The Beginner's Guide to Personalized Marketing: Personalization Best Practices

1. Introduction to personalized marketing
2. Defining your audience
3. Creating personalized content
4. Converting visitors into leads
5. Personalization best practices

1. Avoid going overboard

With personalization software, you can track a lot of data about your site visitors. However, this doesn’t mean that you should use all of it.

Providing suggestions based on past behavior is useful in most cases, but when it’s overdone, it can come across as creepy. And as the infamous case of Target exposing a teen girl’s pregnancy before she told her father shows, that’s entirely possible to do.

Instead, you should only use the information that you need to target your audience more efficiently. For example, if a user has been searching for sandals online, serving them information on similar sandals would be beneficial and helpful.

2. Test everything

Much like the regular content on your site, you should A/B test your personalized content to see whether or not it is more effective than your regular content. Personalized homepages, for example, are often extremely effective – but you won’t know for sure unless you test them.

Instead of simply implementing your ideas for personalization based on best guesses, run a few tests first for the best possible results.

The information you gain from testing your personalized content can increase site visitors, conversions, and time on site.

3. Monitor your analytics

Much like A/B testing your site elements, you should also track your website’s activity with a program like Google Analyticsregularly. It will allow you to see where content or design elements are falling short, and give you insight on what you can improve to make it better.

If you take the time to plan out your personalization strategy, you should have a clear idea of the results you hope to see. However, you won’t know if you’re achieving them unless you monitor your analytics.

You can use Google Analytics to see how your leads arrived at conversion pages – for example, did they follow the customer journey that you expected? Are there any weak points or drop-offs?

Examining how leads arrived on your conversion pages isn’t the only thing you can do through Google Analytics – you can also see information like how long visitors are staying on any one page, how many new visitors are entering pages, and bounce rate.

You should use the answers to these questions as you do the next step.

4. Revisit your strategy regularly

As with any marketing strategy, personalization is not a set-it-and-forget-it tactic. As successful as your personalized content may be at the start, customer preferences change – and so should your approach to meeting them.

Revisit your strategy on a regular basis, and don’t be afraid to continue making changes. The more you experiment with new ideas, the better you’ll be at staying one step ahead of your competitors.

You should constantly be evaluating your website and what you can do to better reach your target audience. Keeping up with your personalization can be the difference between hundreds of conversions.

Ready to start personalizing content?

We hope you enjoyed our Beginner’s Guide to Personalized Marketing! Now that you’re finished, it’s time to start planning your company’s personalization strategy.

If you have any questions about the information in this guide, or if you’d like some assistance using personalized marketing for your company, we’d love to help. Contact us today to speak with a strategist!