Optimise Your Conversion Rate Through Personalisation

I've always been fascinated with the mechanics of things; how internal combustion engines work, why airplanes don't fall out of the sky, and why Pi is, well, Pi.

When it comes to the web, this intrigue of mine focusses on the building blocks of websites and how everything ties together to make the final product work in the way it does. I'm no designer, and never will be, but through taking things apart and re-constructing them I have gained a pretty good understanding of many of the common languages, such as html, jQuery and php.

With this in mind, one of the areas that I find exciting right now is just how dynamic websites can be, so far from the static pages of text that they were in the past. In the past year there's been some great examples of the possibilities:

Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown

The radio transmitter for Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx's We're New Here

This evolution has huge potential when it comes to creating unique user experiences , but from an 'everyday' perspective the wider power is in delivering the most useful, relevant content whenever possible. By doing so you can expect to see much improved user experiences, and from a marketing point of view, this means improved conversion rates.

An Everyday Example

Once of the most common examples that everyone will be familiar with is showing related products – because you have shown an interest in item X, it is likely you will also like item Y:

Personalisation As Part Of A CRO Strategy

Without too much a leap of faith, we can assume that tailoring pages to the individual is going to be beneficial for our conversion rates, and as a consequence should play a big part in the future of CRO. To do this, it is will be useful to start thinking about designing strategies:

Example: 'Search Intent' Personalisation

In PPC we are always trying to deliver the most appropriate call-to-action based on the intent given by the search keyword – trying to identify from this what selling points will get the best reaction from the user (be it price, delivery options, quality etc). By taking this one step further we can efficiently use the most effective space on the landing page

Lets take the scenario where a user has searched on the query 'cheap iPod 4'. When landing on the product page, the main call-out area can be personalised by adding focus on the value aspect of the price:

Other areas which are also worth defining from a CRO perspective could include:

Browsing Personalisation

Using the browsing history to determine how the space on each page is used

For example, having viewed the iphone 4 product page, elements of the sidebar throughout the rest of the site contain relevant offers, how-to's etc

Location Personalisation

By using the html5 geolocation property , any relevant 'local' information can be given the spotlight – nearest store opening hours, local phone numbers, store-specific offers can all be given prominence due the relevance derived from the user's location

Tools

Whilst theoretically much of this could be done using custom scripts and other whizz-bang bits of code, there are some really useful tools out there to help create personalised user experiences for any size of business:

Personyze: Allows you to segment visitors on conditions such as search keywords, facebook profile data and onsite behaviour.  Once segmented there is a whole host of ways to personalise the experience, along with built in a/b testing and analytics (From $59/month)

BTBuckets: Compared to the above, BTBuckets is much more focussed on helping provide the segments with which to apply the personalisation. Although it's a free tool it provides some really powerful tool for creating 'buckets' of user, the most useful being the browser plugin which allows you to create segments straight out of Google Analytics.

Further integrations are available for AdWords, Facebook and even Google Website Optimizer

A Brief Word On Cookies

It would be very hard to deliver the sort of experience displayed above without the controversial cookie.

There is a lot of bad press surrounding misuse of cookies (and rightly so) and potential new laws regarding them, but it is often forgotten that there are positive sides to the information stored in your web browser - I for one find it incredibly useful that whenever I visit the Amazon home page, there is something displayed that is relevant and interesting to me (unless I've been doing Christmas shopping, then it's tailored to everyone else in my family apart from me!)