The term “digital experience” can mean nearly anything today — from user interactions with your app or website to the digital services they receive to the online content they view.
When any one of these things is tailored to a specific customer or audience group, it’s known as a personalized digital experience. This is achieved by customizing touchpoints such as content and product recommendations, emails and landing pages to align with the customer’s needs and preferences.
Personalized customer experiences help you forge stronger connections, improve customer satisfaction, and increase the likelihood of your audience engaging with your brand.
So, how can you deliver an effectual personalized digital experience? We dive into the details below.
Key Components of a Personalized Digital Experience
Personalized experiences are increasingly important in modern customer engagement. With competition and customer expectations rising all the time, businesses need to find a way to cut through the noise and demonstrate value.
Enter personalization. Digital personalization is all about meeting customers where they’re at and communicating with them in the way they want. But creating personalized experiences requires a few components to come together.
Data Collection and Analysis
In the digital world, personalized experiences rely on data. Without it, you can’t understand who your customers are, how they behave or what they’re interested in. But first, you have to collect it.
There are multiple ways to go about this, including:
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- Lead capture forms
- Surveys and feedback tools
- Website analytics
- Webinars
- Social media and marketing platform analytics
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
Combined, these methods will provide you with a comprehensive customer profile that includes demographics, pain points, preferred channels, topics of interest, interaction history, behavior patterns and much more.
With customers’ growing awareness of data privacy, it’s pivotal to be upfront about data collection tools and methods. The last thing you want is to undermine the trust you’ve spent time cultivating through valuable personalized experiences.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is a prerequisite for effective personalization. It involves separating customers into groups based on shared similarities so that they can be targeted with relevant messages.
Customers in the same segment won’t necessarily experience identical journeys – segmentation is used more on an action-by-action basis. For instance, customers in a “form completed” segment might all receive the same follow-up email. However, once on site, those customers will receive different content recommendations depending on the industry segment they fall into.
Segmentation is essentially a tool for marketers to deliver personalized experiences. Some examples of segment groups and the ways they can assist personalization include:
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- Demographics or firmographics such as a customer’s age, location and company size can indicate their needs and budget.
- Behavioral segments such as engagement level and purchase history inform which products, services, or content they might be interested in.
- Segmenting by stage of the customer journey can help tailor messaging frequency and special offers so that customers feel incentivized and not overwhelmed.
Personalized Content
Once you’ve created segments based on customer data insights, it’s time to bring content into the mix. Personalization can be achieved through a wide variety of content types, including:
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- Website content – product recommendations, content feeds and landing pages can all be programmed to dynamically respond to a customer’s prior interactions.
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- Social media ads – ad schedules and creative elements can be customized to align with targeting criteria such as interests and behavior.
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- Emails – subject line, name, messaging and send trigger are just some of the ways that email content can be personalized to the customer.
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- Calls-to-action (CTAs) – you can optimize CTAs and increase conversion rates by personalizing the copy to resonate with individual customers.
Remember, your customers are real people whose interests and behavior will evolve over time. Continually analyzing the data that you gather from their interactions will ensure your personalization efforts reflect their current needs, not their past ones.
User Experience (UX) Design
UX design is all about creating a great customer experience – and personalization allows you to take this one step further. Rather than designing interfaces and interactions for your audience as a whole, you can cater to individual needs and preferences.
When incorporating personalization into UX design, there are some best practices to consider. First of all, simplicity and intuitiveness should always be the top priority. Make it easy for the customer to take action or find what they need with clear CTAs, personalized dashboards and streamlined navigation.
You can also implement feedback mechanisms, such as survey boxes, into the design. This helps customers feel understood and gives you a direct insight into their preferences and pain points.
Accessibility is another core component of good UX design. If customers can’t access the experience you’ve created for them, they’ll take their business elsewhere. You can improve accessibility by adding things like transcripts for webinars and alt text for images.
Tools and Technologies for Personalization
Let’s examine the tools and technologies that will help you implement and enhance your personalization strategy.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems
CRM systems make it easier to manage customer data. They store customer details and, depending on integration capabilities, can track interactions across a wide variety of platforms. Personalized digital experiences aren’t possible without this data, which is why CRM systems are often fundamental to their success.
The key benefits of using CRM for personalization are:
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- Comprehensive customer profiles by consolidating multiple data sources
- Greater consistency and relevancy from having an up-to-date, centralized hub
- Easier and more precise segmentation
- 360-degree analytics and reporting
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is fundamental to carrying out personalization at scale. Automation works by using a predefined set of rules to speed up and streamline repetitive tasks. It means you can increase productivity and deliver more complex personalized experiences without having to increase manual workload.
Here are some examples of how marketing automation can be used to enhance personalized digital experiences:
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- Automatically separating customers into segments based on predefined criteria
- Triggering an email to send when a customer completes a certain action
- Dynamically responding to a customer’s on-site behavior with personalized content or product feeds
- A/B testing personalized advertising campaigns to determine customer preferences
AI and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the machine learning technology underpinning it are rapidly changing how personalized digital experiences are executed. Similarly to automation, these technologies can enhance efficiency and scale up output.
However, AI’s abilities extend far beyond automation. Where automation simply recreates the same process repeatedly, AI can make actual decisions without human input.
This means it can quickly analyze vast data sets and provide deep insights that might take a human days to find. Once patterns have been found, AI uses them to predict and proactively meet customers’ future needs.
AI’s natural language processing (NLP) abilities allow it to read and understand the sentiment of text-based interactions. AI chatbots can, therefore, deliver personalized, human-like responses to customer queries in real time, enhancing customer experience.
AI can also execute creative tasks that typically rely on a human. For example, the ON24 AI-powered Analytics and Content Engine can generate video clips and repurpose content into new assets that more accurately meet customer needs and preferences.
Implementing Personalization Strategies
Just like your customers themselves, the spectrum of digital interactions and experiences is vast. How you use these touchpoints to create and implement your personalization strategy should depend on your own unique business goals and customers.
Creating a Personalization Strategy
Although no two personalization strategies are the same, the fundamental principles are universal. With that in mind, we’ve outlined the basic step-by-step process to follow if you’re struggling with where to start.
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- Define your objectives: starting by defining clear, measurable objectives that align with business goals and customer needs will ensure you stay on track.
- Aggregate and analyze customer data: data is how you understand your customers. Through analyzing it, you can find valuable insights into their behaviors, interests and preferences.
- Segment your customer base: segment your customers into groups based on similar interests and patterns of behavior. This will make executing your strategy much easier.
- Develop your strategy: create a detailed plan for meeting your objectives, including the segments you’ll target, channels you’ll use, messages you’ll send and tools that will help you.
- Execute your strategy: put your plan into action and start monitoring the results.
The steps outlined above won’t necessarily follow in order. You can jump between them, updating your strategy as more data is collected and redefining your audience segments to achieve greater granularity.
Testing and Optimization
Constant testing is important because customer needs, interests and preferences change over time. Their digital experiences need to keep up. You can continually optimize your personalized experiences by deploying the following techniques:
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- Using AI and analytics tools to monitor results and identify changes in customer behavior.
- A/B testing different content, creatives and send times to see what works best for different customers.
- Gathering direct customer feedback through surveys, reviews and customer service interactions.
Case Studies and Examples
Seismic
Seismic, the leading global sales enablement platform, used personalized digital experiences to support its expansion into the Asia Pacific (APAC) market. It created a new program of live webinars broadcast to suit the regional time zone and presented by local and regional experts.
Customers in the APAC segment could access dedicated landing pages featuring relevant material. They also received personalized follow-up emails based on individual webinar engagement scores.
Read the full case study to learn more about how Seismic used ON24’s digital experience platform to increase their webinar-to-sales meeting conversion rate by 20% and shorten sales cycles by 67%.
LexisNexis
Legal and regularity intelligence platform LexisNexis turned to ON24 to enhance its digital customer experiences. They wanted to make it possible for more customers to attend webinars and to provide a more engaging experience for those that do.
LexisNexis recognized that some of their customers missed webinars because of work schedules. To combat this, they used ON24’s on-demand and mobile solutions so customers could experience webinars anytime, anywhere.
During the webinars, they used feedback tools to gather intelligence about which topics people were most interested in. Following these changes, LexisNexis saw an 81% increase in revenue from digital experiences.
Challenges and Considerations
Delivering high-impact personalized digital experiences is easier than it used to be, but you’ll still likely experience some challenges along the way. Here are some of the most common:
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- Data silos – you can have huge amounts of data but if it’s not all consolidated in one place, you won’t be able to make much sense of it. Using a centralized data platform will enhance efficiency and make organizational collaboration easier.
- Privacy considerations – customers don’t like their data being used without their consent. Committing to only using first-party data will earn their trust and means the data is more reliable.
- Segmentation struggles – there are countless ways to segment customers, so how do you choose? This is why being specific about your strategy aims is so important – you’ll be able to work backward to understand which customers you need to target.
- Technical challenges – if you opt for the wrong tools then your tech stack can very quickly complicate processes instead of streamlining them. Avoid this by choosing platforms with integration capabilities, built-in analytics and automation features for real-time personalization.
ON24’s Intelligent Engagement Platform brings connected customer insights together with continuous engagement so that you can deliver high- impact personalization at scale. Get in touch to learn more about how to personalize customer experience with ON24.
