Plan for success

Better preparation prevents poor performance, and in the case of personalisation it is crucial to delivering the return on investment the organisation sets out to achieve. The first step starts with alignment of strategic and business objectives to the digital goals and KPIs. Agreement between technical, marketing and business stakeholders about the agreed outcomes can often change stakeholders from reluctant detractors too enthusiastic promotors. The roadmapping process is often very useful at engaging non-technical stakeholders in thinking about personalisation and gain assistance in using tactics such as campaign tagging, offline personalisation, email segmentation and more if the people responsible for these areas are engaged in the planning process.

Next is segmentation of users. It may be easier to start thinking about creating customer tiers according to engagement and needs to understand where users are in their journey, going from:

high touch - users who are familiar with your brand and loyal customers. This group brings in the biggest revenue,

low touch - these users engage less frequently but can be nurtured further in order to nudge them into the high-touch tier, and

no-touch - these are all new users that have come from acquisition campaigns, newsletters, events, etc. They are users that potentially require more information and attention to remain engaged.

With the establishment of tiers you can move down a level and separate into segments. We can define a segment as a group of users who have something in common. Personalising content toward segments of your audience is a great way to target users with content that’s relevant to them. Segments should be identified and prioritised by their ability to drive business value and their size. A persona is a representation of the segment, is a fictional yet data-driven representation of your ideal user, and includes the users behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals in addition to segment demographics, age, location, and preferences. Creating a range of personas ensures you capture the needs, behaviours, and preferences of the entire target audience.

Get to know the unknowns!

With the segments and personas defined it is possible to map out the customer journey for each persona to help uncover what stages are best to deliver personalised content. Content should be segmented by persona, but also by customer journey stages. Typically, a customer journey map consists of at least four stages; Need, Research, Decision, Action. You may need to adapt or extend the customer journey to suit industry needs, and you should also decide what these stages look like across different channels.

The personas will often include an unknown or new user, a useful way to personalise for the unknown user is with ‘micro-conversions’. These are actions that a user takes that could lead to a larger engagement. Some well-known examples of micro-conversions include signing up for a newsletter or downloading gated content. In the context of a personalisation strategy, these conversions can be relatively valuable goals, because they require enough trust from the visitor to provide their identifying information, such as an email address, which can turn an unknown visitor into a known contact. Additionally, in a mature optimisation and marketing automation plan, this identifying information can be turned into a lead to be nurtured through the funnel to a higher conversion. Other micro-conversions do not ask for identifying information but will allow you to optimise all stages of the customer experience, before users have become a known contact. Designing non-identifying questions such as asking what they’re looking for? These kinds of questions are perceived by the user as extra navigation and often get a high rate of interaction. Have a clear plan of what will happen after the questions have been answered, as users will expect a higher level of help than just a change of imagery or related content. These micro-conversions can also help identify segments that may be a good to optimise as well as those which are not identifying themselves,

and put in place strategies to boost their interaction with the micro-conversions, then optimise their journey towards your higher value goals. Finally, non-identifying micro-conversions are great candidates for A/B testing. You can test the relative impact to the higher value goals, or if they’re essentially irrelevant to your customer journey.

Once a micro-conversion question has been asked, hide it and ask the next question or provide a relevant call to action. Keep the flows short, but relevant. Once you start designing micro-conversions and building them into your optimisation plan, it can be tempting to overuse them or over-promise on the results. Start small and build as you get results. Avoid making them an overlay, which a visitor must answer before accessing content, these are gatekeeping questions and they can turn from a natural part of the journey into an annoyance, leading to high bounce rates. Be wary of setting yourself up for failure by explicitly offering to personalise your site for users. There are often roadblocks in delivering this; for example, without turning them into a known user, it can be very difficult to personalise across devices. The user doesn’t know this and becomes annoyed that the promised level of personalisation is not occurring on their mobile as it was on their laptop. Plan out what happens when they answer a question, there must be value for the user. If the micro-conversion is particularly detailed make sure you offer an ability to reset, change it or perhaps show the original question again on the next visit, depending on the use case.

From small acorns micro-interactions grow!

Presenting the majority of information about your product or service on a long page has become popular with the impact of mobile usage and the change to visitors’ browsing behaviour brought about by infinite scrolling. It can often be better to consider not making it quite so low-touch for the user when designing for a digital experience platform. Having the user make interactions rather than scrolling allows you to track their behaviour. Whether it’s a click to learn to more, expanding an accordion, moving between horizontal or vertical tabs, or scrolling through an image gallery, each interaction provides another datapoint about their interests. Accumulating these data points and matching them to customer segments allows you to personalise the site to show them what’s most relevant, or to encourage further engagement. These interactions are often referred to as micro-interactions and are components of a website that can be shown or hidden based on personalisation rules; for example, you may want to show or hide a particular component based on desktop or mobile, or where a user is in their customer journey. Think of these micro-interactions as simply a different way to present information, and one which enables you to offer them the relevant experience that they want in the right context.

With unfettered access to information at all times users are now accustomed to turning to a mobile device to access quick, useful information about a place they want to go, a thing they want to do, or a item they want to buy, moving between many devices en route to completing a desired action. The critical touch points within this fragmented user journey are the ‘micro moments’. The always connected smartphone and ‘Micro-moments’ have accelerated user expectations for “right here, right now” personal experiences where users are seeking to make more out of their time.

Aligning UX design to micro-interaction behaviour can help to promote user engagement and information. Things to consider are the simple “click to learn more” if executed elegantly can be very effective. Consider designing inviting touch-points that your user will want to interact with. One option could include a product image with touch-points that open an overlay to present more information, or an image gallery with assets to be downloaded, and include icons for calls to action such as social sharing.

Accordions are a UX staple that is well understood by users (UX affordance), and if done well, can be both inviting and usable. They are particularly useful on pages showing additional information, allowing users to expand the features most relevant to them. Accordions are preferable over tabs for longer headings or if you want a preview of the content to be shown. They are also useful where page real estate would be wasted by necessary but non-critical text content, such as technical details and specifications. Knowing that the user was interested in deeper information tells you where they are in their journey.

On the other hand tabs offer the benefit of allowing the user to switch between topics rather than going back to the top and choose the next accordion panel. Tabs can also stay in place after being chosen (and be open on that tab on the next visit) and you can use swiping to go between tabs on the mobile experience. Tabs can also be vertical which presents an alternative option if there are too many to fit across the horizontal layout, or to accommodate long titles.

Internal search is probably the oldest used digital micro-interaction, and one of the most important. Those who use internal search are more likely to return to your site, and twice as likely to convert according to eConsultancy. In a personalisation strategy, internal search has a number of important functions, the weight of which will vary depending upon your user journey and industry: As a micro-interaction, internal search can surface important information about what your users want. Understanding the search keywords in analytics can show the value of users top keywords, and then use personalisation rules to deliver content to those specific terms or words. A search component is a really useful piece of content to have available based on a personalisation rule. Time on site and bounce rates are often used as success criteria, but a user spending a lot of time on a site might simply be lost, and without offering any form of search, and properly tracking that search and the resulting click, it may be impossible to know. A search component is also a great candidate for A/B testing. Search can be used to improve inbound and outbound marketing and understanding if you need to provide more content to bridge a mismatch when a particular keyword is being entered often, but isn’t providing good value to the user, or if that keyword is generating great value, but isn’t getting entered often.

Images can be very useful for personalisation, and including different kinds of image components can allow you to track the visitor’s interest in one image or another. Carousels have often been used to present a range of messages for different customer groups. A well thought out personalisation plan should actually allow use of a single hero image which gives the information they want without the need for multiple slides to cover each customer segment. Having a gallery or an image grid which triggers a light-box is perhaps a better option to carousel since using these kinds of images means you can track the interaction with the components, then personalise based upon the interactions. Consider placing images in context, and not just at the top of the page, and the image components themselves can be personalised and tested to find out which imagery works best for each segment.

A call to action (CTA) being an actual interaction with engagement value makes it a top candidate for personalisation and testing. When designing the site and the CTAs, consider how you may need different CTAs to appear for your users. Think about variations of language and design that can be tested or personalised for different customer segments, then put them into a testing program to make sure you’re getting the best results possible. Easy optimisation options for CTAs include; showing the relevant app store for the device in use, showing the next goal in the customer journey once a lower-value goal has been completed, changing the label of the CTA to match the context.

Related articles have also been a UX staple for years and are still a great way to encourage interactions. Consider having different versions of these for your various segments, and testing the language on them to optimise their relevancy to these segments.

Going above and beyond

In addition to the more regular UX and personalisation plans, there are other tools and techniques that can offer a new perspective on the user information. With geolocation services, you can get information about a users country, state, locale, and city. With such information, you can personalise content based on the users location, which opens up a wide range of possibilities. For instance, you can recommend local services or content that’s in line with the weather they’re currently experiencing. You can even use the name of their locale in your messaging to make your content truly localised.

With a good personalisation plan you are likely collecting data from a wide range of sources and using an array of tools to carry out marketing, sales, and customer service operations. Moreover, as we move deeper into the IoT era, the number of devices you can use to harness even more customer data is increasing. For a truly data-driven personalisation program, you’ll need to centralise all that data, integrate with all those tools, and ensure your customer data can be distributed to any external tool or channel to create detailed personas; the more data you have, the more detailed and granular you can get with your personas. With a higher quantity of granular personas, your content can be even more targeted.

Accurate Segmentation; with more data, you can be sure that your audience is segmented under the correct personas, and are therefore receiving the most relevant content.

Smoother Marketing Operations; a fragmented technology stack helps nobody. When a single platform can act as your content hub, where you can connect all external systems together, it is easier to simply marketing operations.

Identity Management; when delivering personalised experiences at scale, you need to simplify the process of managing your users personalised data. With modern authentication, you can create a full view of your user and access the most relevant information in a single location.

Users are often on the move; commuting to work, walking on the street, passing through the airport, strolling past a store, or driving a voice-enabled car. Their attention span is also getting shorter and more fragmented, as every new device that emerges on the market divides their time yet again. To cope with this changing dynamic requires a Multi-channel or omnichannel experience. IoT devices such as smart watches, smart speakers, digital signage and virtual reality headsets are changing the average user experience. This requires an understanding of what users are actually doing when they use their phones or tablets. Instead of just presenting a responsive site to your customers, take full advantage of their devices by using insights about location or venue to provide the most relevant experience. Also seek to consider that the needs of the end user change depending on the device they’re using. For instance, because of the smaller screen and the fact they may be on the move, a consumer browsing for information on a smartphone will likely want it shorter and snappier compared to when they’re browsing on a desktop.

What is an omnichannel customer experience? It’s a process in which organisations integrate all the touch-points in any given customer experience, including emails, texts, social media, and websites on a variety of different devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops or traditional channels like landline phones, or retail stores. Cohesive messaging and goals are aligned both online and offline. The objective is a final transactional moment that is consistent and predictable. In other words, no surprises.

The omnichannel experience differs from a multichannel digital experience in that it is a progression from multichannel. In a multichannel environment, customers have access to various communication options, but they aren’t necessarily connected or synchronised. Multichannel marketing considers each touch-point and channel as independent and separate. Omnichannel tears down the silos between in-store, social media, mobile, email, web, phone, and live chat experiences.

One more thing!

It’s easy for organisations to create content and messaging centred around their own products or service, but put yourself in the users shoes and start looking at the experience from their perspective. When they get to your website, are you solving their pain points? Do you have a focused understanding and path for solving their pain points? Have you taken into consideration how your competitors are answering these questions? Addressing your users needs is key to ensuring that you’re mapping out customer journeys that drive business results. Customer experience is powered by content and the behaviour data that organisations gains from customer interactions. Establishing a baseline for your content’s performance will help you start to piece together a full 360-degree view of your users. Understanding your content’s performance will also help your organisation identify what customer experience modifications you need to prioritise for better return on investment (ROI) of your content. As you shape the customer experience, focus on offering users content that drives emotional connections through value. How you do that is through great content, not more content. One key way to create great content is by conveying authentic empathy. Show users your brand understands their needs through your content.

Many users experience a time where it was difficult to find what they were looking for on a web site or mobile app. These types of friction points undo all the hard work by causing frustration and a negative sentiment toward your brand. Looking at your overall content strategy, identify and eliminate the points where your customers are getting snagged in your brand’s customer experience such as forms being too complex, the main call-to-action is buried, it’s hard to navigate to the right content, having to re-enter information multiple times, challenges when using various devices. Creating a seamless customer experience extends into your marketing operations, content management lifecycle, and data management practices. Manual or siloed processes and systems create a multitude of internal complexities that in turn affect users which leads to disjointed data capturing and analysis, gaps in content and other deliverables, go-to-market bottlenecks, and disconnected experiences as your users navigate between systems or internal teams.

Delivering a personalised customer experience is the key to making customers feel like they matter to your brand. Personalisation allows your brand to deliver the right content, at the right time, and to the right person. Mastering personalisation is a digital transformation journey from getting started with quick wins to AI-driven automated personalisation. Wherever you are in this journey, the key is to get started.

Customer experience starts from your users first impression with your brand and, ideally, continues through ongoing interactions that drive loyalty. But it’s not only how you ensure your users are getting to the end of their customer journey, it’s also how you’re delivering business results and your brand experience is meeting customer needs. Think of it as a relationship; providing a superior CX is a key component in establishing a long-lasting relationship with users that’s built on trust. As they navigate a journey toward a desired outcome or finding the best solution for what they are looking to solve, CX enables you to connect your customers with the right solution.