How to Personalize Your Content to Increase the Conversion Rate

Despite its lack of use with beginners in this industry, personalizing web content is one of the best and well-known ways to increase the conversion rate of your content campaigns.

Personalization is the quickest path to trigger emotions, and emotions are what ultimately drives your audience to make purchases.

It is safe to say that when you start writing your copy as if it’s a descriptive memo, directed at one person, you will see a complete 180 with your campaigns.

The Surprising Trait That Fuels Your Readers’ Need for Personalization

While the current state of television media allows consumers to record multiple shows, skip advertising, and time-shift viewing as they like, the internet is providing a sister environment.

News content is tailored to make it more personal, customized and informative for viewers while saving them time, providing value, and preventing information overload.

Consumer choice is becoming more of a priority. Basically, media is evolving with the desires of the consumer.

It is important that you understand what’s behind consumer psychology if you want to create compelling, personalized web content, because this is the tactic that creates the most influence on them, no matter what the subject matter.

They may not even know what’s going on themselves, but the University of Texas found out, and published their findings in An Investigation into the Psychology of Consumer Choice and its Impact on Media Enjoyment, Attitude, and Behavioral Intention. So, what can you learn from their work?

A consumer's desire for control is what influences their positive experience with personalized media content. They want to know that they are in the driver’s seat. They are making their own decisions, and you need to prove that you understand this.

When you spin this fact to help you leverage your web content, you find that all of your copy begins to facilitate an environment where engagement starts to increase, and conversions take place more often.

How to Segment Returning Visitor Personalization

When sending emails, you’re naturally sure to include the name of your recipient, but that’s not the only thing you need to know to provide the ultimate customization experience.

You can personalize your content with just about any information. Content Marketing Institute Recommends that you categorize readers by the following traits:

Location

If you know that it’s winter in Missouri, but your viewer is in Florida, you don’t want to be talking about cold weather. This only re-affirms the fact that the conversation isn’t personal. Use location in your segmentation to ensure the best UX everywhere you can.

Interest

This point references a user’s interest in your products and services. You can gauge this factor by understanding what’s going on in the bigger picture. What niche are you in? Now, what niche is your reader in? If you sell children’s toys, but your reader is a male athlete in his early 20s, you may have to do a little more lead nurturing than with a homemaker.

Behavior

Set up tracking to find out who has opened your emails, who has clicked your links, and who has engaged with your landing page CTAs. In this way, you know the difference between a lead, a prospect, and a customer without effort. CRM platforms are helpful for this.

Referral

You want to know, whenever possible, how a user came to visit your site. If you’re tracking marketing efforts with a marketing platform, this is often automated. If not, ask your viewers at sign up, how they came to visit one of your sites. Do this right away, because consumers are moving around so quickly on the web, that they probably won’t remember after any amount of time has passed.

With/ Without Visitor Opt In

When segmenting your contacts, you now need to choose whether you will make use of visitor opt-in -- ask visitors to willingly give you this information -- or without opt-in -- using smart software to make this happen with predictive data points. That choice is yours.

Use these segments across as many content delivery systems as possible. With the rate at which technology is moving forward, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that you will one day be able to use gathered data to customize everything from your brand website to your social media profiles.

What Are the Elements of a Great Personalization Experience on the Web?

Now, I’m sure you want to know exactly what can you do with hints of personalization to your online content.

You may be under the impression that a custom UX website design is a difficult feat to accomplish. Well, this might make it much easier for you.

The Web Design Depot has broken website customization down nicely, and here’s a digestible summary of what they have to say about it:

• Leverage the use of cookies on your site to remember exactly how visitors behave on your site.
• Make sure that apps remind customers of items that interest them and map from the current location. If someone leaves something in their shopping cart, remind them.
• Allow your users to override suggestions to optimize personalization preferences like Amazon and Netflix. Start with a few smart lists and build upon them.
• Help your viewers create a custom experience by choosing subjects that they want to know more about. Like the Web Design Depot points out, ESPN allows website visitors to choose teams and sports that they want to hear more about. (You can spin this to work in any niche.)
• Integrate your sites and applications with other tools (email newsletters, social media accounts, youtube, etc.), for an even more personal experience.

Now, that doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Conclusion

Putting some energy into your personalization efforts is certain to pay off big time. Now that you know what drives the craving for a customized online experience, the traits needed for list segmentation, and the first steps you can take to create the ultimate UX design, you’re ready to go. Start individualizing your content today!