of widgets, different images & sizes, or customized page layouts

Marketing automation tools are a great way to take advantage of personalization. Oracle Marketing Cloud has a suite of products that allow you to take advantage of customizing experiences from every angle. Eloqua & Responsys allow for creating dynamic content, field merging, and tracking behavior. Maxymiser provides the ability customize web pages based on user insights.

As always, an important factor in launching any new tactic is the ability to measure it. It will likely be a worthwhile exercise to measure the success of pre and post implementation of personalizing a site. Measuring statistics like page view time, conversion rate, and page bounce rate will be meaningful to determine if you are getting the right lift from your customizations or need to make tweaks to enhance its success.

We encourage you to give this concept a try. We all know with marketing that relevance and timing is everything. The idea here is that personalizing messaging can create more meaningful connections and make for a better experience for your visitors. Over time this can lead to a faster sales cycle and a more profitable relationship using attention grabbing details to quickly convert those prospects to buyers.

If you’re looking to make your marketing more personalized, Relationship One is always here to help.

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