Personalization is a crucial strategy for marketers looking to build strong relationships with their customers. Personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, highlighting its financial advantages such as lifting revenues, increasing marketing ROI, and improving customer outcomes. With 80% of consumers more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences (according to Deloitte), the potential ROI is significant. However, if done incorrectly or without care, personalization can alienate audiences, violate privacy, and compromise website performance.
In this article, we'll explore the importance of personalization and performance, the limitations of traditional personalization methods, and a more effective approach using intent-based personalization.
Do people really want personalization?
It may be surprising to some, but people do want a personalized experience. It makes sense: people are busy, easily overwhelmed by choices, and want a quick solution so they can focus on what is most important to them. Personalized marketing across the full digital life cycle, including emails, significantly impacts the customer experience by making customers feel understood and valued.
It can also go the other way. What you don’t want to do is give your customers the impression that they are just a number in your database, for example, by way of a failed mail merge, the simplest of personalization tactics. While researching this piece, I received the following email, a very direct example of how poor personalization can backfire. (I remain unconvinced that I’m the target demographic for this special conversation but whatever…😒):
The stats below (from McKinsey and Accenture) show that consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences, will share their data to get that experience, will shop with those who do give them personalized recommendations, and will abandon websites that don’t live up to those expectations:
- 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
- 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
- 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience.
- Nearly half (48%) of all consumers have left a business’s website and made a purchase on another site or in-store simply because it was poorly curated.
- 73% also said that a business has never communicated with them online in a way that felt too personalized or invasive. Of those who reported a brand experience as too personal or invasive, 64% said it was because the brand had information about the consumer that they didn’t share knowingly or directly, such as a recommendation based on a purchase they made with a different business.
- People don’t like creepy location-based marketing tactics, such as mobile notifications or texts after walking by a store, but they do like apology messages after poor online or in-store experiences.
Personalization marketing can drive up customer loyalty, increase conversions, and ultimately, also the company's gross sales.
Yes, but… they also want really fast websites with personalized content
While people love a personalized web experience, if a website is too slow, they will abandon it before they have a chance to see any personalized content. Unfortunately, overly complex personalization and dynamic content can negatively impact performance metrics like page load times if not implemented carefully. Now that Google has increased its emphasis on performance by prioritizing fast pages in its search ranking, visitors may not even find brands with slow sites in the first place.
While performance is vital for good user experience and search engine ranking, optimizing for speed alone at the expense of relevance can undermine marketing effectiveness. As the Accenture survey showed, almost half of all consumers left a website because the content was “poorly curated.”
Consumers want it all—fast websites, good user experiences, privacy, and personalized (but not stalkerish) content. Marketers struggle under the expectations of delivering those great, personalized experiences, perhaps with an inadequate budget, and not enough man power.
How are you supposed to deliver?
The challenges of traditional personalization
Traditional rules-based personalization assumes that the more customer data you have, the better you can target your customer. The promise is that with more data, and enough if/then rules, you will achieve personalization. This also requires the help of the engineering team to implement, maintain, and debug.
This approach is time-consuming, prone to errors, and will also significantly slow down your website. Every time a user visits a page, the web server must run each rule to determine what content to display. The visitor does not see the page until all the rules have been run. The more rules you have, the more work the server needs to do, and the slower your site becomes.
The other major challenge is that you can never be confident that your data is complete, accurate or current. Effective data management is crucial in organizing, maintaining, and storing data for personalization without compromising website performance. Despite all the effort and time spent collecting the data and coming up with rules, you may still deliver irrelevant customer experiences.
And if you are really good at data collection, you risk alienating your customer anyway by being overly intrusive, leading to customer disengagement, opt-outs, and a reluctance to share the personal information required for effective personalization.
As you can see, to be successful under the traditional approach requires a herculean effort of collecting the right data, anticipating every scenario and converting that information into if/then rules (up to hundreds or thousands of them) that need to be executed in mere milliseconds before a user bounces from your slow-loading site.
An intent-based approach to personalization in the customer journey
What if you could deliver personalized experiences, without the hassle of data collection, slow-loading pages, or the need for a developer's help?
An intent-based approach to personalization takes a Jobs-To-Be-Done perspective. Instead of dissecting a customer into countless data points, it simply asks what the customer’s intent is when they visit your website. What is the problem they are trying to solve at that moment in time?
Uniform is a platform that harnesses the power of intent-based personalization through its signals and intent tools. (Read more about Uniform here.)
When a visitor visits a website, they have a specific goal or intention in mind, such as "booking a hotel room" or "purchasing a new phone." By analyzing the actions that a visitor takes on the website, such as clicks, searches, and page views (the “signals”), businesses can identify the visitor's in-the-moment intent and deliver targeted, relevant content to help them achieve their goal. For example, if the signals suggest that a visitor is searching for "best budget phones," the website can display a list of budget-friendly phones and related accessories. Defining visitor intent allows businesses to provide a more personalized, efficient, and effective user experience.
Signals and intents are stored locally on the visitor's browser, ensuring enhanced privacy, security, and a fast-loading site.
Uniform also solves the performance issue by utilizing content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai and Cloudflare to execute its personalization logic and deliver fully personalized pages from the CDN edge locations closest to each user. This means no more delays in dynamically rendering personalized pages on the origin server. Plus, with personalized pages delivered from the edge, your Core Web Vitals will improve, making it more likely that your audience will discover you.
Uniform’s visual workspace unifies your design system, marketing tools, and enterprise content, allowing your marketing and merchandising teams to execute without technical support. Engineers can spend more time building features, and you can focus on personalizing customer experiences with maximum flexibility, control, and precision. With native personalization, experimentation, and analytics capabilities, as well as a full visual preview feature, users are empowered to create dynamic, data-driven marketing experiences. By analyzing conversion data by intent and tailoring funnels to fit each specific target audience, you will be able to maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.
Additionally, Uniform offers pre-configured AI prompts to accelerate content creation, making personalization simpler than ever.
Uniform contains everything you need—generative AI, A/B testing, personalization, localization, etc.—to create personalized, data-driven experiences quickly.
In summary…
The solution to personalization is not to throw more money, people, and data at the problem. What Uniform has done is to rethink personalization marketing from the ground up, putting the focus squarely on the customer's needs and actions. Not only is this approach fast, secure, and respectful of your customers' privacy, but it also delivers the relevant experiences that customers are looking for.
In today's digital landscape, personalization is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. It's the key to unlocking meaningful connections with your customers, boosting engagement, and driving conversions. Using platforms like Uniform means you don’t have to choose between personalization and performance—you can have both.
