What is Website Personalization? Definition, Benefits, Practices

In an era where consumers demand unique and tailored experiences, website personalization has become essential. Brands create interactions that resonate with each visitor by leveraging past behavior, preferences, and demographic data. This guide showcases nine exemplary website personalization examples from 2024. These examples illustrate how tailored web experiences can drive customer loyalty, increase conversion rates, and deliver a more engaging user journey.

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What is website personalization?

A customized online experience happens when companies craft individualized interactions tailored to a visitor’s past behavior on their site. This past behavior is used to gather essential data about visitors, often including demographic details and their preferences.

The main objective of personalization is to improve the customer experience. When it comes to web content personalization, it comes in various forms; ideally, all these forms should be used in tandem. Some notable examples of personalized web experiences contain:

• Page Elements: Text, banners, headlines, videos, and additional content customized according to the visitor’s country or region.

• Product Recommendations: Suggestions based on previously purchased products or frequently visited categories.

• Content Recommendations: Suggestions based on previously read blog articles or watched videos.

• Personalized CTAs: Buttons that use the customer’s name if they are logged into their account or accessing the site from a recognized device. For instance, a restaurant website using your name to encourage you to make a reservation.

• Personalized Checkout or Thank You Pages: Pages that use the customer’s name to provide them with estimated shipping times after completing a purchase.

An important aspect of creating a personalized web experience is knowing what NOT to show. For example, an 18-year-old male shopper might not be interested in women’s knitting accessories. Avoiding the display of random or mismatched items also contributes to a good personalized web experience.

Read more: Website Development Cost: Everything You Need to Know

6 Benefits of Website Personalization

As stated in Statista, 90% of U.S. consumers find personalized marketing content “very” or “somewhat” appealing. Zoominfo discovered that 77% of consumers have selected, endorsed, or paid a premium for a brand that emphasizes personalized customer experiences.

Further, when your website content is simple and easy to understand, people spend more time reading it, which boosts overall user concentration. To make web content readable, you should use paraphrasing techniques to replace complex words and phrases with simpler synonyms while retaining the original meaning.

Beyond improving business revenue, other benefits of website personalization include:

Higher Conversion Rates

eConsultancy found that 94% of companies personalizing their websites saw an boost in conversion rates. Personalized CTAs, more suitable product recommendations, and landing pages with higher conversion rates are the primary reasons for this enhancement.

For instance, if someone is already subscribed to your mailing list, they shouldn’t have to re-enter their email to access a gated resource. Instead, they should be prompted to proceed to the next step, such as signing up for a trial.

Improved Customer Loyalty

Personalization leads to higher conversions and more satisfied customers, improving brand loyalty. SmarterHQ discovered that 72% of consumers engage only with brands that offer personalized messaging.

Gathering data on how users interact with your brand helps you understand their experience on your website. This information can shape your future website UI, pricing strategies, product adjustments, and marketing initiatives to achieve a competitive edge.

Shorter Sales Cycles

Sales teams love pitching and completing deals. What they don’t enjoy is wasting time validating leads or taking calls from unqualified prospects.

Personalization allows you to better segment your audience, helping sales teams identify higher-quality leads and make more efficient sales calls without wasting time and effort.

Another benefit of personalization is reducing the number of follow-up emails needed to close a sale. By comprehending customers’ needs and knowing which messages will resonate, you can close deals faster.

Better Website Engagement

Offering relevant content is key to keeping customers engaged with your site. When users find that the content is personalized to their interests and needs, they’re more likely to spend time exploring your offerings. Personalization enhances their experience by making it feel specifically tailored to them, which naturally encourages more interaction with your products. 

As a result, you’ll likely see an increase in the average duration of sessions and a decrease in bounce rates. Users are not just visiting your site; they are staying longer and engaging more deeply because the content resonates with them on a personal level.

Better Marketing ROI

Personalized marketing strategies, including targeted ads, customized communications, and tailored landing pages and calls-to-action (CTAs), significantly improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. By refining your retargeting efforts, you ensure that your marketing messages are more relevant and impactful. 

This precision leads to more engaged prospects and a higher likelihood of conversions. As a result, your marketing campaigns become sharper and more focused, translating into stronger returns on investment (ROI). With better-targeted efforts, you’ll see more substantial results and a higher overall effectiveness from your marketing initiatives.

Website Personalization Best Practices

Define Clear Objectives

Before embarking on website personalization, it’s crucial to define your objectives. What do you aim to achieve through personalizing your website? You might concentrate on increasing engagement, improving conversions, reducing bounce rates, or enhancing customer loyalty.

Another method to define objectives could involve analyzing your current website and identifying gaps. Consider the following questions:

• How can I better engage returning visitors?

• Which areas of my website need special attention?

• What CTAs should I use for different user groups?

• What metrics should I track and analyze?

• Answering these questions can help you establish clear goals for website personalization to guide your campaigns towards success.

Utilize Real-Time Data

The best way to identify user needs is by collecting real-time data so that you can build real-time personalized website features. Data sources may include:

• Purchase data

• Pages visited

• Emails opened

• Search history

By deploying Insider’s Growth Management Platform (GMP) on your website—a sophisticated platform supported by powerful AI technology and machine learning algorithms—you can understand visitor behaviors and preferences. Subsequently, you can effectively segment users and create real-time website personalization based on their needs.

Disclose Privacy Agreements

Ensuring that users feel comfortable and secure on your website is essential, especially when it comes to handling their personal information. Many customers are apprehensive about how their data will be used, and any lack of clarity can lead to feelings of mistrust. To alleviate these concerns, it’s vital to be completely transparent about your data practices.

Provide a clear and comprehensive privacy statement that outlines how user information is collected, used, and protected. This transparency not only reassures users but also reinforces your brand’s commitment to their privacy and security. 

Engage Your Current Users

Instead of internal debates about changes on the website, it’s best to involve your current visitors in this process. After all, if the changes aim to improve customer experience, isn’t considering their feedback wise?

Use surveys to gather feedback from customers about your website and suggest new changes that could help minimize risks and avoid conflicts.

Another excellent way to follow is to notify your users of upcoming changes to your website. This is an excellent way to keep everyone updated and avoid disappointment!

Test, Test, Test

Testing your features before fully implementing them is crucial for saving both time and resources. Utilizing A/B testing and multivariate testing allows you to gauge how users will react to different changes on your website. This approach helps in identifying what works best and making informed decisions. Additionally, you can introduce changes gradually and collect feedback from users to assess their impact before rolling them out more broadly.

Don’t Overdo It!

Striking the right balance between making your customers feel valued and not overwhelming them is essential. Overloading users with repetitive content or excessive product recommendations can become annoying and counterproductive. It’s important to have a well-thought-out strategy on how and where to personalize their experience without crossing the line into overload.

Analyze Performance Regularly

To ensure your efforts are paying off, continuously monitor your website’s performance against the goals you established at the outset. Regular analysis through web analytics tools will help you validate your assumptions and measure the effectiveness of your changes. By staying on top of these metrics, you can ensure that your updates are contributing positively to your campaign’s success.

9+ Amazing Website Personalization Examples In 2024

Ticino

As its name suggests, Ticino’s website offers information related travel about Ticino, a picturesque region in southern Switzerland. This site provides details on the best restaurants, recreational activities, and accommodations for visitors to the area.

Beyond allowing you to switch the website content to your preferred language, Ticino.ch also offers the option to tailor your experience based on the purpose of your visit, whether it’s for meetings, business, or general sightseeing.

The homepage adjusts its content dynamically depending on the user’s geographic location and language preferences. This enables them to provide visitors with relevant information and a navigation experience that suits their needs. With the Ticino app, this information is not only available on the website but also on mobile devices, offering a truly enticing experience that makes you want to visit Ticino!

Alior

Alior Bank, a versatile bank based in Poland, offers a personalized experience for its customers. Visitors are welcomed in either Polish or English based on their location.

Once the language preference is set, the content and advertisements are tailored to provide visitors with relevant information suited to their needs. Moreover, tailored versions of the same page are presented to specific target groups, allowing Alior Bank to provide relevant information.

While most banks focus on promoting products they want to sell, Alior’s personalized experience emphasizes what the customers actually need.

Sephora

Sephora, a renowned beauty brand, exemplifies true multichannel personalization. As expected, they deliver a personalized experience on their website established on the visitor’s geographic location. Depending on where they are, visitors might be shifted to sephora.com, sephora.fr, sephora.co.uk, or other provincial sites.

The brand enhances shopping in store by using beacon technology to refine their customer segments. This technology alerts customers if they are near an item they left in their digital cart.

Sephora also leverages first-party customer data to further personalize the shopping experience. Customers can set their Beauty Preferences, informing the website about their skin type and tone, fragrance and ingredient preferences, and other key details that influence their makeup choices. This allows Sephora to collect clear customer data directly, providing a tailored experience.

Additionally, the Beauty Insider rewards program offers members special discounts and promotions, personalized emails, and more.

Amazon

In the realm of web personalization, Amazon is likely the leading brand at present. The e-commerce giant operates in 19 global markets to serve its customers. Geographic location is used to identify where customers are, highlighting the products available to them in that area.

When viewing a product, Amazon can indicate whether the item can be shipped to a specific location. Customers can smoothly change to a different shipping address if they intend to get the product elsewhere.

Amazon’s personalization efforts are vast, including the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section that showcases complementary products often paired with the item a customer is viewing.

Looking at an office chair and curious about similar materials? Amazon provides recommendations in such cases as well. If you have an Amazon account, you can expect product suggestions based on your past purchases.

Spotify

The audio streaming platform Spotify excels at using AI and algorithms to convert data into helpful suggestions and personalized experiences.

Upon logging into Spotify, you are immediately prompted to choose your favorite artists or genres. Based on your listening history and your location, Spotify then recommends songs, artists, albums, and playlists tailored to your preferences.

What if you have a single favorite song and nothing else? Spotify then creates a “Radio” station for you based on that song, playing related tracks. This feature assists users in finding new music they may not have come across otherwise.

Spotify extends this personalization to podcasts, presenting suggestions based on the gathered data. At the end of the year, Spotify collects all this data into a feature called Spotify Wrapped, introducing you with a encyclopedic overview of your top artists, genres, and songs from the past year.

Netflix

Another giant in personalization is Netflix, the streaming platform that processes vast amounts of customer data to recommend movies and series across various devices.

Have you ever allowed someone else to use your Netflix account for a few weeks and unexpectedly noticed that all your suggestions look different? That’s because Netflix uses your viewing record to suggest shows and movies you might enjoy.

The platform also highlights recommendations like the top 10 movies and TV shows in a specific country, setting it apart from other heavy personalization companies. Additionally, Netflix collects data from millions of subscribers and conducts A/B tests to determine which content is more popular. For instance, the top recommended show when you log into Netflix may have different cover images depending on who is watching.

Each person or profile on Netflix has a unique experience, and the more you watch, the better Netflix becomes at predicting what you might be interested in.

Airbnb

Airbnb’s marketplace showcases available homes, vacation rentals, apartments, and experiences for travelers.

Personalization with Airbnb begins as soon as you enter the site, offering recommendations for cabins, apartments with pools or great views, private rooms, villas, and more, based on your geographic location. You’ll also find these suggestions in the Experiences section, featuring tours and activities organized by locals in your area.

Suppose you’re traveling rather than just looking for a weekend getaway and start searching a specific area. In that case, Airbnb continues to provide recommendations by displaying homes or experiences that match the location you’re exploring.

When you spend time looking at a particular listing on Airbnb, that listing will appear higher in your search results during your next visit to the platform. Additionally, Airbnb will notify you when many people are searching in particular areas, such as around major events.

Burger King

Burger King aimed to boost conversion rates and average order value (AOV) and recognized that personalized cross-sell recommendations were essential element for reaching this goal.

Collaborating with Insider, Burger King introduced personalized banners and web push notifications tailored to users’ browsing history and cart contents. The web push notifications targeted users with more than two items in their cart, promoting add-ons like soft drinks and fries through overlays to encourage additional purchases. The results were impressive:

• Conversion rates 25% higher than the industry average

• Increased average order value

Adidas

Adidas is leveraging the power of AI and machine learning to promote easier product find and purchases for customers. Their goal is to boost conversion rates by offering personalized product recommendations tailored to each customer’s browsing history, intent, and behavior.

Insider’s growth specialists assisted Adidas in implementing the Smart Recommendation tool, powered by Insider’s AI, to create highly personalized cross-channel recommendations.

The Smart Recommendation tool harnesses machine learning and AI capabilities to showcase tailored product suggestions for Adidas customers, such as trending items, recently viewed products, best-sellers based on location, and frequently bought together items. Here are the outcomes:

• Conversion rates increased by 13% on the homepage within one month.

• Conversion rates increased by 7% on product pages.

Samsung

Samsung noticed a significant decline in engagement on category and product pages during the launch of the Galaxy Note 9, as observed from their website analysis. To address this issue, Samsung utilized the Internal User’s Category Optimization Tool to automatically personalize the mobile device layout based on the last clicked category of the visitor. Samsung greeted each visitor with a personalized view of their products and categories tailored to the visitor’s preferences. Here are the results:

• Conversion rates increased by 10%.

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Recap

Website personalization has shifted from being optional to crucial in digital strategies. The website personalization examples highlighted in this guide show how effective personalization transforms user experiences. This leads to higher engagement, increased sales, and stronger customer loyalty. By following best practices and constantly analyzing performance, enterprises can harness personalization to surpass customer expectations. As technology advances, the options for making personalized web experiences will increase, offering brands more opportunities to bond with their audiences in meaningful ways.