What is Real-Time Personalization
Artificial intelligence and computerized learning technologies are opening up a whole new level of online marketing — real-time personalization. It allows you to instantly respond to any user action, bringing proven offline sales techniques online.
We will delve into the details of their implementation, will explain what advantages of this approach are, what difficulties you may encounter and where to start implementing a new marketing strategy.
Real-Time Personalization Definition
Real-time website personalization means providing user-generated content tailored to a user's actions. The degree of personalization can vary. Almost all of us had to deal with SMS order confirmations or emails reminding us of unfinished purchases. But artificial intelligence allows us to go further — to customize the text and multimedia elements of landing pages to each user's preferences.
Real-time web personalization implies a very fast response time. The optimal response time to user actions is within a couple of seconds,ideally it’s a few milliseconds. Information processing, decision making and content delivery should be invisible to the user. Technology works effectively only when integrated seamlessly.
Benefits of Real-Time Personalization
Personalized content means that a user will see exactly what he or she expects on the website. A user will have no reason to close the page and continue his search. On the contrary, real-time web personalization will give the motivation to complete the transaction and make a purchase. We will share information about the advantages of this type of marketing in more detail.
Better user experience
By getting instant feedback on their actions, users are more active towards conversion. A user spends less time thinking about a purchase and encounters far fewer obstacles on the way. As a result, the depth of site browsing increases and bounce rate decreases. This increases customer loyalty and serves as a positive signal for search algorithms.
Better targeting
Real-time website personalization allows you to collect the missing information and use it immediately to create an advertising appeal. It helps you assign users to the right segment and choose the right sales scenario for them. Data clarification significantly increases conversion rates.
Collecting information can be a difficult process, as you need to motivate your customer to share the required information. Claspo, a service with tools for adding pop-ups to your website, will help in this process. Using the service, you can create a widget that offers to register or fill out a feedback form in exchange for a discount, coupon or an exclusive subscription.
Better understanding of the customer
The real-time personalization process can be presented as a sequence of iterations. Each user action populates the database with more information. The more steps, the more accurate the information and the easier process of assigning a user to a certain segment.
Comprehensive optimization
The experience of successful companies confirms that any form of personalization increases the marketing effectiveness. This methodology stimulates sales while reducing the cost of generating advertising appeals. It has a positive impact on conversion rates, ROI, and overall business profitability.
Challenges of Real Time Personalization
New technologies always meet resistance. Real-time web personalization will not be an exception. If you are going to implement this marketing technique, be prepared for these challenges.
Technical Complexity
There are more and more off-the-shelf solutions on the market — tools that you can use with minimal or even zero programming skills. Still, you'll have to understand how they work to get the results you want. Studying new technologies requires serious expenditures of time, effort and resources.
User rejection
Real-time personalization requires the collection of personal data. Many users see it as a threat to their privacy. They are afraid of information leakage, which can cause various problems ranging from mild discomfort to financial losses. Therefore, it is very important to clearly show that the benefits of personalization cover all possible risks.
Problems with integration
As a rule, real-time website personalization is approached after other marketing strategies have been successfully "run-in". By this point, the business has already chosen certain CRM and CMS systems. And it is far from a fact that it will be possible to connect new software to them. Often it is necessary to use various "adapters" and integration applications, which creates additional difficulties.
Examples of Real-Time Personalization
Large corporations, which were the first ones to master such technologies, create individual sales funnels for each website visitor. Such comprehensive real-time personalization websites allow them to keep leadership in the face of fierce competition. Of course, this comprehensive approach will require significant resources, so you can start by personalizing individual elements of your marketing strategy.
Pop-ups
As a rule, this convenient and effective tool is used to push a hesitant user to a certain decision. Pop-ups are used when:
- prolonged exploration of content;
- trying to close a browser tab;
- scrolling down a page to a specific point, far below a call to action.
One of the advantages of pop-ups is that they are easy to connect to most software platforms. By choosing Claspo to generate them, you can create an advertising appeal in just a few minutes. This service easily connects to popular CRM and CMS. Claspo offers a drag-n-drop widget builder where you can work with zero design and programming skills. The developers regularly update the library of modules, components and templates. For example, gamification features will soon be added to it, which can significantly increase conversion rates.
Recommendation widgets
Amazon statistics show that approximately 35% of the platform's sales come from products matched by a special algorithm. It suggests products based on purchase and browsing history, as well as demographic, social and behavioral characteristics of users.
This form of real-time personalization accelerates the selection of the perfect product. This increases a customer’s loyalty and improves conversion rates. If you want, you can also increase the size of the average check by offering additional products — cell phone cases, TV speakers, etc.
Emails
Despite the emergence of new types of advertising, email marketing remains very effective. However, competition in this sphere is very high, so the prerequisite for success is an individual approach. You can create newsletters containing:
- product recommendations;
- reminders of unfinished purchases;
- useful content.
Special attention should be paid to the last point. A letter with interesting information, tips and instructions increases the level of confidence in the brand. You can form it automatically, adjusting it to personal preferences of a particular user — it’s a good thing that today a variety of generative models based on artificial intelligence are available.
Landing pages
One of the latest advances in technology are applications that can completely rebuild websites in a matter of seconds. They are suitable for comprehensive real-time personalization with:
- text blocks;
- static images, animations and videos;
- interactive banners;
- buttons and other functional elements.
Of course, such services should be used with caution — it’s necessary to run tests and try various hypotheses. However, the positive effects of their implementation easily cover all risks — they can give a new breath to a stagnant business.
6 Steps to Create Real-Time Website Personalization
Many business owners find the transition to this innovative marketing strategy too difficult. They put off implementing real-time website personalization or abandon it altogether to optimize costs. Of course, any technological revolution requires significant efforts. To keep it simple, it's worth splitting the process into a few sequential steps.
1. Create a database
The basis for decision making will be information. Make sure it is accurate, complete and well-structured. Collecting data is not an end in itself, but only one of methods. You will use them to identify user characteristics, select appropriate sales scenarios, and launch customized advertising appeals.
2. Studying behavioral characteristics
Real-time web personalization relies on user actions, so it's important to determine where they come from, how much time they spend on the site, what pages they explore, and what features they use. To do this, you need a specialized analytics service.
3. Adding mini-surveys
Feedback is very important to clarify information. However, you don't want to bore a user with large survey forms. The optimal format is one question with 2-5 answer options attached. You can ask it during registration, connecting a new feature, or when a user contacts the support team.
4. Target Audience Segmentation
Although an individual approach to each user is considered perfect, it is very difficult to implement it in practice. Therefore, most companies use aggregated segmentation — by demographic or psychographic characteristics, behavior, income level or number of purchases. This allows you to choose a sales scheme that will serve as a basis for generating personalized content.
5. Creating a user journey map
One of the important steps in real-time website personalization is to build a user-business interaction map. It will include all the events from the first visit to the website till a targeted action is performed. A user journey map is an important marketing automation tool.
6. Customizing scenarios
A user performs a certain action and triggers a system response, for example, when a button is clicked, a pop-up window with a registration form is displayed. To create a successful scenario, you need to visualize the end result and think about the steps that will lead a user to it. This is easier than it seems at first glance — you just need to follow the basic rules of logic.
Real-Time Personalization: How Claspo can Help You
Claspo is a tool that can significantly increase user engagement and improve conversion rates. It can reveal the potential of any website — online stores, information portals, SaaS services, etc. Its widgets allow you to use such marketing tools as recommended products, limited offers, individual discounts, etc.
The widget builder allows you not only to assemble pop-ups by moving the necessary elements on the screen, but also to customize the scenarios of their display in a few clicks. Just follow the instructions and choose the necessary options in the prompts — the whole procedure will take a couple of minutes. Widgets of the service are created using adaptive design, so they are correctly displayed on both desktop and mobile platforms.
Try Claspo for free and evaluate the increase in conversions right now. You can easily adapt the tool to the scale of your business — it offers many favorable pricing plans.