Personalization is a common part of online life. When ordering food, buying a gift for a loved one, or opening Netflix, personalization features make it easier to find what you want. Treating your visitors personally and personalizing your website should be one of your main goals in 2023 if you want to keep up with your competitors. If you’re just getting started with website personalization, you should research the best practices used by industry leaders. And that is exactly what we are doing in this article.

What is website personalization?

Website personalization means creating unique, tailored user experiences and customer journeys by using customer data to learn about each individual’s wants and needs.

Based on demographic data, behavioral data, and contextual data, marketers create personalized content for different audience segments. This ensures that all website visitors see relevant information, resulting in a more engaging customer journey for everyone.

The benefits of website personalization

Research shows that  74% of customers feel frustrated when browsing a website that is not personalized. Not only will your customers appreciate your efforts in personalizing their experience, but you’ll also see specific, quantifiable benefits, such as:

1. Higher Conversion Rate

When you provide the right experience for your visitors using website personalization, they’ll be more eager to follow your conversion path. These higher conversion rates lead to more sales and more revenue.

Obvi, a DTC company that sells dietary supplements, increased its conversion rate during Black Friday by almost 25% with the help of website personalization.

2. Get to know your customers better

Website personalization involves using a variety of data points to better understand your customers. This information can help you come up with website personalization ideas, but it can also help you in a number of other ways (such as in new product design).

3. Increase time on site

Personalized web experiences make your content more appealing to online visitors. After all, it’s the relevant content they’re really interested in. This means your customers will likely spend more time on your website.

4. Increase customer loyalty

Website personalization also leads to more customer loyalty. If a person feels that an e-commerce business can anticipate their needs, they will be more enthusiastic about shopping with that brand. They are more likely to become loyal customers. Plenty of “research” shows that customers prefer to shop with brands that care about them (and their needs).

3 steps to personalize your website

Now that we’ve gone over the benefits you can expect from your personalization efforts, let’s see how you can actually implement a personalization strategy.

The website personalization process has 3 main steps:

• Audience Discovery: At this stage, you’ll divide your target audience into smaller segments (also called buyer personas) that have something in common.
• Create a message: Next, you’ll need to create a message for each of your buyers or segments.
• Evaluation: After implementing personalized messaging, you need to measure and analyze your results. Knowing what’s working and what’s not will help you decide on your next steps

Types of website personalization

There are two distinct ways to deliver personalized content to individuals, and both types of website personalization have strengths and weaknesses.

1. Embedded Content

Using embedded content to personalize your website means that you change the original (original) content of your website depending on who sees it. Different audience segments see websites differently, which could involve things like changing titles or offering discounts for some but not others.

Dynamic embedding is the least intrusive way to conduct website personalization because online visitors won’t even notice that they’re viewing personalized content. Instead, they’ll just think they’re viewing the “normal” version of your site.

2. Overlay

Overlays allow you to display personalized content that appears “on top” of the base layer of your website.  popups and fixed bars are the most common overlay types for dynamic website personalization.

Using overlays to create a personalized experience is more intrusive than using embedded content, as the appearance of pop-ups, sticky bars, or side notifications interrupts