How everyday personalization increases engagement

A true personalized experience for website visitors brings better engagement, which ultimately leads to more revenue for your business. Improving the digital experience for a user is especially important now as losing customers has never been easier.

What is personalization?

Personalization is a strategy of connecting with customers and prospects to them feel like their needs and priorities can be met, that they are heard and that they hold a personal connection with the brand. Personalizing your content presents your visitors with the most relevant information, services or promotions at the right moment in a specific context on your website that can greatly increase their engagement and subsequently conversions. Remember: content, context, time, customer.

What are the benefits of personalization?

The main benefits of personalization are:

• You can deliver a relevant experience for each unique visitor to your website
• The platform can remember the user and target them with real-time relevant messaging according to their browsing
• It allows you to get a better idea of what your visitors want implicitly and explicitly

Where can I see examples of personalization?

There are plenty of examples of personalization in your daily lives from ecommerce to entertainment. You may notice that when you use someone else's Netflix that their recommendations are completely different to yours or if you see someone scrolling on Spotify that you’ve never seen any of their recommended playlists on your app, these are examples of personalization we see every day.

One type of personalization is recommendations, content suggestions similar to what you have watched/listened to, targeted content related to demographics. Let’s look at some examples:

1. Asos: Through the app, if you previously visited the women’s section the site automatically redirects you to the women’s section. It also suggests clothing that you may like related to your previous orders and searches and it suggests the size that would be most suitable after analyzing previous orders.

Recommendations:

Fit assistant:

2. Amazon: the site analyzes your previous behaviour including search history and order history and promotes products that would it thinks you may want to purchase.

3. Netflix: Netflix uses your viewing history and how you've rated different shows or movies you've watched to figure out what you might like and make recommendations for what you should watch next.

4. Spotify: Similar to Netflix, Spotify takes the music you have listened to and makes recommendations about other albums or playlists in similar genres that you might enjoy or other music by the artist you have listened to.

5. Google: Google records all types of information about you including your demographic information, your search records and what you’re clicking on in the search results. This allows Google to target you with relevant advertising and suggest relevant content in the search results. To find out what Google knows about you and how it’s used, click here.

Other examples of personalization around you are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram where your suggested videos and images are related to your searches and what you’re looking at and watching. The technology for the likes of Spotify and Netflix provides unique experiences for visitors and makes them feel like individuals and not just a member of a crowd. This is the goal for personalization for many of our clients, making the individual feel special and these are examples that achieve this.

In conclusion, personalization leads to an improved customer journey experience which is what we are all striving for and the right technology can support your personalization strategy.

The recent Sitefinity 13.0 release also contained some updates to personalization, which you can find out about here.

Are you interested in applying personalization to your Sitefinity or Sitecore site? Contact us today.