How to prepare your business for online personalization

In the face of today’s increasing commoditization, improving customer intimacy is a crucial factor to stand out from the competition. How? By making sure your digital experience is relevant to every visitor, at any time. Digital personalization can help you to achieve that goal.Consumers expect to quickly and easily find what they are looking for. 74% of internet users say they get frustrated when websites show them content that does not correspond to their interests. The majority of B2B marketers consider content personalization to be a key priority in their digital strategy, according to Econsultancy.

Why personalisation?

Your business is probably already spending substantial sums on your web platforms and digital marketing activities. All traffic that goes to your site, costs money: just think of ads in search engines or on social media. At the same time, your digital marketers and copywriters spend precious time on delivering content that demonstrates your expertise. Your platforms are a continued investment, including building, hosting and maintenance. Fortunately, Drupal does not come with a licence fee.

If you could serve your visitors faster and better using the exact same platforms and content that you’ve always been using, would you take the chance?

This is exactly the reason why our customers increasingly rely on personalization that is based on Machine Learning.

Personalization allows you to increase the relevance of your content. This is true across different sectors and for a wide variety of use cases. Below are a few examples of organizations that successfully rely on the power of personalization:

Higher conversion rates and more sales
Staples (B2B) saw its revenue per visit increase by 3,5% through personalization of its on-site search experience.
More efficient lead gen
Mazda received 133% more brochure requests and 200% more test drive bookings, simply by focusing on dynamic forms and performance statistics.
Encouraging self-help for a better customer experience and decreasing support team overhead costs
Essent brought down incoming requests to its call centre by 30% by personalizing its online information service and by stimulating self-help on its website UZA drastically decreased support calls to its website after improving on-site search results through Machine Learning.
Better experiences for different stakeholders
Our own Dropsolid website uses AI to detect visitor intent. This allows us to enable smart personalization - for example to distinguish potential customers from job applicants -, which helps us to lead visitors to the content that is most appropriate for them.

The above cases sound self-evident. Nevertheless, there are very few organizations today that manage to implement AI in their business successfully. This leads us to another interesting question...

Why is AI-based personalization so difficult?

The possibilities for website, email and mobile personalization are endless. The number of tools that are designed to add personalization to your digital channels keeps increasing. How to get actual added value out of these tools in practice?

Applying large-scale digital personalization is not as easy as it sounds. Organizations often lack the required expertise and resources. The tools that are available can be difficult to use or they require specific technical profiles to integrate them with your existing stack. Systems sometimes turn out to be incompatible and data are locked in silos and unavailable when you need them most. Marketing and IT teams have different expectations. Teams lack clear personalization goals that match the overall business strategy, or they get stuck internally because they find it difficult to prove the added value of personalization.

Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise. We will share a few tips to start your personalization adventure using the right focus.

Build your business case for online personalization

Start from your use cases and data strategy and pay particular attention to your onboarding process, usability and potential for growth.

Personalisation strategy that fits your corporate mission and goals
As with all your digital applications, a carefully thought-out strategy should come first. What are you looking to achieve? How could personalization help you to improve your customer experience? How does this fit into your organization’s mission and strategy? What are your current pain points and opportunities and how could you use personalization to address them? Does your website suffer from high bounce rates, or do visitors tend to abandon your site much later in their journey? Start by selecting relevant KPIs and straightforward, achievable personalization concepts.
Data strategy that supports your use cases
Start from your use cases to get a clear view on the required data. Verify whether those data are available in the right format and in the right place.
Tools that support your objectives and your existing technology
Many organizations use marketing platforms that support personalization - for example Mailchimp, Hubspot and Mautic, to name a few. Depending on your existing data model, tech stack and objectives, these tools might be able to support your first few use cases. If you decide to expand further using new platforms or technology, ask yourself the following questions:
- Will you be able to start lean and mean, or will you face a considerable integration process?
- Are the required use case data easily accessible?
- Will you be able to keep track of the return on your personalization journey through clear dashboards or reports?
- Are AB-testing and control groups available?
- Does the selected tool have the potential to grow alongside your organization?
KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid
Start simple. Experiment with a single target group or journey. This will show you what works and what doesn’t and allow you to adjust along the way. And bear in mind: there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach.

Dropsolid brings AI-powered personalization to the mid-market

In anticipation of the challenges and opportunities surrounding personalization, our team at Dropsolid has been working for years to fine-tune the right solutions for our clients. This resulted in Dropsolid Experience Cloud:

User-friendly UI for marketers.
Ready-to-use visitor segments that are immediately usable in your existing Drupal sites and via Mautic Marketing Automation.
A secure and scalable Customer Data Platform (CDP).
The opportunity to start small - e.g. with our free open source module) and grow gradually, adding capabilities on the go.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to discover visitor intent more quickly and apply the appropriate segmentation.
An interesting TCO for mid-sized businesses and organizations.
Hosting, expertise and support by our team of 70 experts and strategists.

Are you ready for AI personalization?

Enabling personalization positively affects your customer experience, team and tool set. Dropsolid can help you with yout strategy, UX and open source tools.