Personalization: What is it and why is it important to your site?

Website personalization is a hot topic and is quickly turning into one of the most effect ways to drive conversions on your site. But what exactly is personalization and why is it so important to your brand and overall marketing strategy?

What does personalization look like on my site?

Personalization is a way of adapting your site's content, images, CTAs, offers, emails, and more to conform to a user's previous experience with your brand in a way that better meets their needs. Notice I said a previous experience with your brand, not just your website. This adds complexity (and if not done correctly, a bit of creepiness) to the individual experience each visitor has on your website. Not every CMS is built the same when it comes to adding personalization to your site. Platforms like Sitecore offer a dynamic Customer Experience Profile that is created as a user interacts with items on your website and other trackable entities on the web (think social media, CRMs, etc.). This then dictates the type of experience that user has on your website.

Why is it important?

Besides improving the overall customer experience with your brand, personalization is important to your brand in other ways.

Differentiation

Every company has at least one competitor (and if you're not in a brand-new industry, you probably have several competitors) that you are constantly in battle with for your target customers' attention. Personalization gives you that extra edge to differentiate yourself from your competitors by offering a custom experience that keeps your brand at top of mind.

Proactive (vs. reactive)

Personalization gives you the ability to be proactive with your marketing and messaging instead of reactive. Think about this: a customer most likely visits your site and interacts with your brands several times before they decide to (or not to) make a purchase. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to track the content they're interacting with your site and customize it to their needs to help make their process for purchasing even easier?

How Sitecore integrates personalization

Like mentioned above, Sitecore offers a robust solution to website personalization in their Customer Experience Platform. This platform inside Sitecore offers digital marketers the information they need to make informed decisions about future campaigns, website content, and more. Here's just a taste of what Sitecore can do for your website's personalization:

• Integration with non-Sitecore websites to give a more personal, fluid experience on your site when a customer interacts with your brand across various digital touchpoints.
• 
  Automated testing and optimization of content to make sure everything offered to users is optimized to produce the highest conversion.
• 
  Creation of robust customer profiles that are used not only to personalize content, but also for customer service and sales.

The time for personalization is now. It's no longer some nebulous concept that is something we'll be doing in the future. It's something that companies are utilizing to improve their marketing and overall customer experience.