Learn the essentials of website personalization. Access the on-demand webinar right here. 

Getting to know someone is never easy — even when they’re your customer and you already have a bunch of data on them. Personalizing their experience based on known customer data is a challenge most marketers face. The question is how to best serve up a personalized experience and messaging to optimize the buying experience so you meet your conversion targets.

Most marketers have used email in their personalization efforts through dynamic field insertion (i.e. entering the recipient’s first name), but it’s hardly enough. Companies are quickly discovering that web personalization is necessary to improve customer experience.

The rapid move toward web personalization has left some businesses in the dark. For some, it’s unclear when a company should simply employ rule-based personalization from basic knowledge about customers rather than adaptive, automated personalization, which learns more about customers over time.

In our webinar, “Website personalization: Why you can’t afford not to get personal,” Amber Whiteman, VP of Client Service at the digital marketing agency Metia, says that the best approach is often a hybrid of the two.

“You may think you know your customers pretty well and set up your rule-based segmentation for personalization up front. However, if you’re able to employ some machine-based learning to your experience, then you can utilize that to continue to learn more and more about your customers and, in turn, customize their experience based on the behavior you’re tracking.”

Whiteman says that a multi-faceted approach allows companies to be automated yet still flexible and quick to react to data in order to keep improving their customers’ experiences.

But what about companies that don’t have the data or the resources to properly employ manual personalization? “In that instance,” Whiteman says, “you can start out with machine-based learning and begin to collect that information while still providing that personalized experience for your customers from the onset.”

Jeriad Zoghby, Managing Director of Global Personalization at Accenture, agrees. He notes the importance of realizing the strengths of each method of personalization. For example, recommendations are best handled by the automated and predictive methods of personalization.

“There’s nothing more frustrating, whether it’s a small business or a large business, for me to have to constantly remind you what I like — it’s basically showing that you’re not paying attention.”

Zoghby says in order to best tailor these recommendations for optimal customer experience, marketers need to focus on why they’re buying, rather than on what they’re buying. “If I know who someone is, that data is by far the most powerful data I have.”

Whiteman thinks that the solution is in recognizing the customer’s journey. Whether you’re in a B2B or a B2C scenario, less information about the customer is needed the earlier they are in their buying cycle. The closer you get to a sale, Whiteman says, the more you need to know about the customer.

Personalization efforts won’t be the same for every company, but most marketers agree that for most, a combination of prescriptive and adaptive learning will create the best buying journey for customers.

See the entire recorded webinar to hear more about how these marketers personalize their customers’ experiences.

In this webinar, you’ll:

  • Learn key fail points in website personalization that are common mistakes for surprisingly large companies
  • Discover the best way to personalize website content — it’s not what you’d think.
  • Hear the best tips from industry insiders on strategic website personalization

Speakers:

Andrew Jones, analyst, VentureBeat
Amber Whiteman, VP Client Service, Metia
Jeriad Zoghby, Managing Director, Global Personalization, Accenture

Moderator:

Wendy Schuchart, analyst, VentureBeat

This webinar is sponsored by Autopilot.