At Lake Solutions, we’ve written a lot over the years about personalising the journey for your website visitors and delivering them targeted content, based on factors including their browsing behaviour and accumulated profile values. In doing so, you are reflecting what happens in real life when, for example, you visit your favourite local coffee shop and they start to make your ‘usual’ when you walk through the door or point out a new pastry that they know you’ve love.
When it comes to really understanding your website visitors, you’ll need to have some sort of personalisation available through your web provider. Then, you can begin to create rules to determine the types of content a visitor will see. The more times a person visits your website and the more journeys they take within that space will help you to build a profile about that person, enabling you to focus your offering around the desires and needs of that visitor.
There are two ways of profiling visitors, using implicit values, which relate to browsing behaviour and explicit values, which relate to visitor responses.
Returning to that local coffee shop. Implicit values might see a potential customer checking out the pastries and the owner telling them what special Danish pastry fillings are available on that day. While explicit values might see the same customer asking directly if there are any vegan options? With implicit values, you are taking a guess at what the person is looking for and this becomes easier, the more you learn about them. If somebody says they are vegan, then you are dealing with a clear fact.
When it comes to a website, establishing implicit values will include looking at website analytics – which will reveal quite a lot about your visitors, such as what device they are viewing your website on, browsing patterns and time spent on different pages and where they are located.
Establishing explicit values will be gained from looking at any feedback or enquiry forms visitors may have completed. If, for instance, your business involves selling foreign travel and a potential customer completes a form saying they are interested in a family-friendly all-exclusive resort in Turkey, it wouldn’t then make sense to send them deals for upmarket cruises in the Caribbean.
Looking at implicit values, that same visitor might not have filled-in a form online, but they might be looking at the website pages which relate to all-exclusive family holidays. While these are not hard facts you are dealing with, you can still begin to imply personas on visitors based on their behaviour.
More and more businesses want to make their websites work hard for them as a sales tool and having personalisation available is becoming increasingly important. It’s exciting then to see that Umbraco, having acquired uMarketingSuite, has rebranded it as Umbraco Engage. Previously, personalisation was possible within an Umbraco website but by using a third-party tool or plug-in. Now, with Umbraco Engage, this tooling is a ‘first class citizen in the ecosystem’.
Umbraco Engage provides analytics, customer profiling, A/B testing and personalisation tools with reporting, all accessible directly in the back office.
According to Umbraco:
“Umbraco Engage is here to help with each step toward reaching content goals and to help continuously measure and improve content performance. At the heart of it all are the tools of the content optimisation trade: A/B testing and personalisation. While these are very important, they can only do some of the heavy lifting. To succeed, you have to have insight and be able to gauge if changes are working as intended. Analytics, tracking, profiling, and solid first-party data are requirements these days. Umbraco Engage delivers all of this and more. It’s simply the tool you need to ensure your content drives immediate wins and long-term results.”
At part of this, Umbraco Engage offers 360° profiling to build detailed profiles for both identified and anonymous users. With these profiles, you can segment audiences based on behaviour, preferences, and demographics, allowing you to deliver relevant, high-impact content.
The fact remains that if you are investing in ways of getting people to view your website, such as Google ads and pay per click, then you have to make that journey worthwhile for those visitors. They need to feel engaged with your brand while on your website and you then need to be able to demonstrate improved conversion rates.
As Umbraco Engage is now a first class citizen in the Umbraco ecosystem and not something which needs plugging in, then it can be set up with minimal configuration and integration. Also, if you are a marketer used to Umbraco’s back office, it will look familiar to you.
If you want to talk to us about how personalisation can work for your business, then contact Lake Solutions today.