Personalization is often associated with one-to-one customer experiences. But personalization doesn’t mean delivering a unique message to each individual customer.
In fact, most customers just want to see content that is relevant to them and adds value. So there’s no need to create custom content for each customer. But you do need to start understanding what’s relevant and valuable to each of your customers.
Right now, you’re probably sending the same message to the majority of your customers, and there’s a good chance the content on your website offers the same experience for all visitors, no matter who or where they are located. But with Acquia’s personalization tools, you can start customizing the content each visitor sees based on information you know about them.
For example, if you were visiting a hotel website, searching for hotels for the week of July 4th, then wouldn’t it be helpful for a European beach-lover to see relevant content regarding the Amalfi Coast, or a VIP beach and movie package that week instead of a general listing? Maybe the content is best served in their native language? If this content already exists on the website, it’s just a matter of serving it up to the right visitor at the right time - and making it easy to find with Drupal so it’s not lost in the sea of other content on the website.
Ultimately, the goal of personalization is to strategically deliver relevant content to customers that feels tailored to their individual needs, based on their specific behaviors. This may seem overwhelming, but don’t worry: Acquia has a 3-phase approach to help you get from where you may be now - marketing one message to many customers - to a personalized approach to delivering your message.
Acquia’s ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach to personalization allows you to start small and gather data and insights regarding how your customers interact with your website. You’ll begin to turn previously anonymous website visitors into known customers with demographics and behavioral data connected to each unique visitor. With each new personalization you implement, you’ll collect more data on your customers, allowing you to narrow down tailored messages to a smaller groups of customers.
So how does this 3-phase approach work?
The first phase is “Crawl,” which is designed to collect actionable data on visitors immediately. As soon as the javascript for Acquia Personalization is installed, you’ll begin collecting general demographic data on your website’s visitors, such as their location, browser, device preferences, and whether they are a new or returning visitor. All this data can be collected immediately out-of-the-box, without any personalizations set up. This data can then be used to later create personalized experiences that will generate results quickly for these groups, and allow you to start building out your targeted outcomes.
The second phase is “Walk” which evolves from testing personalizations with the information based on this collected data. This new information allows you to consider previous interactions about key demographics to drive a better user experience on your website. You’ll start to know more about your customers such as their name, email address, company, products purchased, site preferences, and other relevant interests. You will also have a better understanding of how your visitors are interacting with your site, what pages they are viewing, what content they are downloading, and how they like to navigate through your site. All this data will feed into the creation of new and better-personalized experiences through past personalizations and information from prior site behaviors.
Lastly, the “Run” phase allows you to take everything you’ve learned about your customer’s activity and create an orchestrated customer journey across multiple touch points. You can pull in data from other sources outside of the website such as your email marketing system or your Customer Relationship Management database in order to create omni-channel marketing strategies targeting the most important key segments you’ve identified.
This may seem like a lot but Acquia has a great program that will break all of this down for you -- in more detail, in a step-by-step process that will teach you how to implement these personalizations on your site.
Check out our Acquia Personalization product page to learn more about Acquia Personalization, and how our personalization strategy services can help with your personalization efforts.
