Why You Shouldn’t Let Generic Content Cause User Drop-off in 2021
For something that is a top investment priority for most organizations, personalization is surprisingly ineffective. Looking at different 2020 research reports, 86% of marketing teams are spending money on personalization, and nearly a third of organizations say it is a top priority for this year.
Yet, the results aren’t as per expectations. Less than one-third of customers/users feel that the content experiences they receive leave a positive brand perception, despite being personalized. Clearly, there is a dissonance somewhere — one that organizations must urgently correct if they are to unlock their content’s true potential.
Good personalization, bad personalization: where are organizations going wrong?
Content is a critical stepping stone, for organizations looking to drive conversion — any kind of conversion, be it making a B2C purchase or signing up for a B2B newsletter, or subscribing to an online service. The landing page creates the first impression, your chatbot conversation guides users through doubts/queries and regular emails keep that thread of engagement alive.
Without personalization, you are basically throwing the same generic content towards varying customer and user demographics, with a hit-or-miss chance of success.
Unless you operate within a hyper-specific niche where every customer’s needs, drivers, and motivations are identical, personalization is key to ensuring that users don’t drop off halfway into the experience. Unfortunately, despite recognizing this need, most organizations are yet to deliver personalized content that is at par with customer expectations.
● In 2020, 92% of marketers agreed that users expect a personalized experience (vs 85% last year).
● Websites (56%) and email (78%) remain the top focus for personalization, with the increasingly popular web apps coming in at the bottom (20%).
● Just 13% are very or extremely satisfied with the level of personalization achieved.
● More than 1 in 5 companies report that personalization has had only a moderate to zero impact on advancing customer relationships.
● The overwhelming majority (69%) believe that marketers are not getting personalization right.
So, where is the dissonance?
Why is that despite strategic prioritization and strong funding, content personalization is yet to achieve an adequate degree of maturity?
The answer lies in identifying the gaps in the user experience — i.e., important factors turning users away.
Strategies for content personalization that work
The first step is to recognize the bottlenecks in the average content experience. It is not enough to just serve up what organizations feel is the appropriate content for a user segment. The following hurdles often get in the way of your personalization efforts’ impact, causing drop-off:
● Pop-up ads, alerts, and cookies — 41%
● Non-persistent websites, i.e., pages that don’t recall where the user left off — 18%
● Spam emails (37%) and slow pages (25%)
● Too many pages required to find content — 16%
● Clutter (12%), content unavailability (13%), and offer-related issues (19%)
Organizations must identify if these common frustration triggers are part of the average UX, and eliminate them one by one.
Further, there are several tips that can help to drive personalization that actually resonates with the target user group:
1. Keep it simple
Tried and tested personalization tactics like geo-based segmentation are proven to work. If an employee is logging into the HR web portal from a location housing your software development team, it is safe to personalize the web content to address the needs of that role. Geo-based segmentation has a very low level of risk (remember that irrelevant content is 15% likely to cause drop-off) and is easy to implement. The computing needs are low enough to maintain an optimal load time.
2. Offer context at the backend
Interestingly, personalization at the backend can be equally helpful when trying to drive adoption, particularly in the B2B space. Given your select user base and the high value of transactions, B2B users are likely to expect a highly personalized and efficient customer experience. By empowering your customer support agents with contextualized information and insights, you can help them solve problems faster and boost user retention.
3. Turn content engagement data into action points
To garner the expected ROI from content personalization, it must feed into genuine action — lead generation, conversion, referrals, etc. create targeted content for various stages of the adoption funnel (awareness, research, interest) and collect data on how a user interacts with one or more of these content stacks. Based on this data, you can push users further along the funnel, with intelligent intervention from your support team, to inspire action.
Tools you should be using for creating websites that resonate with your user base
Ideally, content personalization will encompass every facet of your digital presence that influences user adoption.
For example, you could configure your FAQs to show documentation for a specific programming language once the traffic origin IP is identified as belonging to a specific language developer. Website personalization, email personalization, and personalized chat conversation flows are other integral elements for resonating with your user base.
Some of the tools that can help you on this journey are:
● Twik — experience optimization tool for B2B and other segments, aiding in user onboarding via CRM integrations
● Adobe target — AI-powered testing, personalization and automation to fine-tune the content experience informed by every click
● Hyperise — website and image personalization, sales funnel personalization and anonymous visitor identification for B2B and B2C
● Optimizely — experience optimization and testing tool for websites, mobile apps, TV and IoT
Before you choose a technology that can help personalize your content experience for your entire and specific target audience, make sure that you have a detailed user analysis and persona library in place to prevent any “shot in the dark.”
That’s the only way to avoid falling in that 80% group who will abandon personalization in 2020–2021, due to low ROI.
What are your thoughts on personalization and its impact on customer relationships and user adoption indices? What are the tools you’d recommend to the larger community — as certified game-changers? Write to me, drop your comments, or simply tell me what you thought of this article at Arvind@AM-PMAssociates.com.
