4 ways to up your personalisation game

Whether or not you have a wealth of data at your fingertips, there are always ways you can incorporate more personalisation into your marketing.

Here are four ways that you can easily personalise your content to drive conversions and increase customer loyalty.

If you’re a hotel resort in the Maldives, your target audience may include different demographics, for example, families, friends, and couples. Or, if you’re a clothing brand, your products could fall into categories including dresses for wedding guests, summer dresses, or dresses for parties. Creating dedicated landing pages around these specific search queries is a great way to display relevant content to specific audiences, and can also help drive organic traffic to your site.

When it comes to landing pages, you could even go one step further and utilise dynamic content based on your users’ search behaviour. If you know someone has visited your site before, why not display messaging such as ‘Welcome back’? Or, if geolocation data tells you a user is based in a country that you’ve recently started shipping to, then be sure to highlight this in your messaging. It’s little details like this that grab attention and drive conversions.

To get the best out of personalisation, it needs to feel personal. It’s important that your content is tailored to suit your customer, yet doesn’t overstep the line and feel creepy. Let’s say that someone provided you with their name when they signed up to emails. As well as including their name in email copy and subject lines, you can use this data to address them personally when they land on your site.

Or, why not use the fact that they signed up to your database a year ago as an excuse to send them an offer? Something along the lines of ‘We’ve been friends for a year - here’s a gift from us’ is a great example of how you can reward loyal customers and re-engage those that may not have shopped with you in a while. Subtlety is key, and often the smaller, more personal touches are the most powerful.

An obvious way to personalise your content is by including recommended offers and products. This could be something as simple as listing related blog posts or articles, or ensuring the userflow continuously directs your visitors to other important areas of your website. On the other hand, you could make the most of browsing data to showcase similar products and services.

Whether you upsell or cross-sell on your product pages, or wait until the customer reaches the checkout, your recommendations have to be relevant. If they’re not, you’ll just frustrate users and could risk losing them entirely. If they are relevant, then you’ll increase basket value and maximise conversions.

Although you can capture insights about your audience through their location and browsing behaviour, an easy way to avoid second-guessing and ensure you’re targeting the right people with the right content is to simply ask what they want to hear about. This is simple enough when it comes to email marketing, as you can ask them to tailor their preferences as soon as they sign up. But what about your website content?

In a recent episode of the Unofficial Shopify Podcast, product page guru, Rishi Rawat ran an experiment with a client that was selling air purifiers. Instead of choosing between summarising the key information on the page or going into all the details about what the product is and how it works, he simply asked the audience ‘how much time do you have today?’ Those that chose ‘I have time’ were presented with the super-detailed version, while those that selected ‘I have two minutes’ saw a much more concise overview. The result? Conversions soared by 30%.

Just goes to show - you don’t ask, you don’t get!