A Partner’s Perspective: Why Quba Is Really Excited About Sitefinity's Web Personalization?

Until recently online marketing and websites were a bit of a gamble.

Organizations were asked to sign off substantial budgets for things they didn’t really understand. They then employed someone else to do ‘Google Magic’ and get them into supposedly advantageous positions in the search engines.  At the end of every year management would look at a 30-page report confirming that traffic to the website was ‘up’. 

“Great News” they would proclaim, handing over another check to their web designers to perform further enhancements that would make traffic go ‘up’ again. Fast-forward to now and all websites and online marketing are expected to deliver real ROI. 

‘Traffic is up’ no longer does the business. For the agencies that have survived understanding business priorities and the effectiveness of web investments has become crucial to how we work. Reporting has had to become much more rigorous which has led to a different kind of digital marketer. We’re completely obsessed with delivering continuous ongoing improvements.

Delivering constant improvement 

How do we deliver constant improvement? We get into the head of the person using the website to understand the entire customer journey. Not just on the website but the complete set of behaviors that got that person to your website looking at your company at that time.

It sounds really simple but actually it throws up a whole lot of complications. First you realize that people interact with your website at completely different stages of their journey. 

In the example of an eCommerce website some people are close to buying and some people are doing their initial research. Ultimately your marketing needs to engage with the customer in the right way. For someone doing their initial research a hard sell isn’t going to cut the mustard.

Predicting user behaviours

We can go some way to identify where customers are in their journey without personalization tools.

For example if someone types ‘2 seater sports car’ into Google there is nothing in the search term that indicates real buying intent. A large proportion of people searching on this keyword are probably at the beginning of their journey.

However if someone types in ‘BMW 2 seater sports car chrome finish’ their search term suggests they are further down their purchasing process having identified a potential brand and finish. If this person decides not to buy from us on this visit we can continually retarget them with adverts to try to convince them because we know the intent is there.

PPC and SEO experts have been juggling the odds of conversion for quite some time. They’ve even managed to increase conversion by sending specific searches to optimized search landing pages with offers that match the intent of the search. It’s a tactic that has generated a lot of success but there are some limitations.

The limitations of SEO Landing Pages and Microsites

So we know how people are finding us and we can send them to the right places. Job done right?

Actually no. The biggest limitation of landing pages is that they are limited. Specifically the optimized pages are very superficial. When you get away from the landing page the content becomes more general. This means that the marketing conversation with customers becomes lost.

This can be partially covered through heavily optimized microsites. Again this had some success but there were also limitations… 

1. It cost a lot of money to buy new domains and create optimized websites. 
2. Google started to place a higher emphasis on domain authority when ranking websites meaning it was harder to get a new domain to a high ranking position. 
3. With the duplicate content and keyword stuffing penalties bought in by Google generating these optimized websites became more time consuming and more costly.
4. Most importantly microsites tend to only expose a customer to a particular part of a business offering. They restrict where the conversation can go. 

Where does User Habit/Personalization fit in?

What tools like the Sitefinity Personalization Module allow you to do is take that conversation a step further.

For example if our person searching for ‘BMW 2 seater sports car chrome finish’ decides to browse around our website before submitting an enquiry we can place relevant messaging about the initial search term throughout their journey.

For a considered purchase like this personalizing the content does not need to stop when the website journey ends. In our example if the person books a test drive at a local showroom we can retarget them with questionnaires asking how the test drive was. Really clever organizations are even linking what you see on the website to conversations and interactions you have had with their human staff. 

In our example this might include connecting details held in the customer database used by sales teams to track sales with the website itself. It might be that our customer Mrs Miggins didn’t like the 2 seater sports car and is now looking at coupés. A website working on this intelligence could then show Mrs Miggins coupés if she returns to the website rather than bombarding her with sports cars that she has excluded.

How does it work?

At a technical level there are a number of ways that personalization software identifies customers. The main ones are listed below:

• Search terms: What term did the customer use to find our website.
• Previous Visit: Dropping a Cookie on a visitor’s machine can allow you to personalize content for them when they come back. For example, it might be that last time she visited Mrs Muggins looked at lots of sports cars.
• Email Addresses: This is a great identifier as it can be used to track down an entire customer record. This is where sales team conversations can be added to our customer intelligence.
• Referring URLs: Frequently visitors arriving at your website from other websites will have relatively specific interests. In our example anyone coming to BMW.com from Sportscars.net will probably have a refined interest in sports cars.
• Location: Although location based online marketing is already done by a number of organizations not using personalization software it can be harnessed further through personalization. For example if you know that visiting a showroom is a common factor in 90% of BMW purchases it makes sense to showcase where the local showroom is on web-journeys.

Sitefinity Personalization allows you to create ‘user segments’ using these and other criteria as you can see from the screenshot below:

For example you might choose to create a segment for:

Location= London, Search Term=’BMW Sports car’, Referring URL=’Sportscars.net’.

This version of your website should be highly relevant to London and optimized to show sports cars. However, for someone with the following criteria the site would be optimized very differently:

Location=’Midlands’, Search term= ‘BMW’, Referral URL=’Facebook.com’.

Ultimately the different ‘user segments’ represent different kinds of potential customer at different stages in their buying process.

The benefit of this is that you manage your interaction with the customer throughout their engagement with your business. The theory being that by managing their interest you can push them towards positive decisions.

What results can you expect?

It’s really hard to put an absolute metric on what personalization can do to bottom line turnover. Ultimately it depends on how much personalization you do. 

Personalization is really more of a shift in how you do your business online. It is about supporting the entire customer engagement from initial interest through to real action. For some companies developing this wider understanding and communication with their customers can have a profound effect on turnover.

What is for certain is that big online operators like Amazon have been using similar methods for a long time. If they’re doing it, it is definitely worth considering for your business.

About the Author

Jon Eaton is an online communication specialist and a web journalist by training. Jon’s role as New Business Manager at Quba is to help new clients to exploit online business opportunities.