Personalization has become impossible to ignore in today’s digital landscape, permeating various aspects of our online experiences. As consumers increasingly expect personalized experiences, businesses across industries are investing in personalization technology to enhance user engagement, drive conversions, and foster customer loyalty in today’s highly competitive digital market.
What is personalization?
Personalization can be used whenever content is delivered to the user. It works by tracking user events that trigger whenever the user interacts with elements of interest in the website (page views, added to cart, added to favourites, etc…). This data is then used to train a model that comprehensively learns about users, enabling it to provide personalized recommendations tailored to each individual’s interests.
What are some uses of personalization ?
Personalized search
Personalization can be used to enhance search : it is then called personalized search. Personalized search means that whenever a user enters a query, the results will be reordered (or re-ranked) and modified (“personalized”) based on his profile (determined by the model) before being displayed to the user.
Recommendations
Personalization doesn’t simply enhance recommendations but is a core part of what recommendations are. Recommendations can be placed anywhere on your website, and it is often recommended to add a lot of them since the more options you give to your user the more they will choose statistically.
Email personalization
Email personalization is an interesting concept. It is used to send more relevant content to each one of your users using emails. It is a main way to drive user engagement since the relevancy and attractiveness of the content they receive compels them to interact with it, cementing your website’s prensence in their minds.
What are the benefits of personalization?
Personalization significantly increases click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates while also greatly improving user engagement across various digital platforms.
When it comes to personalized search, users are presented with results tailored to their specific interests and preferences, resulting in higher CTR as users are more likely to click on relevant content.
This relevance extends to recommendations, where personalized suggestions based on past behavior and preferences lead to higher engagement and conversion rates as users are more inclined to explore and purchase recommended items.
Additionally, personalized email campaigns leverage user data to deliver targeted content, promotions, and recommendations directly to users’ inboxes, resulting in higher open rates, CTR, and conversion rates. By delivering content and recommendations that resonate with individual users, personalization drives greater user engagement and ultimately boosts CTR and conversion rates across digital platforms.
What are some purposes of personalization?
E-commerce
E-commerce is probably the type of online platform most affected by personalization.
In today’s digital landscape, where revenue often hinges on users spending extended periods browsing and engaging with content (which directly correlates to clicks and purchases), it’s essential to have a solution that tailors content to their interests, keeping them engaged and entertained.
Also, having a personalized email be automatically sent to the customer whenever they add an item to their cart is also incredibly valuable since it’s been proven to convince the customer to follow-through their purchase, when they would otherwise abandon their cart.
Social media
Social media platforms leverage personalization technology extensively to enhance user experiences and engagement. Through algorithms that analyze user behavior, preferences, and interactions, social media platforms curate personalized feeds tailored to each user’s interests. These feeds prioritize content from friends, pages, and accounts that users frequently engage with, ensuring that users see posts and updates most relevant to them. Additionally, social media platforms utilize personalization technology to deliver targeted advertisements based on user demographics, interests, and online behavior. This enables advertisers to reach specific audiences with relevant content, increasing the effectiveness of their campaigns. Moreover, social media platforms employ personalized recommendations for content discovery, suggesting groups to join, events to attend, or accounts to follow based on users’ interests and activities. Overall, personalization technology plays a crucial role in optimizing user experiences on social media platforms, driving engagement, and facilitating connections between users and content.
Streaming
Most streaming websites (videos, music, movies, etc…) are subscription-based services which means that keeping a user engaged for long periods of time is the main part of their business model, and nothing does that better than personalization.
Personalization is in use whenever a user searches for a movie and the main cast are all present in the following results, whenever a song is added automatically to a playlist based on the user’s interests or when another similar movie is recommended after finishing the first one.
It could also be through email personalization.
News
Articles on a news website can be personalized through various means to cater to individual user interests and preferences.
It can be through user browing history and interactions, based on the content the visitor is viewing (suggesting similar articles for example) or it can be using contextual personalization techniques, such as geo-location or time-based recommendations, to deliver articles that are relevant to a user’s location or current events.
By implementing these personalized approaches, news websites can enhance user engagement, increase time spent on site, and ultimately deliver a more satisfying and tailored news reading experience.
