But what exactly does digital customer engagement mean? Let’s break it down in plain and simple terms. 

What is digital customer engagement?

Digital customer engagement is connecting with your customers in the digital space using various internet tools. It involves building relationships, creating customer loyalty, and providing a memorable experience for your customers. 

As a customer, you must have received a personalized birthday wish via email or a website must have prompted you with a live chat for immediate assistance. That’s all part of digital engagement. 

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where competition is fierce and attention spans are shorter than ever, mastering digital consumer engagement is crucial. It is the key to standing out, staying relevant, building long-term customer relationships, and thriving in the online marketplace.

Now, we move forward to understand why it is important to prioritize digital engagement.

Benefits of digital customer engagement

In today’s age, digital customer engagement is not just a buzzword; it’s the lifeblood of your online business. If you want to thrive in the competitive digital marketplace, engaging with your customers on a personal level is not an option but a necessity. 

Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of digital customer engagement and answer the question: Why is digital customer engagement important?

Builds strong customer relationships

In the digital world, customer engagement is like a secret ingredient that makes your brand unforgettable. 

When you engage with your customers in a meaningful way, you become a trusted friend they turn to again and again. Think about your favorite local coffee shop. The barista knows your order by heart and greets you with a warm smile. That’s not just great coffee; it’s exceptional customer engagement. In the digital world, it’s about knowing your customers’ preferences, addressing their needs, and making them feel valued and heard. That’s the kind of connection that keeps customers coming back to your website or app for more. 

Boosts customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is the holy grail of business, and digital customer engagement is your treasure map. Engaged customers are not just one-time buyers; they’re your brand advocates. They’re the ones who sing your praises to their friends and followers on social media and keep coming back to choose you over the competition. They’re not just promoting a new product; they’re sharing valuable tips, responding to comments, and creating a community around their brand. 

Drives growth

Digital customer engagement isn’t just about warm and fuzzy feelings; it’s a growth engine. Engaged customers are more likely to convert, spend more, and stick around. When you engage with your customers effectively, you’re not just boosting sales; you’re increasing the lifetime value of each customer. 

For instance, imagine you run an online store, and a customer visits your website. They have a question about a product, so they click on the live chat option. Within seconds, they’re chatting with a friendly and knowledgeable support agent who answers their questions. That seamless experience not only clinches the sale but also creates a loyal customer who’s likely to return for future purchases. 

Enables the business to adapt and thrive

In the fast-paced world of the internet, change is the only constant. Customer preferences evolve, new technologies emerge, and competitors are always one click away. That’s where digital customer engagement shines. 

Imagine you notice a sudden drop in website traffic, and you’re not sure why. With the right digital engagement tools and analytics, you can quickly identify the issue, address it, and get back on track. It’s like having a GPS for your online business, helping you stay on course even when the road takes unexpected turns.

Digital customer engagement strategy

Having a well-thought-out digital customer engagement strategy sets the direction for all your digital channels and online presence. It ensures that you are not only connected with your audience but also leave a lasting impression.

We will look into some of the key strategies and tactics that can spearhead your digital customer engagement:

a. Web experimentation

You must constantly experiment with your website to enhance digital customer experience and engagement. By analyzing user behavior, you can identify pain points, areas of improvement, and new opportunities. Web experimentation involves making data-driven changes to your website to optimize its performance. 

A key web experimentation method is A/B testing. It can help you compare two versions of a webpage to see which one performs better. Such experiments can lead to substantial improvements in conversion rates, user engagement, and overall customer satisfaction. For example, the following image showcases two variations and control (original version) of the product page that are A/B tested to improve conversion.

b. Customer experience personalization

Customer experience personalization is like having a digital concierge that tailors every interaction to the individual customer. It’s about using data and insights to create a personalized experience that resonates with each customer. 

For example, if a customer frequently shops for running shoes, your e-commerce website can showcase the latest running shoe arrivals the next time they visit. These personalized touches go a long way in keeping customers engaged and coming back for more.

c. Content marketing

Content is the lifeblood of your digital engagement strategy. It’s the bridge that connects you with your audience, providing valuable information, entertainment, and solutions. Various forms of content, from whitepapers to webinars, play a pivotal role in creating digital customer engagement:

Whitepapers, reports, and ebooks

These in-depth pieces of content demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership. They offer valuable insights and solutions to your audience’s pain points. By providing free access to well-researched whitepapers, reports, or ebooks, you not only educate your audience but also establish trust and credibility. For example, VWO provides an in-depth A/B testing report that helps marketers get valuable insights about experimentation.

Online courses and webinars

Hosting online courses and webinars showcases your commitment to helping your audience grow and learn. These interactive formats allow for real-time engagement, enabling you to answer customer queries, address concerns, and build relationships. By consistently producing high-quality content that aligns with your audience’s interests and needs, you become a go-to resource. This keeps your audience engaged and encourages them to stay connected with your brand throughout their customer journey. For instance, Bain & Company conducts regular webinars on important business topics to regularly engage with their clients.

d. Integrated customer support

Exceptional customer support is the cornerstone of any successful digital engagement strategy. In the digital age, customers expect quick and convenient ways to get their questions answered and issues resolved. A robust contact center, equipped with knowledgeable contact center agents, is essential for delivering top-notch support. These agents are the human touchpoints in your digital space, available through multiple channels like chat, email, or phone. They play a crucial role in providing real-time assistance and creating positive customer experiences.

Moreover, a well-integrated contact center can also collect valuable data on customer interactions, allowing you to better understand customer pain points, preferences, and behaviors. This data can inform future engagement strategies, helping you continually improve customer relationships and build a base of loyal customers.

e. Multi-channel engagement

In today’s interconnected world, your audience engages with you through multiple channels. An effective digital engagement strategy embraces this multi-channel reality. By being present and responsive across all these channels, you create a seamless and consistent customer experience. Whether a customer reaches out via Facebook Messenger or your website’s live chat, they should receive the relevant experience as per the funnel stage.

f. Mining data-driven insights

Data provides valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. By continuously analyzing this data, you can refine your strategies, uncover new opportunities, and improve customer relationships by using a digital customer engagement platform.

For example, an educational portal is striving to create a vibrant online learning community. It uses a customer engagement platform to collect and analyze customer data from multiple sources and derive valuable insights. By tracking student behavior, preferences, and learning patterns, they tailor content and resources to individual needs, ensuring a personalized educational journey. This data-driven approach not only fosters greater student engagement but also boosts overall satisfaction, making the educational portal a trusted and preferred destination for eager learners

Digital customer engagement examples

Top-performing companies in the world utilize digital engagement strategies to keep delivering the best customer experience. Here are three examples to inspire you.

Nike

With thousands of product offerings in its arsenal, Nike understands the importance of tailoring the customer experience. They’ve built a digital engagement strategy that’s akin to having a personal shopping assistant right at your fingertips.

Here’s how it works: When you visit Nike’s website, they invite you to choose your interest. Whether it’s a specific sport, product category, or athlete, you’re in the driver’s seat. 

Once you’ve made your selection, the magic happens. Nike’s platform serves up a curated selection of products that match your chosen interest. It’s like having a virtual shopping aisle customized just for you. This approach makes the browsing experience not only convenient but also highly engaging.

Customers can explore products that align with their passions and preferences, creating a sense of connection with the brand that goes beyond just making a purchase.

IMB Bank

One of the best banks in the world, IMB Bank, wanted to improve customer engagement on its digital platform. Recognizing the need to enhance its digital customer engagement, this global banking giant utilized VWO.

IMB Bank began its journey by analyzing the user journey on its digital platform. Through funnel analysis, they uncovered a significant bottleneck – approximately 37% of users were dropping off at the first page of their personal loan application form. Armed with this insight, they decided to roll up their sleeves and launch an A/B test using VWO.

The existing personal loan application form page (control) was tested against a variation. The variation introduced several strategic elements, including highlighting unique selling propositions (USPs), showcasing awards, mentioning the time taken to complete the steps, enhancing the overall form design for easier navigation, and providing clear instructions at each step to enhance user clarity.

The results? A 9% increase in users completing the form.

IMB Bank’s success story with VWO is a shining example of how leveraging digital engagement strategies can yield not only higher engagement but also impressive conversions. 

Spotify

In the ever-evolving world of digital music streaming, Spotify orchestrated a brilliant strategy known as “Spotify Wrapped” back in 2016 that has become music to its users’ ears. This annual campaign is a testament to the power of personalized engagement. 

Spotify Wrapped offers users a delightful recap of their year in music and podcasts, presenting a customized list of their top tunes and most-played podcasts. It’s like a musical journey down memory lane, perfectly tailored for each user. Also, users can easily share this recap on their social media platforms, igniting discussions and fostering connections with friends.

This campaign isn’t just about celebrating the music; it’s a digital engagement masterpiece. By curating a unique experience for every user and encouraging them to share their musical journey, Spotify not only engages its audience but also creates a sense of community. 

Spotify Wrapped has become a yearly tradition that users eagerly anticipate, strengthening their bond with the platform. It’s a shining example of how personalization, user-generated content, and social sharing can drive digital customer engagement.

Digital customer engagement trends in 2023

After 2020, brands are finding new ways and deploying new technologies to acquire, engage, and retain customers. Here are three major digital engagement trends to watch in 2023.

Generative AI

In 2023, companies will be using Generative AI to transform digital customer engagement. From personalized content and recommendations to innovative chatbots and product design, Generative AI is redefining the rules of engagement.

Thanks to Generative AI, companies can analyze data streams such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and social media activity to curate content and recommendations that cater to individual interests and preferences. For example, Netflix uses generative AI to recommend new movies and TV shows, and Amazon uses it to generate personalized product recommendations for its customers.

Moreover, conversational AI and chatbots powered by Generative AI provide 24/7 customer support, answering inquiries and collecting feedback naturally and engagingly. These AI-driven interactions create a seamless and personalized customer journey.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

AR and VR technology create immersive experiences that blend the digital and real worlds. AR adds digital elements to our physical surroundings, while VR transports users to entirely virtual environments. Businesses are using this technology in innovative ways. For instance, furniture companies are allowing customers to virtually place new furniture in their homes using AR. Clothing brands are enabling customers to try on outfits in a digital mirror. 

AR/VR is also revolutionizing customer support. For example, a car company can use AR to allow a customer service representative to see what a driver is experiencing through their windshield, providing real-time instructions to troubleshoot an issue. These technologies offer a unique way to visualize products, fostering a deeper connection between customers and brands.

Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization is all about delivering unique, tailored experiences to individual customers by leveraging data, analytics, AI, and machine learning. It helps redefine digital customer engagement and keeps customers coming back for more.

Businesses collect a wealth of data, including demographics, purchase history, browsing behavior, and social media activity, to fuel hyper-personalization. This approach serves as a dynamic catalyst for digital customer engagement by delivering relevant, captivating content. For instance, retailers can send personalized emails suggesting products based on past purchases, while streaming services recommend content aligned with viewing habits and preferences.

Hyper-personalization nurtures stronger, more personal relationships by demonstrating a profound understanding of individual needs. It’s a game-changer for businesses looking to stand out in a crowded market and build loyal customer bases.

Watch the webinar to learn more about personalization:

Conclusion

In the fierce competition to stay at the top of the business, the ability to establish personal, timely, and relevant interactions with your customers is essential for distinguishing your brand. It requires demonstrating not only a deep understanding of your customer’s unique needs but also having the right products and services to meet those needs.

Digital customer engagement is not simply a technological undertaking to experiment with; it is something that enables you to develop strong relationships with your customers, foster meaningful engagement, enhance your cross-channel marketing efforts, and maximize your return on investment to unprecedented levels.

FAQs

In a world where competition is intense and customers have it all figured out, it’s easy to focus on what’s trending and achieve short-term success through it.

But, if you look at the bigger picture, gaining trust and building a long-term relationship with your customers is what really matters. 

It’s the most basic aspect of any business, yet a lot of brands are struggling to achieve it. 

Why?

Because, they fail to focus on the three key pillars of long-term success: customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction. 

Without proper strategies for each of these pillars, you will find it tough to grow your business and build brand loyalty. So, let’s take a closer look at what these aspects entail and how you can ensure long-term growth and success by implementing them.

What is customer engagement? Why is it important?

Just like the name suggests, the concept of customer engagement is all about building a relationship with your customers. It refers to the interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand across various touchpoints. 

Customer engagement is a measure of how well your business can capture and maintain a customer’s interest, attention, and involvement over time. 

For example, let’s say you manage an e-commerce brand and want to improve customer engagement. 

One of the things that you can do is send a personalized email to the customer as soon as they purchase a product. Apart from thanking them for making a purchase, your email can also include helpful information about the product like how it can be used, tips for maintenance, instructions for claiming a warranty, and so on. 

Post the purchase, you can follow up with the customer regularly to share updates, exclusive offers, and customer feedback requests while also sharing relevant, helpful content on your social media pages. 

By doing so, you are creating a positive customer experience that involves personalized interactions, continuous support, and a sense of community, ensuring that your customer feels valued and supported. 

As a result, customers are more likely to stay loyal to your brand, share positive experiences with others, and they will also consider you for their future needs. Moreover, they will also be willing to provide valuable customer feedback and suggestions to improve the business.

In other words, an effective customer engagement strategy involves nurturing relationships, showing genuine care, and providing value beyond the initial sale. 

It’s a two-way street that benefits the customer and the business too.

What is customer experience? Why is it important?

Customer experience refers to the overall journey and interaction that a customer has with a brand, product, or service. It covers every touchpoint and interaction a customer has, right from awareness to post-purchase.

While customer engagement & customer experience are similar concepts, they focus on different aspects of the relationship between brands & customers. 

Let’s consider the previous example of managing an e-commerce brand. 

To increase customer engagement, you sent personalized emails, shared helpful content on social media, and ensured healthy interactions with the customer.

Now, to improve customer experience, you can start by building a user-friendly website experience. Every product on your website will include high-quality images, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, etc.

Additionally, you can ensure that the entire checkout process is simple and hassle-free. Post the purchase, you can also provide prompt customer support, timely order fulfillment, and an easy return/refund process. 

By doing so, you are building a holistic experience for the customer that includes improved website usability, high-quality customer support, a smooth checkout process, and post-purchase assistance as well.

In short, customer experience is all about how you make your customers feel across their entire journey with you. A positive customer experience will help you to build a strong, loyal customer base and can improve your brand reputation too.

What is customer satisfaction? Why is it important?

Customer satisfaction refers to the extent to which customers are happy and content with their interactions and experiences, with a product, service, or brand.

It reflects how well a company meets or exceeds customer expectations. 

High customer satisfaction indicates that customers are happy with their overall experience, while low customer satisfaction suggests areas of improvement.

Let’s understand customer satisfaction with the same e-commerce brand example. Your customers will feel happy and satisfied when the products they receive match the images and descriptions available on your website.

Another way to improve customer satisfaction is to ensure that the products are delivered on time and the quality of the products also match their expectations. 

You can build on this by offering prompt assistance and asking for customer feedback. By doing so, you can focus on meeting and exceeding the expectations of your customers, which is what customer satisfaction is all about. 

How are customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction related?

As we saw before, regular interactions with your customers along with strategies to improve experience, will eventually contribute to high levels of customer satisfaction.

These three pillars – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction – complement each other while also helping you build customer loyalty and achieve long-term success.

While these three concepts are quite distinct, they are also interconnected and often influence one another. Let’s have a closer look at how each pillar is related to each other. 

Customer engagement vs. customer experience:

As we know, customer engagement is all about having healthy and personalized interactions at every touchpoint. By doing so, you build a connection with the customer which again contributes to building a positive customer experience.

When customers are actively engaged through personalized interactions, relevant content, and meaningful connections, their overall ‘experience’ with the brand becomes more positive and memorable.

Thus, engaged customers will more likely have a better experience because they are actively involved in their interactions with the brand. 

When you engage in these interactions across various touch points such as email recommendations, helpful content, and social media interactions, it enhances the customer experience, making it more dynamic and layered. 

Customer experience vs. customer satisfaction:

As we noticed in our previous examples of managing an e-commerce brand, creating a positive customer experience plays a huge role in improving customer satisfaction. 

When you provide a seamless experience throughout the customer journey with a brand, it eventually leads to higher satisfaction levels, as customers feel their needs and expectations have been met or exceeded.

This creates a positive perception of the brand in the minds of the customers, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction vs. customer engagement:

Customer satisfaction is known to be the foundation for customer engagement.

When customers feel satisfied with your brand, they are more likely to engage with you further, either through more purchases, referrals, or even participating in activities that you organize.

High customer satisfaction also means that customers are more likely to stick with your brand since their positive experiences have laid the groundwork for trust and loyalty.

So, when you successfully engage customers, provide memorable experiences, and ensure their satisfaction, you create a positive cycle that results in increased loyalty, repeat business, positive word-of-mouth, and sustainable long-term growth.

In other words, customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction are all connected elements that hold the key to the relationship you have with your customers.

Which is more important: customer engagement, customer experience, or customer satisfaction?

If your goal is to build a successful, customer-centric business while also achieving loyalty and long-term growth, you need all three – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction.  

This is because these three pillars are interconnected. They can only deliver results when you implement them together to create a positive and lasting relationship with your customers. 

As we know, customer engagement is a crucial component for building a relationship and promoting brand loyalty. When customers feel engaged, they are more likely to interact with you, share their experiences, and provide valuable feedback.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is a ‘must-have’ at every touchpoint. It ensures that every aspect of the customer journey is designed to provide a positive experience.

Without this, you will find it challenging to engage customers effectively. 

Thus, customer experience is considered to be the foundation upon which both customer engagement and customer satisfaction are built. 

Customer satisfaction reflects how well your brand meets or exceeds customer expectations. High customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business. 

So, rather than trying to figure out what’s more important, you should develop a culture where these elements work together to provide customers with high levels of satisfaction, memorable experiences, and genuine engagement.

Examples of good customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction

Having a balanced approach toward each of these ideas is crucial for the long-term growth and success of any company. Let’s have a look at some real-life examples of brands that have successfully incorporated each of them.

Customer engagement example

UK Tool Centre, an e-commerce platform that offers a huge range of over 42,000 products, wanted to improve engagement on one of its product pages. 

The page offered a brand of woodcare products called Cuprinol and had a filter menu right at the top. It was theorized that this filter menu was distracting users from exploring the products. 

So, the company ran a test where they compared the original product page (control) with another version of the page (variation). 

In the original version of the page, the filter menu was placed just above the Cuprinol listing.

In the variation, the filter menu was completely removed from the page, making it easier for the users to explore all the products. 

Once the test was conducted, the variation saw a 27% increase in engagement on the product page. 

This was possible because the company identified the needs of its customers and removed distractions from the page. Users were now able to have a better look at the products, which again increased engagement on the page.  

Through this simple customer engagement strategy, UK Tool Centre was able to encourage healthy interactions with its audience. 

Customer experience example

Buyakilt.com, an online Kilt and Scottish Highland Dress retailer, had multiple category pages along with many more subcategory pages.

The company wanted to test whether a new product filter would make it easier for customers to find what they were looking for. 

With the help of VWO, they ran a test to confirm whether this change would improve customer experience, and in turn, increase conversions. 

The new variation included a product filter, which allowed users to shop by kilt type, kilt pattern, and so on.

After the test was completed, Buyakilt.com registered a whopping 76.1% increase in revenue. Moreover, they also saw a 26% increase in conversions along with a 19.76% increase in shopping cart visits. 

One of the main reasons for this success was that a simple feature offered an easier way to take action, thus improving the overall customer experience. 

Customer satisfaction example

Archive Social is a US-based brand that helps organizations fulfill their legal requirements and avoid lawsuits on social media. 

The company wanted to improve lead generation through its pricing page and also increase conversions from a banner form on its home page.

Working with the VWO team, Archive Social made some observations about areas that needed improvement. These areas were affecting conversions and were also preventing the company from satisfying customer expectations. 

To begin with, they noticed that the email form field was shown at the very button of their home page banner. This made it difficult for users to differentiate the field from the rest of the page.

They ran a test with a new variation where the email field had better placement and visibility. After running the campaign for 27 days, the variation saw a massive increase of 101.68% in terms of clicks on the email field. 

Next, Archive Social ran a test on their pricing page. Here, the variation included a completely revamped page where the primary CTA button was highlighted and the pricing options & features displayed were extremely simple.

After running the test for seven weeks, the variation saw a huge jump of 64.76% in conversions and visits to the ‘Thank you’ page.

In their final campaign, the company wanted to increase traffic to the gated content on their ‘Resources’ page. To do so, they created a new variation by adding the ‘Resources’ category to the top navigation bar.

They ran this campaign for 10 days and registered a 73.30% uplift in traffic for the new variation. Thus, Archive Social understood the needs of their audience and the results clearly show that they also satisfied customer expectations. 

The above examples prove that no matter the industry, you can always achieve long-term growth by focusing on three basic aspects of any successful business – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

I was evaluating two skincare brands to make a decision on which one would be the best fit for me. I remember receiving generic emails from one luxury skincare brand that simply spoke about their achievements and who they were. It felt impersonal and lacked the emotional connection I was looking for. On the other hand, I received emails from another luxury skincare brand that were personalized to my preferences and skin concerns. This level of customization not only showed that they cared about my individual needs, but it also made me feel valued as a customer. 

And this got me thinking – as much as brands love the idea of using personalization in their marketing efforts, not every brand gets it right. 

Personalization isn’t just about sending out random discounts or automated birthday greetings. It’s about understanding the customer, their preferences, and behavior across different touchpoints and delivering a tailored experience. 

This is where visitor or customer data lays the foundation of kickass personalized campaigns. If brands don’t collect and bring together customer data, they’ll be light years away from acing their personalization game.

In this blog, I discuss why and how you can use data to get personalization right so you connect with your audiences and improve their experiences with your brand. Let’s begin then. 

What Data Should You Track?

Long gone are those days when businesses could rely on just identification data to create basic-level personalized content. 

Today, you need to track everything a customer does across their buying journey starting from awareness to purchase and even post-purchase. So, here are the types of user data you need to collect to deliver personalized experiences.

1. Identification Data

This type of data provides basic demographic information about a person.

• Name
• Location
• Contact
• Age
• Job title

2. Descriptional Data

This data centers around where users work, their habits, and their lifestyles. 

• In which company do they work?
• What is the size of the company?
• What’s the salary they get?
• Lifestyle, habits, and hobbies of visitors.

3. Contextual Data

Contextual data shows a visitor’s unique properties and gives context to their session on your website. 

• Are they using a desktop, mobile, or tablet?
• What is the location of the device?
• Which browser do they use?
• What day of the week did they last purchase?
• What time of the day do they purchase?

4. Behavioral Data

Behavioral data tells a great deal about a user’s interactions with your brand. Such data will answer questions like:

• How many times has a user purchased from your website?
• Has any user brought the same product twice?
• What products do a user search for the most on your website?
• Has the user clicked on any upsell offers?
• How many times does a user interact with a live chat?
• How many times a user has opened the monthly newsletter email?

When you combine the power of all types of data, you unlock the real magic of personalization. 

How Can You Track & Use Data For Personalization?

Collecting data from multiple customer touchpoints is challenging already. Using this data in the proper context is even more difficult. Wondering who can make the job easy for you? The answer is simple – a Customer Data Platform.

If you want to strike a chord with your customers through your personalization efforts, then a CDP is going to be your true friend and guide. Here are some reasons why CDPs are a must-have for modern businesses.

1. Collect & Unify Data

Collecting and bringing together all the data is step one in the personalization game. From what your users are searching for on your website to how they’re interacting with your email campaigns, to even if they clicked on your targeted ads or checked out a product demo in-store, your CDP can scoop up data from everywhere.  Whether you want to keep tabs on what your visitors are up to, track their behavior, or see how they react to different things, your CDP brings it all together from a ton of sources (like DMPs, CRMs, ABMs, browsers, and so on). Then it unites them all together in its database so you can use them to send out personalized campaigns across channels through any third-party platforms you want.

2. Single Customer View

With the data all consolidated and brought together, the CDP can now create a Single Customer View (SCV) where you can find everything related to a visitor in a single profile page – properties, attributes, segments, and experiments they are part of. This view hosts real-time and accurate data on each visitor that allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to deliver the right message at the right time to each individual.

Okay, let’s think back to my experience with the luxury skincare brand that sent generic emails. If they had a super smart single customer view with all that extra data, they could’ve easily sent me tailored offers or content based on my preferences or concerns. Not taking advantage of all that data to connect with customers at the right time is a big loss, right?

Further, having a centralized view ensures that all individuals within your organization know where to access customer data. This streamlines the process and eliminates the need to spend time searching for and verifying data, thereby increasing its usefulness and value for your company as a whole.

3. Segmentation

Okay, now that SCVs are ready, it’s time to figure out who your key website visitors are so you can better cater to their needs. Segmentation is a surefire way to do that. Let me give you an example to help you understand.

So you’re the owner of an online shoe store and you’re curious to see how well your new orthopedic shoes are doing in Canada. Based on the data drawn from SCVs, you group customers aged between 40-55 sharing a common interest in this type of shoes in a single cohort. Within this, you further see that most of them are women. All you want to know now is where they’re finding out about your product, and it turns out they’re coming from organic search results. Now that you’ve narrowed it down to a very specific segment, you can start an ad campaign aimed at these customers who looked for these shoes but didn’t buy anything yet.

 This is how a CDP allows you to unlock the power of data, fine-tune your customer segmentation, and launch targeted campaigns for maximum conversion. Also, this is just one way to use customer data for personalization. You can also use it to make all sorts of personalized campaigns, like email, website content, and push notifications.

Why VWO For Data And Personalization?

VWO Data360 is the robust customer data platform you need to add to your martech stack. Of course, there is a multitude of choices available in the market. But when you opt for VWO Data360, you enjoy the benefits of some fantastic features that set this platform apart from the rest. Here are some of them:

1. Houses Advanced User Behavioral Insights

VWO has a host of behavioral analytics tools like heatmaps, form analytics, session recordings, and survey analytics. You can use behavioral data from here to feed into data collection in Data360 and therefore create accurate and up-to-date customer profiles. 

2. Allows Creation Of Custom Business Metrics

From average order value to lifetime value per user, you can build and track complicated metrics like these by applying rules on the user’s page-level engagement. In fact, any numerical data that is seen to impact your business goals can be turned into a metric only on this platform!

3. Integrates With Other VWO Capabilities

VWO Data360 and VWO Personalize work hand in hand to deliver the ultimate personalized experience. Data360 collects and consolidates data from all sources, creating a single customer view. This data is then seamlessly integrated with Personalize, which allows you to segment your audience and launch tailored campaigns based on their interests, behaviors, and attributes. 

An example of how personalization with VWO works

Imagine yours is a hotel booking website, and you’re using Data360 which collects data from various sources and consolidates them to create SCVs for every visitor. 

Based on data collected by the CDP, let’s say you create a segment of visitors aged between 30-45 looking for hotels that offer cab rentals in Manhattan, one of the premier business districts in the US. Next, you head over to VWO Personalize to launch a personalized website banner where you offer 20% off on booking business hotels with cab rentals targeting this user segment. 

Here’s another scenario. Say you want to promote the Las Vegas romantic package your company has curated very recently. You can use CDP data to create a segment of audiences from the US who interacted with your social media post announcing the launch of this new package. Through Personalize, you can set up a campaign where you show a pop-up that reads – Discover why Las Vegas is called the Romantic Capital of the world. Individuals who engage further with this pop-up may be given a discount if they make a booking for this package. Driven by data from start to end, this is a step-by-step process to nurture leads and ultimately push them down the hotel conversion funnel.

No matter in which industry you operate, the collaboration between Data360 and Personalize makes it easy for you to deliver a data-backed seamless personalization strategy that drives results. 

What About Data Privacy?

Data and privacy go hand in hand and there are no two ways about it. This is why VWO is built on a privacy-first approach that adheres to global data protection standards and regulations. 

Its Data360 feature uses secure architecture and tight privacy controls to protect visitor data. Enterprise-grade encryption is used to hash unique user IDs and PII is automatically removed from profiles. Additional filters and rules can be added for further data security. All data is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform and distributed across multiple global locations. 

Along with other stand certifications, VWO is compliant with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

Your Journey To Data-Driven Personalization Starts Today

If you don’t mind me being a little dramatic, I’d say data and personalization are a match made in heaven. While you need data to personalize, you need to personalize to make sense of all data, otherwise, it’s like a bunch of Legos serving no purpose when scattered but giving rise to something meaningful when organized properly. 

With VWO Data360 and VWO Personalize, you can harness the power of data like never before. And the best part is you can make the most of other VWO capabilities like behavioral insight analytics, experimentation, deploy, program management, and so on. Take a full-featured trial to chart your path to data-backed personalization. 

To measure personalization success, you decide to keep track of a certain metric. But the metric tells you about the progress in weight lifting, and there is no clue about the improvement in cycling time. Without any idea of your cycling performance, you enter the race. Do you think you will win the competition?

While it’s a no-brainer that the situation and your chances of winning will be odd, this example teaches the importance of tracking the right metric. The right metric navigates you toward your goal and prevents you from getting lost on the wrong path. 

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Metrics measurement has the same importance when it comes to the personalization of consumer experience. Each metric has its significance and contributes differently to personalization success. Thus, it’s important to know when to track a particular metric depending on the goal.

So, let’s dive into metric measurement and its relationship to the success of a personalization campaign. We will then look at ROI tracking of personalization because a positive ROI is the ultimate aim of any business, and it decides the continuation/repetition of the campaign.

Personalization and its significance

Before going forward, let’s understand personalization and its significance in your marketing strategy.

Personalization is customizing the experience of returning users to make them feel more connected. The whole process of this customization is based on data gathered from past interactions, behavior, and customer background.

The reason personalization is so important is that it makes the customer feel special and see things of interest at different touchpoints. Thus, making the customer stay for a longer time, increasing the lifetime value of a customer, and reducing the customer acquisition cost. 

Now, let’s move on to the crucial part of measuring personalization success with the key metrics.

Key metrics to measure personalization success

Forrester conducted a survey that included 372 business decision-makers. The survey revealed that only 30% of firms have the right metrics to measure the success of their personalization program. The key metrics are equivalent to understanding your customer’s response to your digital communication effort. Some of these key metrics are as follows:

Here’s an explanation for each of the metrics –

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

It is one of the key metrics that is mainly used in the SaaS industry. This metric is tracked when you roll extensions and packages tailored for customer segments. For example, say a company offers a SaaS marketing tool with an off-page SEO analysis feature. Now, the company is rolling out an on-page SEO analyzer with a $5 increase in subscription for its loyal customer segments in the initial stages. In such a situation, tracking ARPU becomes crucial to know the effectiveness of the campaign to roll out the extension. 

An increase in the average revenue per user means that the personalized campaigns to suggest extensions and packages have successfully aligned with the customer’s needs and interests. Thus, this metric summarizes the ROI of the marketing campaigns. 

Here is the formula for ARPU calculation:

Cart abandonment

This metric combined with past customer behavior data helps understand your customers’ purchase behavior. For instance, say you have a group of regular customers that buy whenever there’s an offer discount, and in a recent buying journey, they abandoned the cart because there were no new promotions or offers. This particular behavior helps in segmenting the group as discount seekers. You can personalize the upcoming campaign with offers for this specific group and again track the cart abandonment rate to check the success of the personalization measure.

Also, sometimes due to a lack of payment options, users drop out at the last step. Thus, when you test your payment gateway page with new payment methods, tracking the abandonment rate helps in knowing their efficacy. 

So, this key metric is vital when you enrich your customer’s experience with new favorable payment methods or offers on the product. Also, this data is required for segmenting users, who can be targeted with custom digital marketing ads and communication.

The equation to calculate cart abandonment is as follows:

Churn rate

Churn rate helps you gauge the dissatisfaction in customers while using your product or service in the follow-up interaction. When you want to increase the revenue from returning users, then tracking this metric is vital.

Churn rate tracking before and after personalization helps in knowing whether the tailored experience is keeping up with customers’ expectations. 

Here is the formula for the churn rate:

Click-through rate (CTR)

A website, whether a SaaS or eCommerce platform, has multiple call-to-action buttons which guide the customer to make a decision. Tracking the CTR of these buttons is essential when the goal is to understand the effect of UI/UX on the customer’s decision. CTR tracking of buttons like add to wishlist, add to cart, read details, etc. helps pinpoint where the customer is finding ease or difficulty in navigation. 

CTR tracking in personalization becomes vital when the returning customer sees the product catalog based on interest and past purchases. Thus, tracking CTR buttons before and after personalization aids in making the UI/UX and product recommendation better, which in turn affects sales. 

The formula to calculate CTR is as follows:

Conversion rate

Conversion rate gives you a complete picture of your sales cycle and its weak points. This metric helps in testing hypotheses related to gaps and personalization measures. 

It also tells you about the impact of the product recommendation mechanism, especially when the revenue has a significant chunk from returning customers. 

You must track this key metric for personalization when you see a stream of traffic but lowering/ stagnant sales and if you are testing new features for a custom experience.

Here is how you can calculate the conversion rate:

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV is tracked when the long-term association is in view with multiple transactions between a customer and the company. Personalization success monitoring with this key metric determines whether the experience was as per customers’ needs. You track it not just for one campaign but for a larger picture.

The formula for CLV measurement is as follows:

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Increase in average order value

This metric is essential when you want to improve cross-selling, subscriptions, and related course sales. The success of the personalized products section on the webpage is known through this metric.

One example is Bear Mattress, which utilized VWO to redesign the cross-sell flow and personalize the recommendation based on purchase behavior history. The goal to increase order value and key metric tracking helped them increase revenue by 16%. 

An increase in average order value is calculated as follows:

User progress and usage

A metric that is the heart of eLearning website analytics, you must measure it after the personalization of study material and courses for the user. It helps validate hypotheses for personalized course recommendations.

The formula to measure user progress and usage:

Now, that we know the importance of metric tracking in personalization success, let’s move on to an overview of the ROI of personalization measurement. Personalization is worthy only when it positively contributes to the ROI.

Keeping a check on the ROI of your personalization campaign

There is no doubt that personalization increases revenue. As per Deloitte, Starbucks once carried out a personalization campaign that included 400k personalized messages. The campaign saw a threefold increase in the offer redemption.

ROI from personalization must be checked on a dashboard with pre and post-personalization campaign results rather than in silos. To check ROI, go through the Conversion Rate, ARPU, and Average Order Value of the control group to whom you showed the personalization campaign and compare it with your previous data.

Also, it’s necessary to monitor human resource involvement, third-party tool usage, and disruption (if any) in the regular flow of work while measuring the ROI. 

In the end, to improve the ROI of the personalization program, the foundation needs to be strong. This means you must have a robust data strategy that fills all the gaps and creates a strong visual of the consumer journey.

Measuring personalization success with VWO

VWO Personalize makes personalization easy and effective. It helps you trigger unique experiences for specific audiences at the right place and time by – 

1. Leveraging visitor data 
2. Prompting experiences via triggers that are based on visitors’ persona or events like when one refreshes a page
3. Helping you create experiences via the visual editor without relying on developers each time 

With VWO Personalize, you can track how your personalization campaigns impact the conversion rate for the metrics associated with the campaigns. Our platform allows you to track the following goals:

1. Page Visits 
2. Form Submits 
3. Clicks on Link 
4. Clicks on Element(s) 
5. Revenue 
6. Custom Conversion 
7. Engagement

The VWO Personalize report dashboard shows real-time conversions and is easy to read, which assists in better business decisions. The ongoing personalization journeys can be optimized based on report observations.  

Conclusion

The true potential of personalization is unlocked with the right metric tracking. It’s like becoming a pro in bike racing, measuring your cycling performance each time, analyzing faults, and making more personalized efforts to grab the competition trophy, while your competition is still measuring weight lifts or making efforts without any analysis.

In the growing business competition, your trophy is a loyal consumer base, and personalization measured with the right metric is your effort. Metric tracking will help you personalize and become the true server to a loyal consumer base. 

Let VWO Personalize become a partner in your journey, and it will do the heavy lifting of bringing you accurate reports on your key metrics. Also, create 1000s of consumer journeys, run A/B tests, create variations with an easy-to-use visual editor, measure ROI, and get behavior insights on a single dashboard. Grab a free demo for all the VWO features and capabilities including personalization.

Truly personalized marketing has become a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. This is because customers have already come to expect a certain amount of customization, such as their name appearing at the top of a marketing email. Now, they’re looking for the next level, such as web pages that automatically display content based on their preferences or location-based ads for special offers at nearby stores.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Luckily, technology is on our side, with automation and machine learning making it easier to provide truly personalized marketing content. Let’s explore what that means for your business.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing is the practice of targeting content to specific customers based on data you’ve collected. This includes their interests, preferences, and behaviors. Companies use this data to create highly customized content, which is delivered to customers via email, ads, or other platforms. For example, VWO Personalize enables you to deliver thousands of unique journeys tailor-made for a specific audience and triggered at the right time. You can take a free trial if you’d like to explore it.

Customer data is collected using automated tools and smart algorithms, which is where machine learning comes in. Typically, a code is added to the website, enabling the machine to capture valuable data such as clicks, time spent on site, and purchase history. With the right technology, you can also collect data from customer interactions across multiple channels.

Data collection also includes gathering information on customer demographics, such as age, gender, location, and financial status. Once you’ve collected all the relevant data, the algorithms will analyze it and identify which customers should receive which content.

The aim is to create a great experience that feels unique to each customer. This means reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. Think: 

• Custom emails (and we don’t just mean inserting their name instead of “Dear customer”)
• Targeted discounts 
• Product recommendations 
• Birthday offers 
• Rewards for loyal customers

Benefits of personalized marketing

Personalization lends an important human touch to your marketing strategy (even if everyone knows it’s carried out by a machine). It makes your prospect feel valued, as the brand has made an effort to find out what they want.

Customer happiness leads to increased loyalty. This has a positive impact on your acquisition costs (it’s typically cheaper to keep the customers you’ve got). Loyal patrons will also recommend you to others. This, in turn, enhances your reputation and attracts more business.

Plus, personalized marketing can improve your ROI, as tailored recommendations encourage customers to spend more than they would with traditional advertising. According to one survey, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that remember them and provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Meanwhile, 63% of US marketers see increased conversion rates as the main benefit of personalization. So, if you’re worrying about conversions and revenue and asking, “How long does it take to see SEO results?”, it’s worth devoting your marketing efforts to personalization.

Challenges of personalized marketing

Personalized marketing isn’t a walk in the park. For one thing, you have to make sure your customers aren’t put off by having their preferences and behaviors tracked and analyzed. There are also data privacy laws to navigate.

Another challenge is that you need to collect a lot of data to accurately predict what customers want. This is in addition to segmenting customers based on things like age, gender, and location. And you’ll want to carry out experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s time-consuming to do any of this at scale.

Even if you use a tool such as Apache Hadoop to process and store large volumes of big data (Read this Databricks article about Hadoop software), it’s not possible to manually create personalized emails or ads for every customer. That’s where machine learning comes in.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables machines to learn continually from data. Algorithms analyze large datasets to identify trends and relationships between data, using their findings to predict which actions or experiences are most likely to give a certain result.

The machines get smarter the more data they absorb. After a while, they become capable of making their own decisions and adjusting their actions without human input.

It might sound wildly futuristic, but we all experience machine learning in our everyday lives. If you browse an item on a retail website, expect to see it advertised on your social media feeds. When you type a message on WhatsApp, suggested words pop up based on your previous message content. And when you log in to Amazon or Netflix, you’ll see recommendations tailored to your preferences.

How is it used in marketing?

In personalized marketing, ML is used to analyze the type of content, keywords, and phrases that grab the attention of your target consumers. Once you’ve discovered what matters to them, you can create relevant content or infographics. And, over time, the machine will learn which content is most effective for meeting particular goals.

Here are some of the techniques commonly used in machine learning:

Regression analysis

This is a statistical method that allows you to examine the relationship between two or more variables. You can use linear regression to figure out which pages are most likely to lead to conversions, as a regression equation can reveal a definite relationship between the number of clicks on a certain page and the number of conversions. Logistical regression is used to analyze historical shopping behavior data, which helps you determine personalized follow-up actions to deal with cart abandonment.

Clustering algorithms

These algorithms help you, group customers, into segments by analyzing unlabeled data, separating it into groups based on shared characteristics and qualities, and assigning it into clusters. 

They can be applied for recommendation engine development and social media analysis. The idea is that if a connection exists between people, they often have a common set of preferences, so you could be confident that followers of a particular Facebook page would react positively to an ad for something similar. 

Association rules

Association rules reveal interesting relationships between different variables in huge databases and can also be used to build recommendation engines. For example, if you buy a new phone on Amazon, you might see a recommendation for a suitable phone case. This is based on the fact that other customers bought both items together, and the computer has learned that it’s a popular action.

Markov chains

This method is used to model probabilities, such as analyzing a user’s real-time website behavior and making navigation predictions based on it. A machine might spot that most visitors click on CTA buttons when they’re positioned in the middle of the page, so the web designer knows to set all pages up that way in the future.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Why is machine learning so effective for personalized marketing?

Personalization at scale

Machine learning tools learn about customer preferences much faster than humans can. They’re able to process huge amounts of data almost instantly and make smart decisions based on it. 

For example, the machine knows when someone has abandoned their shopping cart and automatically generates a personalized follow-up email. Take a look at the following example, where the message includes the shopper’s name and gives them an incentive to return:

Deeper insights

ML is useful for gaining a deeper understanding of your audience. Machines can learn from filters that allow website visitors to sort items by category and deep behavioral tracking that monitors mouse movement, scrolling, and time spent per page. Google’s deep learning technology enables it to come up with suggested searches for individual users.

They can also analyze interactions using Natural Language Processing (NLP), where computers learn to understand spoken words and text in a human-like way, and sentiment analysis, where the machine can tell if the participants’ attitudes are positive or negative. Both techniques help marketers to realize when a customer is unhappy, or find the ideal opportunity to upsell.

Adjustable actions

Because machine learning enables computers to develop knowledge and analyze data constantly, it means that evolving customer characteristics and behaviors can be taken into account. 

If a customer has been with you for a long time, their tastes and circumstances may change. Machine learning helps you be prepared for that, as the tools can adjust and refine content for the most up-to-date preferences.

For example, Salesforce has an AI called Einstein, which is capable of adjusting its modeling with every customer interaction and additional piece of data it receives.

Best practices for using machine learning in personalized marketing

A massive 93% of global B2B professionals believe that personalization efforts on their websites have paid off in revenue growth. But how can you ensure that machine learning augments those efforts most effectively? Here are some tips on how to get it right.

Put the customer first

Sounds obvious, but you should always keep the customer experience at the top of your mind. Don’t get so carried away with new technology that you forget why you’re using it. If there’s a situation where a live phone call would work better than a personalized email (such as compensating a customer for a problem or mistake), go for it. 

You can also use ML to strengthen the customer support experience with options like chatbots and voice-activated search.

Timing is key

Personalized marketing isn’t just about tailoring the content of your messages. The right timing is crucial if you want the recipient to engage fully. Every customer is unique, and they don’t all check their emails or browse social media at the same time of day. Machine learning lets you customize send/display times based on previous behaviors, which is called “intelligent delivery.”

Use A/B testing

A/B testing compares the original version of your digital property with one or more variations and measures the difference against defined goals. It uniformly splits your traffic between versions to determine which version fares better. This means that a significant proportion of your traffic is sent to an underperforming variation.

To maximize conversions in the experimentation time window, VWO offers multi-armed bandit (MAB) testing. The MAB algorithm allocates traffic dynamically – which means it continuously identifies the outperforming variation based on the data obtained during the test and routes the majority of the traffic dynamically and in real-time to this winning variant. 

So if you have a short window for optimization and not enough time to wait for statistical significance, you can opt for this machine-learning-based testing to maximize your conversions. To know more about this, take a free trial with VWO or request a demo with our MAB experts. 

Personalize your website

As well as personalizing pop-up ads or emails, you can tailor web pages and apps to suit specific customers. When someone browses the site or app, the content they see can be personalized based on things like gender, location, and whether they’re a new customer. Again, Amazon and Netflix are particularly good at this. Take a free trial to see how VWO Personalize can help you with this. 

Take an omnichannel approach

Customers like to use whichever channel is most convenient to them at the time, so make sure personalization extends across all of them. You can use functional testing tools to check your websites and apps are working as intended, with the right messages reaching the right users.

The more channels you have, the more data there will be! You might also use pandas DataFrames to load data from different databases and data formats to get a complete view and segment records within a data frame. (Read this Databricks article about pandas DataFrame structure).

Takeaway

As people are bombarded with marketing messages from a growing range of channels, you need to cut through the noise with truly relevant content. Machine learning allows you to:

• Personalize your marketing messages at scale 
• Make the data-gathering process more efficient 
• Experiment with your messaging to drive conversions

However, marketing teams need not fear for their jobs. Machines are not yet capable of displaying creative intelligence or consciousness. So smart marketers can combine AI with human input to deliver a personalized customer experience.

Hopefully, this guide has provided a clear answer to the question, “What is personalized marketing?” and you now feel confident to use personalized marketing to supercharge your business.

Have you also spent hundreds of hours gathering and analyzing website data to build experiences that show no change in conversions?

If this is your story, I’ve got two good news for you.

First, you’ve arrived at the right place. And second, you’re not alone!

The case of missing uplift in conversion and revenue

Take the case of an online phone accessories retailer who recently launched a new line of customizable, superior quality phone covers. Despite offering the best products, they were not even close to meeting their conversion goals. 

The team decided to find out what was going wrong by tracking visitor behavior. Heatmaps and session recordings showed how visitors interacted with their new offering. After studying the data, some key findings surfaced:

• Visitors dropped off on the customize phone covers page
• Visitors who dropped off spent the most time on the phone specification & personal details pages
  

Looking at this data, the team narrowed down actionable insights – 

• Reduced the number of steps on the customize phone covers page
• Make phone specifications more visual
• Reduced form fields on personal details pages 

While this worked, it did not get the expected uplift in conversion, and the team struggled to find reasons and fixes.

Does this sound familiar to you?

While chasing data to fix isolated friction points in the funnel streamlines the buying journey, it does not make the journey contextual or relevant to user segments. Visitors expect relevant experiences and want to feel valued at every touchpoint. 

A delightful experience is a mix of experience optimization and engaging with your audience at the right touchpoints. Personalization aids in achieving the latter by helping you release sharp audience-specific contextual and personalized interactions based on user journeys. For instance, rather than simply reducing form fields to reduce drop-offs, the phone accessories retailer can leverage personalization to auto-filter and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on the device they’re using or auto-fill details for repeat customers, and so on.

Similarly, if a visitor on your website is from the US while another is from Germany, the German visitor might expect a local language experience on your website. Or, users who have an affinity for luxury brands are likely to be put off if the most relevant results show discounted brands on the product listing page.

Besides this, visitors also need contextual information relevant to their journey to make a buying decision quickly. Personalization enables this. For example, you can nudge someone visiting a product page forward by showing positive product reviews as a notification triggered at the right time. 

While these are some common examples of how businesses can create personalized experiences, there is no limit to what you can do. Irrespective of what your unique use case is, personalization always starts with your users’ data.

Data in personalization – All you need to know

Websites gather a vast amount of raw visitor data that has the potential to unlock valuable personalization opportunities. But to make the most out of the data you already have, knowing what type of data enables personalization is paramount.

A single view of enriched and intelligent data lets you craft experiences that convert. With digital advancement, surface-level personalization is not enough. The above data empower marketers to create behavioral micro-segments of website visitors, so they get personalized experiences at the right time in their journey. This data is collected from multiple sources and unified at one central customer data hub so that you can visualize and learn from your visitors’ behavior and leverage it in your optimization campaigns.

Let’s look at some ways you can define your audiences using raw customer data:  

1. Pre-defined segments

You can build visitor cohorts using pre-defined behavioral, geographical, demographic, and contextual data in this segmentation method. You can also create micro-segments combining one or more of the above data sources. 

The phone accessories online retailer mentioned earlier can use pre-defined data points (like device and browser used, location, behavior on site, past purchases, etc.) to create user cohorts, plan segment-specific campaigns, and only show them relevant content.

For example, they can segment visitors and deliver personalized content to reduce drop-offs on the customize phone covers page. Or show first purchase offers to new users to motivate them to complete the purchase. A micro-segment of iPhone 13 Pro users visiting the website for the first time and through a Chrome browser can be shown a special discount to nudge them to complete the purchase.

2. Custom attributes-based segments

Segmentation based on custom attributes helps deep-dive into visitor behavior and ascertain how specific segments respond to your experience. Contrary to pre-defined segments that cover generic visitor attributes, custom attributes help build cohorts using non-standard, domain-specific attributes that match your campaign goals. These are extremely flexible and allow you to create hyper-personalized interactions by filling in the gaps between pre-defined segments.

Imagine you are an eCommerce store collating and analyzing conversion rates. You notice that premium members convert at 10%, whereas general buyers convert at 2%. Using this data, you can go very specific, run targeted promotions for the general buyers to nudge them further into the funnel, and increase conversions from this segment.

Similarly, you can create custom segments based on attributes like visitors’ last visit to your website, guest visitors vs. members, monthly spends, buyer personas – discount, impulse or FOMO, frequent flyers, loyalty customers, top 5% ace gamers, and more.

3. Third-party data-based segments

Another data source that comes in handy when segmenting visitors based on external parameters is third-party tools and integrations. 

For example, using Mixpanel, you can create cohorts of inactive users who haven’t used your product or app in the last week, craft re-engagement campaigns, and deliver personalized content to them for higher retention.

Similarly, using Clearbit’s data, like a company’s IP address, you can deliver personalized content on the homepage banner to visitors from a specific company or industry. B2B companies can leverage Demandbase to identify companies that match their defined ICP, create a segment of high intent prospects, and deliver meaningful information that helps convert companies on their very first visit to the website. 

4. Uploaded visitor lists

Uploaded visitor lists consist of external data like stored cookie data, POS data,  URL query parameters, premium user lists, etc., that you can import and use to create deep visitor segments. You can then run hyper-personalized marketing campaigns for these segments. 

Let’s assume that you are an online gaming company. You want to target the top 10% of users of your game for a particular campaign. Working with the engineering team, you can get a list of every user that qualifies with their unique cookie value. You can deliver the desired experience using robust experimentation engines that let you upload this list onto its database.

These data sets create an invaluable collection of insights that can enrich your visitor interactions at every touchpoint. But knowing how and when to use them is critical to ensuring your campaigns’ success. Let’s look into some industry-specific use cases of personalization that help businesses create a differentiator from their competitors.

Personalization is for everyone

Whether you’re an online retailer looking to increase AOV, a SaaS firm striving to reduce churn, or a publishing house looking for more subscriptions, personalization helps businesses across industries gain deeper behavior insights and design delightful experiences that resonate with every visitor. If you are an online business looking to maximize ROI from existing traffic,  build stronger visitor relationships and ultimately drive growth by delivering relevant experiences, read on to know how you can leverage personalization to activate your audience.   

eCommerce

A study by McKinsay suggests that  80% of online shoppers want personalization from retailers. These potential buyers on your website that you want to convert come from varying geographies and demographics looking for various products. The same shopper may like shoes from Retailer A but not their joggers, some visitors may only shop during sales, and so on. And there is a cut-throat competition to acquire these prospective buyers. With personalization, you can dive deep into granular buyer behavior, and design tailored experiences so they choose you over your competitors.

Micro-segmentation for increased revenue

Using data like geo-location, past purchases, product affinity, etc., you can curate personalized offers and category pages, recommend products to cross-sell, upsell, and more. 

For example, you can auto-apply filters on category, listing, and search pages, so visitors only see relevant products. This makes it easier for them to navigate through the products and increases sales.

SaaS

All SaaS companies aim to keep churn at a minimum. Their subscription-based model demands building long-term relationships. Leveraging personalization to design and deliver tailored experiences for visitors rather than a general spray and pray approach shows that the company values them and helps inculcate brand loyalty. 

Personalized pricing and content for increased revenue

The pricing page is one of the most critical elements. You can create segments based on attributes like company size, revenue, etc., and craft experiences that match visitor expectations. For instance, you can personalize the pricing page to hide self-serve pricing and only show the “contact sales” CTA to Enterprise businesses while showing pre-set pricing to SMBs.

Marketers who evaluate a SaaS product conduct thorough research to find social proof. Using data from third-party tools like Clearbit, you can detect the visitors’ company/industry and trigger relevant logos, testimonials, and success stories. You can also track if the visitor has signed up for a free trial and craft the messaging so they only get content that nudges them further into the conversion funnel – from free trial to paid. 

Travel

The travel industry caters to a diverse customer base. The needs and expectations of travelers keep evolving. Hence, it’s crucial to understand each visitor and curate personalized experiences.

Demography & purpose-driven personalization

A majority of people travel for business or leisure. Once visitors enter travel details like date, destination, number of travelers, etc., websites can use the data to show them purpose-specific travel options & information. 

For business users, show easy cancellation policies, boardroom facilities, how to get an invoice, etc. For leisure users, show activities, spa options, pool timings, 24-hour room service, discounts, etc. You can further break down the leisure demographic into more targeted groups.

You can also pair cookie data with previous purchases, pre-select options in the booking flow, or change the ordering of search results to show the most relevant result first.

E-Learning

People respond more positively to personalized content – interacting, watching, reading more, and ultimately converting.

Personalize learning flows

Many e-learning platforms offer a multitude of courses. But, only a few of them manage to retain learners. Personalization enables e-learning platforms to break away from the linear approach where every learner follows a pre-set flow. 

You can personalize learning flows with dynamic feedback and/or contextual pop-ups. For example, you can ask learners to take a quiz at the beginning of the course to assess their abilities and recommend the next steps. This creates a personalized flow for each learner that matches their skills and expectations.

You can also offer dynamic feedback that reinforces good behavior or applauds achievements. For example, once a learner completes 50% of the course at a good pace and shows progress, you can trigger personalized pop-ups encouraging them to complete the course. 

Leveraging contextual data about visitors, e-learning platforms can curate personalized pathways for each learner, thus giving them more control over the course they pursue.

Media

Personalization has already revolutionized content consumption and monetization. It helped Netflix become one of the largest OTT platforms. It has brought huge revenue uplift for social media giants like Instagram and TikTok by pushing content and ads based on what users engage with most on their platforms.

Personalized recommendations for increased subscriptions

When users easily discover content they like, they continue using your platform. And when they find value in your content, subscriptions skyrocket. 

For instance, an online editorial news portal can increase readership and subscription by using behavioral data to show relevant news items first. If a visitor mostly looks for sports news, it can show them sports-related content first. If a visitor often reads political updates, show similar content to get them hooked.

How to personalize with VWO?

At the start of this blog, our phone accessories retailer had actionable data but lacked the means to design and release the right experiences across every touchpoint at scale.  

To bridge this gap and empower businesses to deliver hyper-personalized journeys at a scale that accelerate growth, we recently launched VWO Personalize. With this latest addition to the suite of VWO products, we aim to connect every aspect of personalization so businesses across industries can unlock infinite growth possibilities. You can create multiple tailored experiences and target each of them to a different visitor segment in one single campaign without depending on your development teams. 

VWO Personalize starts with helping you build cohorts using raw visitor data. It then lets you curate and release experiences using the widget library and code editor in our powerful WYSIWYG Visual Editor:

– Create personalized experiences in a couple of clicks using our Widget Library, where you can access a range of pre-designed, ready-to-use widgets. Drag and drop any existing template and design personalized experiences quickly. In the library, you can find widgets for banners, modals, scroll to the top, countdown timer, social share, and more. You can also use dynamic texts in the content to further hyper-personalize the web page catering to individual segments. 

Suppose you want to run a sale campaign on your homepage for a specific visitor segment. In that case, you can go to the Widget Library in the VWO Visual Editor, select the type of banner you want to add to the page, edit its content, and voila!

Similarly, if you are an online retailer looking to increase sales in the US region, you can add a sale countdown to specific product pages and deploy it for visitor segments you want to target. With our Widget Library, you can design as many hyper-personalized experiences for your visitor segments within minutes.  

– When you want to deliver something unique, create custom templates with our Code Editor. Insert custom Javascript codes and variables into your website and build your own unique widget and experience that match your campaign goals.

Let’s say you want to add a hover effect on your product pages. Using our Code Editor, you can simply write a custom CSS or Javascript code and deploy it on the pages you’d like. Take a free trial or request a demo with our product experts to understand how VWO Personalize can help your business achieve unprecedented growth.

Personalization vs. privacy – Striking a balance

Throughout this article, we’ve discussed how visitors leave behind data trails with each online session. Companies capture this data daily to use it to personalize campaigns and interactions. But, the amount of data gathered also calls for concern about misusing visitors’ data without their knowledge. Inevitably, while visitors prefer personalized, contextual experiences, there is an inherent fear that couples it.

The question facing companies is how to use this data for personalization without breaching privacy and security. Many regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have been implemented to address this. 

But companies need to take the onus of responsibility. To win visitors’ trust, they must do more than just fulfill the regulatory requirements.

Companies must ensure that their personalization practice is always compliant by adopting a privacy-first approach that ensures privacy and data safety. They must constantly update security controls with evolving data protection regulations and reforms. 

Maintaining transparency about data collection, storage, usage, and what businesses do to ensure its safety is critical. 

With VWO Personalize, you run data-driven campaigns and release hyper-personalized experiences while ensuring absolute data privacy. It is designed with a privacy-first approach, complies with global data protection norms, and comes with airtight controls that ensure your visitors’ privacy.

What next?

Customized covers of superior quality were the USP of our online phone accessories retailer. The irony was that most visitors were dropping off on the customized page itself. The changes made didn’t help since they were non-targeted blanket changes. Personalization fills this gap. 

With personalization, our retail guy can:

• Implement auto-filtering and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on demographic data like age or gender & contextual data like phone model used
• Trigger location-specific payment options 
• Trigger offers and dynamic content based on the buyer stage a visitor is on

This list is not exhaustive, and the possibilities to personalize are infinite. Visitors expect personalized experiences. If they don’t get it on your website, they will move on to the next available option. So don’t lose out on any more business. Start your personalization journey and unlock unlimited growth opportunities to scale your business now.

With feedback becoming a new currency, you can’t stand aside. Collecting feedback offers much more than just the knowledge of what your customers disliked and what you can do better. Website surveys can provide you with a way to approach your customers at the right moment and time.

Download Free: Website Surveys Guide

They can help you learn the why behind your customers’ behaviour and the reasons for which people choose your products and prefer them to your competitors. With this knowledge, you can better communicate your product advantages and work out a new value proposition. Also, analyzing feedback with website surveys can help identify conversion rate blockers, especially for eCommerce businesses.

Thanks to website surveys, you can learn about new market trends and demand for new features, and product types, and understand how your customers’ needs change. This gives you an unprecedented opportunity to tip the market by adjusting your product to your client’s needs better and faster than your competitors.

However, running short rounds of website surveys from time to time is not enough to put yourself in your customers’ boots. Collecting feedback on a regular basis should become a part of your company’s culture. That’s where the feedback loop can help understand this better.

What is a feedback loop and how does it work?

The feedback loop focuses on the consistent collection of feedback and its implementation. This system suggests looking at feedback collection as a process rather than some activity.

That’s what the feedback loop looks like in practice.

Step 1. Ask for feedback – send your survey to a customer

Step 2. Collect feedback in one place – keep it in one tool and categorize for an easy reference in the future

Step 3. Analyze and plan – shape your product’s appearance based on what you’ve learned from customer surveys

Step 4. Implement – adjust your product based on what customers said

Step 5. Notify – inform your clients of the recent update or improvement in some area of your product. 

Start this process again.

In this article, we want to show you how to navigate the first two steps in the feedback loop. When reading this article, you will learn about the strategy behind organizing a website survey and also discover the tools necessary to execute the process in the right way.

1. Trigger on-page surveys at the right moment

Ask for feedback when your customers are more likely to respond instead of bombarding everyone on your email list. Some brands are still using the ‘spray-and-pray’ technique of sending online surveys – they usually use some newsletter template and send an email campaign to the entire list of subscribers. 

Low response rate, subscribers deleting or sending your email to spam are one of the outcomes of such traditional campaigns. Instead of proceeding with this scenario, you can choose a more targeted way to reach users who are ready to share some feedback. As a result, you would display your survey at the right moment, when a reader is more likely to take action.

Here are some of the triggers you can use to target users more effectively: 

• landing page URL
• new vs. returning visitors
• browser
• time spent on page
• clicking a certain link
• exit intent
• pages in a session

Also, with tools such as VWO website surveys, you can combine different triggers. For example, you can choose to show a survey to returning web page visitors (condition 1), who viewed at least 3 pages on your website (condition 2). 

Action point. Brainstorm the scenarios for potential triggers you can use and match them with the goal of your survey. For example, if you are aiming to collect feedback on your new web page design, think of what type of customer can provide the most informative feedback. For example, this can be a user who scrolls down the page by at least 80% and stays on the page for at least 1 minute.

2. Conduct NPS surveys on your website

Asking for feedback in customer surveys at the wrong time and place is one of the reasons why you get almost no data to analyze while ending up with a low number of survey responses. When opening your NPS survey your clients can be busy, at work, or simply not receptive to emails, text messages, or calls.

NPS surveys are crucial for understanding how satisfied your clients are with your service and help identify the red flags for the customers who are about to churn. With this survey, you can also get feedback on what you can improve to serve customers better. 

Displaying your NPS survey on the website is one of many ways you can use customer surveys. Check out what an NPS survey can look like when embedded on your website.

You can trigger such surveys on the client portal, the place that only customers can access. Also, you can define when the survey should be displayed. For example, an Internet provider could show an NPS survey right after a user prolongs a subscription or pays a monthly bill through a client portal.
Action point. Check out these steps to create a survey and brainstorm the option on where you should be placing the survey once it is ready (think of specific pages that you can use as triggers).

3. Use single line text box in a website survey

In some situations, it is not sufficient to collect predefined responses from your website visitors or clients. Sometimes, a problem is too complex and you would want your customers to be honest about what doesn’t work with your business. Take customer support as an example. 

After your support agents have answered a customer’s question, there are a few ways you can proceed further. You can create a survey asking to rate a customer support agent and answer “Was it helpful?”

However, this response doesn’t give you a lot of context on your client’s perception of the customer support department. That’s why you can add an additional question for users who were not satisfied with the support using the single-line text box in the website survey.

Later, by collecting and sharing this more in-depth feedback with your agents, you will be able to develop more proactive customer support. That’s because your customer support will be working more on dealing with challenges customers face and offering a better service even before a problem appears.

Here is an example of this survey question type.

4. Use QR codes in a thank-you message

Have you ever been invited for an online survey in exchange for getting an Amazon card? If you have ever taken up this challenge, you would most likely do it for the sake of getting some gifts, not because you were that interested in sharing your feedback. If you haven’t, then the incentive was not strong enough. 

In both cases, offering an incentive before a user fills out a survey is a bad idea. Users who participate in paid or incentivized surveys and are told to receive a gift after completion usually do their best to help and that doesn’t always mean being honest.

Instead of offering a gift at the beginning of the survey, make it a surprise for an engaged user who doesn’t need a present to share some feedback. Once they have invested some time in helping you improve your product, as a matter of gratitude you can offer a small discount, a promo code, or something else that your users would appreciate.

For example, you can use a QR code generator to create a QR code which you can embed as an image in the thank-you screen of your website survey. So why not just paste a link leading to their reward? With a QR code, your coupon is automatically added to the checkout making it easier for a customer to redeem it.

In addition, with QR codes you can track what users are taking action as it offers more advanced analytics.

Download Free: Website Surveys Guide

5. Incentivize your partners to use website surveys

For some businesses, a company website is only one of many places to sell products. Brands that rely heavily on affiliate partners distribute their goods through other websites. 

Often, this model of selling products also means losing control over how your brand is communicated and how products are delivered to an end customer. However, this doesn’t mean you have to ignore positive affiliate marketing trends and shift away from this marketing channel.

There is a way how website surveys can help you regain control when working with affiliate partners. So how can you convince your partners to make website surveys and collect feedback?

To involve other parties who are distributing your products, you need to create a solid incentive. That’s because implementing your survey can take up your partners’ and affiliates’ time they would otherwise dedicate to growing sales. 

They might not realize that getting their audience feedback has a direct impact on the sales volume and revenue and that’s what you need to communicate to them more often.

There are a few things your affiliate partners can ask their website visitors. 

• How clearly does your affiliate partner communicate your product?
• Why is your product not attractive enough for people to buy?
• Are there any issues with how the website functions (usability issues, speed)? 

Working closely with your partners doesn’t stop there. You should also consider checking how attractive your affiliate and partnership program is as well. By directing a survey to your partners (not clients), you can learn what blocks them from selling more of your products and work towards making your program more attractive.

Also, based on what answers your partners provide, you can prepare automated and personalized reports which would provide them with guidance on selling more.

Here are some questions you can consider asking your partners.

1. Which marketing materials were most useful?
2. How easy were marketing materials to find? 
3. Are there any other marketing materials you would be interested in using?

Conclusion

Collecting feedback should not be a one-off activity, but an ongoing practice in your company. If you want to make your website surveys efficient and get more information from your customers, you need to be strategic in targeting, timing, and content of your surveys. 

Choosing the right tool for surveys is also crucial for your success. Consider choosing the one that gives you more options on targeting and embedding your surveys on the website – that will make achieving your goals with website surveys much easier.

But virtual reality (VR) is more than just a headset that gamers use to play computer-generated simulations. VR has the ability to provide a variety of business opportunities including helping maximize conversions. The ever-expanding technology is being adopted in many industries from healthcare, and real estate, to eCommerce. Here are some statistics about VR:

• The VR industry will be worth almost $34 billion by 2022.
• Over 26 million VR headsets will be sold every year by 2023.
• Nearly 19% of US consumers will be utilizing VR by the end of 2020.
• 71% of customers believe that brands that use VR are forward-thinking.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Related to VR is Augmented Reality (AR). This technology can enhance reality by superimposing computer-generated images. In this article, we will be looking at the potential of VR and AR and how they can be used to optimize your eCommerce business’ conversion rate.

Is VR right for your business?

Just like any other good business decision, determining whether your eCommerce website will benefit from VR/AR technology needs to be based on data. So first, you need to identify if it will help your company.

The first step is understanding your target audience. Who is it that you want to attract and convert? Or, more importantly, who is it that you’re not converting? Conduct surveys, questionnaires, and polls about how your current audience feels about VR/AR being implemented to collect useful data. Here are a few data points you can consider gathering:

1. What is the main source of audience traffic?

2. How long do they spend browsing?

3. What are their major concerns with the eCommerce website purchasing journey?

4. What are their views about VR/AR and use cases?

Alongside surveys, other analytics tools can collect behavioral data on your site visitors. The likes of Google Analytics and VWO Insights are invaluable in helping you understand your potential customers, and how VR/AR may improve their user experience (UX). Through research, you’ll be able to understand whether AR/VR is a fit for your business, as well as the best approach to implementing it on-site, or at least where to begin testing.

1. Testing

Testing what works according to your audience’s likes and wants. Creating an eCommerce experience that maximizes conversions requires finding out what resonates with your audience. After choosing which VR/AR options will benefit your business conversion rate (we will discuss these options in more detail below), it is important to test the different variants.

One of the most effective testing methods used to optimize business conversion rates is A/B testing. This is the process of creating two variants of a specific website feature, for example, a VR element, showing it to your audience, and measuring which variant performs the best. The conversion rate of each variant is measured, and the best-performing option is kept.

2. Optimize your conversions with customer service

Good customer service is at the core of a thriving company. 84% of consumers said that customer service is a key deciding factor on whether or not they will do business with that brand. In fact, 68% of customers would be happy to be charged more if they received good customer service.

Fidelity Investments used VR for employee onboarding and training—particularly useful during the pandemic where only remote work was possible. This included VR team building, socializing, and, most importantly, customer service training scenarios.

Fidelity also used VR to put their customer service teams in the position of the customer. This helped the teams to better understand what their customers go through. Promoting customer empathy is a great way to improve customer relationships, and VR makes it easy.

In some situations, customer support teams need to troubleshoot the issue over the phone or through a contact center. This is very common in industries like IT. Often, the customer service team member will require the customer to describe the issue over the phone. Using AR in these customer service situations is useful as it can provide staff with a visual representation of the problem and allow them to assist the customer in a shorter period of time.

Not only that, it can show the customer exactly what the staff is doing to help, and it can teach the customer to troubleshoot the problem for themselves in the future. Providing customers with efficient support will optimize eCommerce conversion rates. 

3. Optimize your conversions with user experience

Being able to test and try a product before buying it is a big advantage for a consumer. However, this can be difficult in an online setting. VR and AR showrooms allow eCommerce businesses to bridge the gap between online products and physical in-store items.

It’s not just conversions, either. The average user visits a website for less than 15 seconds. VR/AR showrooms engage customers for longer. In fact, websites with some form of VR have higher visitor retention and are viewed 5-10 times longer. 

A VR showroom allows the customer to immerse themselves in a digitally created environment. For retail, this means that shoppers can pick up and examine objects, open drawers, and even try on clothes.

An AR showroom, on the other hand, allows customers to superimpose your products into their own reality. For example, let’s say you’re working from home and need to buy a new desk for your home set-up. AR will allow you to view how the desk would fit into your home.

Just a few of the benefits of VR/AR showrooms include:

• Customers aren’t required to wait in changing room queues to try items on.
• VR/AR reduces the number of returns because customers observe how the products will look on them or in their homes. Macy’s has reported that product return rates have reduced to less than 2% since the introduction of AR.
• VR can be used to collect analytics such as most tried items, style preferences, and customer behavior. This data can then be converted into actionable insights.

All of these benefits will optimize your conversion rates.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

4. Optimize your conversions with marketing

VR marketing has the potential to immerse customers in a world created by your brand that normal video marketing can’t replicate. It can be visual, and it can even be multi-sensory, depending on the device that is used.

The key benefit of VR marketing is increased customer engagement. Customers commonly use ad blockers or quickly skip commercials, but a VR experience is a deeper interaction with the consumer. In fact, research shows that 360^o adverts have an 85% completion rate compared to 2D adverts that only have a 58% completion rate. This increased engagement will increase traffic and improve your conversion rate.

AR marketing is also an option. It’s not as expensive as you might expect, either. Features like Instagram AR filters and Apple’s ARKit have made creating AR marketing campaigns a possibility even for small businesses. 

Using these novel marketing techniques is a great way to drive traffic to your eCommerce website and convert potential customers into paying ones.

Examples of great VR marketing campaigns

Merrell Trailscape VR was an experience created by Merrell to support the release of their new hiking shoe. It took customers on a dangerous hike through mountains and unstable wooden bridges whilst they were ‘virtually’ wearing the new shoe.

A less action-packed but equally effective approach was Patron’s “The Art of Patron” VR campaign. The tequila company used VR to tell their audience the story of how their product is made, beginning in an agave field and ending at a glamorous night event.

How does all this apply to your eCommerce business?

You might be thinking: how does this relate to you and your business?

Creating an emotional connection with visitors to your website is one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates. Brands that aim to emotionally connect with their audience outperform competitors by 26%. Creating a compelling experience that your audience will remember is something all eCommerce businesses should aim to do, and VR makes this easier.

It’s important not to just use VR as a technology but as a tool to tell a story with.

Creating a synergy between online and physical experiences is the essence of VR. If you can harness its immersive capabilities, you’ll have a lot to gain from the VR world—from conversions all the way through to customer engagement and retention. 

The unpredictability of conversion stems from the unpredictable behavior of us, humans. Just the change of the color of a CTA button or adding a single word to your landing page headline can bring about a drastic change in your conversion rates. 

Download Free: Visitor Behaviour Analysis Guide

For example, Cocohanee, an eCommerce website, increased their number of transactions by 40% simply by adding their USP on the product pages and redesigning their menu! Who would have thought about that?

If only there was a way to understand and decode user behavior and use it for optimizing landing pages, right?

Though we cannot completely analyze and predict user behavior, user behavior analytics can help us speculate at least some parts of it and increase conversion rates.

You too, can use user behavior analytics to bring about a drastic improvement in your conversion rates and increase the ROI of your business (check out VWO Insights). Let’s have a look at how you can do that.

1. Use heatmaps for your landing pages

Heatmaps are a system for data visualization where you can view users’ behavior using a color-coded system. Using heatmaps, you can precisely visualize human behavior. The colors indicate the number of clicks on any part of the webpage.

Using heatmaps for your landing pages can be an excellent way to understand how your visitors are interacting with your webpage. You can understand where the users are focusing their attention.

Using heatmaps for landing pages, you can find data about your landing page content, the images and videos that you have added, and the call to action button clicks. This way, you can find room for improvement and use it to improve your conversion rates.

You can also use scrollmaps to identify the ideal length of your landing page. Using a scrollmap, you’d know the ideal position to place your sign-up form and CTA to get maximum conversions.

You can use a mouse-tracking heatmap to track mouse movement. This way, you can identify the places where most of your visitors are hovering over. You can set goals for your heatmaps and document important observations. Based on these, you can come to accurate conclusions that will help you bring about drastic changes in your conversion rates.

Once you’ve found how your visitors are interacting with a particular element on your landing page, you can use A/B testing to test different variations of the same element. This way, you’ll be able to optimize your conversions.

A great example of the use of heatmap would be the case study of Paltalk, a B2C chat service based out of the USA. Using heatmaps, it was observed that users were not able to effectively view the different categories of virtual gifts. With a change in design for the virtual gifts menu, Paltalk increased their conversion rate by 11.32%!

Take a full-featured free trial with VWO to leverage heatmaps for your website.

2. Personalize the experience based on the user journey stage

Not every user of yours would be the same. Some would be new and unfamiliar to your brand. Some might have heard your brand’s name but don’t really understand your offering. While some others might have been stalking your website for a while.

This means users at different stages of their customer journey would have different perceptions about your brand and your offering. So, is it fair to target them with the same messaging and expect them to convert? Absolutely not!

Instead of targeting all your users with the same landing page and messaging, you can try to segregate your users based on their customer journeys and then target them with different landing pages. This strategy can be extremely effective in improving your conversion rates.

For the segregation of your customer data based on their customer journey stages, a potent Customer Relationship Management tool such as SuperOffice can be powerful. SuperOffice will gather all your prospect and customer data along with the information about the touchpoints with each of these users.

Using a CRM tool such as SuperOffice, you will be able to create customized target lists of users based on their customer journeys. 

You can then target each of these lists with different landing pages, email campaigns, advertising, and messaging. You’ll definitely see a massive increase in your conversions this way.

Here are some other ways to personalize user experiences:

• Visitor data collection – Collect prospects’ data and use it to offer ultra-personalized experiences to them. You can collect visitor data by cookies, web beacons, email activity tracking, or even asking the visitors directly.
• Visitor profiling – Based on the customer and prospect data collected, you can create your ideal customer personas to offer personalized experiences to each of these personas.
• Set your goals – Before implementing personalization, it is good to set goals for the same. What do you want to achieve using personalization? In this case, it would be increased conversions but you can set a few other goals too.
• Plan and implement – Next, you can start working on your strategies for personalization. You can use A/B testing to try different variations of your personalization strategies. This way, you’ll get much better results.
• Measure success – Finally, you should keep track of your metrics and understand if your set goals were. This way you can keep improving your conversion rate over time.

3. Find the reason behind increased bounce rate

If you are experiencing increased bounce rates on your website, especially on your landing pages, then this is not something that you should ignore. Increased bounce rates can be a major indicator of the fact that something might be going wrong.

So, get down to the root cause of it. You can use heatmaps and session replays to understand the reason behind increased bounce rates. There can be multiple reasons for this. Some of them being:

• Inconsistent branding and messaging can drive away your website users. Hence, ensure that you use consistent branding and messaging along all the touchpoints.
• Slower page load speed can be a major reason why your users are bouncing.
• Your headline and the entire landing page copy may not be enticing enough for the user to stick around and convert. So, make sure to add a more benefit-driven copy that directly hits the pain points of the users.
• Add some more engaging elements such as an image, an illustration, a video, and some form of social proof. Adding these elements will persuade the user to put their trust in you and fill-up your form.

Once you’ve found the most probable reason for the increased bounce rate, you can use A/B testing to confirm the reason. For instance, if you think that the headline of your landing page is the reason for increased bounce rate, you can try split testing by varying your headline and optimize your conversions this way.

Download Free: Visitor Behaviour Analysis Guide

4. Vary your landing pages based on the traffic sources

Most businesses have multiple traffic and referral sources for their landing pages. Some part of your traffic may be coming from emails, some from social media advertising, while some from SEO. 

The users from all these traffic sources would have come across different messaging. For example, your Facebook ad might read “Free landing page optimization tactics,” while another referral traffic source might have read “Free checklist for increasing conversions.”

The simplest way to gather customer information is by implementing the use of DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) technology of call tracking into your SEO campaigns. It provides you a deep insight into traffic source, geographical location, which campaign drove the most traffic, and much more. It helps you to optimize your campaigns more effectively and target your landing pages according to the traffic source

Though these two messaging might be indicative of the same, it is better to stick to the exact same messaging throughout. Hence, you can consider having different landing pages for different traffic sources. 

Doing this will ensure that your landing pages are appropriately customized for every user segment. And this will definitely lead to an increase in the number of sign-ups.

5. Use session recordings to optimize your landing pages

You can also use session recordings of your landing pages to analyze the user behavior with great detail. 

With each session recording, you can look for details such as the mouse movement, user clicks, scrolling patterns, and the area of your landing page where the user is spending the most time. 

Using session recordings, you can improve the performance of your website’s core metrics by improving the site navigation, site design, form design, and form flow. You can run experiments and reduce bounce rates, ultimately leading to increased conversion rates.

Using session recordings of your landing pages, you can understand common browsing patterns and distractions that are keeping the users from clicking on your CTA button. 

There may be a huge number of reasons for reduced conversion rate such as a misplaced CTA, a distracting ad, or a lengthy form. Whatever the reasons may be, you’ll be able to analyze that through session recordings and make appropriate amendments.

Using this data from session replays, you can try to change your landing page structure, which will ultimately lead to increased conversions for your business. 

For example, suppose you find many of your users are stopping at a particular point in your landing page. This may be because the users find this part more interesting and want to stop and read through it. So, you can consider placing this part above the fold to make your landing page even more impactful.

You can then use A/B testing to test if your observations based on session recordings are working as expected. Request a demo with the experts at VWO for valuable insights on your website.

A good example would be A/B testing done on the Locations Hawaii website. Using 3-variation A/B testing where the CTA button was changed in each variant, the number of leads was increased by 23%! 

Start using user behavior analytics to improve your conversions

You now know the various tactics you can use to analyze users’ behavior and come to precise conclusions based on it. 

Using behavior analytics can be a major turning point in your business’s growth. So, start implementing these strategies right away and watch a massive boost in your conversions.