CRO Best Practices: Personalization part 1

How can you keep optimizing your conversion rates? This question comes up almost every time with our e-commerce clients.

At Kameleoon, we favor two practices: Personalization to provide each visitor with content relevant to his needs and A/B Testing to find the best compromises between UI and UX.

We’ll give you a high-level view of the methodology and best practices for both in a 4-article series.

Today, we start off with Personalization.

Preamble: When should you choose Personalization?

In Conversion Rate Optimization strategies, A/B testing and Personalization are generally both used as they cover different aspects of your website.

The question is: which one would be optimal for you now?

Whether you have several products and target audiences, or one product in a niche market, you can enjoy the benefits of behavioral marketing.

If you want to work on your product’s value proposition, adapt your content and messages for specific visitors segments, Personalization is the way to go. It opens a vast range of possibilities while being technically accessible and doesn’t have a minimal traffic requirement.

For example, increasing your customer retention, developing tailored navigation experiences, grabbing opportunities based on contextual data (day and time, weather, location) and fine tuning your marketing efforts will be made easy as 1,2,3 with a personalization solution.

Segmenting your audience

The relevance of a product’s value proposition is intrinsically linked to your understanding of your target audience needs.

Buyer personas built thanks to a deep analysis of your data and the segmentation of your customers / visitors by history, needs, motivations, pain points, goals and maturity regarding your product is often the best approach.

The more you get granular with your segmentation, the more the actions you undertake will improve your conversions.

But this method is not the only way. Thanks to our real-time visitor data analysis, you can discover relevant visitor segments as you go based on their on-site behavior and the context of their visits.

You can then answer questions like: Who likes what? Who reacts to which message? Who clicks? Who buys? Who doesn’t? What order size? Through which channel? What are their interests?

This is where the power of Personalization lies. You associate products, content and targeted messages to specific visitor segments for maximum relevance.

However, you’ll be more effective if you have a structured and thoughtful approach of your visitors’ segments.

Prioritize

The possibilities are so vast that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We advise you score your ideas with the PIE Framework:

• Potential gain (../10): If it’s successful, how much will it affect your bottom line? Is it on a high-traffic / high-importance page?
• Impact (../10): If successful, how much will it affect conversions?
• Ease of implementation (../10): It’s recommended to start with “quick wins” and focus your optimization efforts on changes with minimal technical impacts. Generally, Personalization is technically simple as it focuses on your value proposition rather than on UX hypothesis like A/B Testing does. But if your action involves a structural UX change, it’s paramount you apprehend its implementation difficulty beforehand.

Rank your segments and actions

As soon as you have multiple personalizations running, you’ll need to be rigorous. One visitor can belong to several segments which are in turn subject to different actions.

What action or message would you push to this visitor in priority? Would you like him/her to be exposed to all personalizations or just one?

To avoid saturating your audience, it’s important you rank your segments and their associated actions. You can give priority or even exclusivity to a personalization rather than another.

Also think about modulating or limiting the display frequency of your actions to avoid saturating your visitors. Especially if they are of the “intrusive” kind (pop-in, slider, …).

For our second article in this series, we’ll continue our overview of Personalization Best Practices. See you next time!

Article written by Frédéric De Todaro, Head of Consulting at Kameleoon.