In today’s world, personalization isn’t just nice to have - customers expect it.
Personalization takes massive amounts of broadly applicable content and narrows it down to exactly the information relevant to your customer. It utilizes data to create a unique and more efficient user experience. Personalized content helps users know that the information they’re seeing is specific to their needs.
Why does personalization matter?
There’s so much noise to break through on the internet. If you’re going to stand out to a potential customer, your content has to be unique. When content is personalized it increases the time spent on your website and increases the likelihood that a customer will make a purchase.
Not only does personalized content improve customer experience, but it’s also now expected. No one wants to get to an online checkout and realize that they’ve been viewing prices in a different currency. Or click on a quote that isn’t valid in their state.
A well-planned piece of personalized content can flow seamlessly with your customer experience strategy.
Here are 4 stellar examples of content personalization in action:
Location
Curating content based on location is one of the most common types of personalization. Showing your customers different options based on their location can help personalize their experience. Allstate automatically detects your location when you open up their website. And if you need information for a different area, they make it easy to change locations.
For an insurance company, personalizing by location is important because policies are different in each state. Since the information on the website is personalized, customers don’t have to worry about making sure the information they’re seeing on the screen is accurate.
We always want customers to be confident that what they’re seeing on our websites applies to their situation. Customers are then motivated to take the next step because they have correct information.
Persona
Businesses like Betterment create content for different personas with extremely different needs. It can be challenging for organizations like this to figure out how to get the right information to the right people.
To solve this problem, Betterment made three different landing pages for the different personas who would use their services. The Individuals landing page has information to help people set up an account on their own.
The Employers page provides content for companies who want to set up employee retirement plans through Betterment.
And the Advisors page focuses on how Betterment can help financial advisors support their clients.
Not only are the pages different, but they provide different options in the menu. These three personalized experiences not only help customers find what they need but also communicate that Betterment has a broad understanding of financial services.
Interest
On Heretto’s marketing email opt-in, subscribers are asked what content solutions they’re interested in and will receive a personalized email flow based on their decision.
Technical writers don’t necessarily need the same information as customer service managers, so we make sure that everyone is getting content that’s relevant to them.
Personalizing by interest is one way to make sure customers don’t have to search around a website to find what they need or get overwhelmed with inapplicable content.
Internal
Personalization is often talked about in reference to customers, but it is also crucial for internal operations.
Personalized content can help your employees find relevant business operations information and improve the performance of daily tasks. No more searching around for the right version of the document they need. With personalization, they can quickly find what they need. For a real life example, see how Medallia uses Heretto Portal to personalize their content not only to their customers but their internal audiences in this video:
Our own help site isn’t just useful for customers — it’s also for employees. The help site portal is built with Heretto Portal which has authentication capabilities that allow for personalization. One of our customers built personalization into their portal by using email authentication to create a unique experience for their general web audience, their customers, and their employees.
Personalization matters
No matter what industry you’re in, personalization makes an impact. And it’s here to stay. As AI continues to develop the opportunities to create personalized user experiences are rapidly expanding. In order to keep up, it’s vital to understand content personalization.
