Consumers Don’t Just Want Personalization, They Demand It.
And you’re missing out on explosive business growth by not giving it to them. Companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. (McKinsey, 2021)
We see you. Scaling personalization efforts is complicated at best, and brain-melting at worst. It’s hard to know if you have the right strategies, tools, and talent in place to make your personalization goals come to fruition.
Even if you’re familiar with personalization strategies and tactics, you might not know how to implement them to scale. Leaning on resources like our Web Optimization Maturity Pyramid can help you take your personalization to the next level.
Don’t worry too much if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the information available. All you have to do is ask yourself 3 important questions.
- What’s Possible?
- What’s Blocking Your Team?
- What to do next?
Let’s walk you through it!
1. What’s Possible?
Even if you know where you are in your personalization journey, do you know where you’re going? Not only are there different levels of personalization, there’s different strategies used in each step.
The Web Optimization Maturity Pyramid, as with any good personalization framework, starts out broad before niching down into hyper-targeted campaigns. Which category does your company currently fall into?
Strong Foundation of Data + Analytics: The first step in personalization is building a strong data layer. This allows you to track user behavior across channels, measure key metrics like clicks, impressions, and transactions, and establish a framework for deeper insights. Without this foundation, your personalization efforts will lack precision and impact.
Established Experimentation Program: At this stage, you’re testing small, low-effort changes to gauge user reactions. This could mean tweaking headlines or swapping CTA buttons.. These quick tests help uncover what messaging resonates with your audience.
Mature Experimentation Program: As your experimentation evolves, so does your targeting strategy. Now, you’re segmenting and personalizing based on factors like user type (new vs. returning), device type, or campaign source. Some tests may require backend development, custom coding, or advanced activations to execute effectively.
Broad User Personalization: With a deep understanding of your audience, personalization expands to include geographic, behavioral, and contextual data. You might tailor product recommendations based on browsing history, adjust branding for new visitors, or implement localized messaging. At this level, personalization starts to feel more dynamic and relevant.
Hyper-Targeted User Personalization: This is where personalization reaches its peak. You’re now leveraging real-time behaviors, micro-segmentation, and ultra-specific data points to deliver tailored experiences. Whether it’s dynamic upsells based on user interactions, hyper-localized messaging towards a specific IP address, or one-to-one ABM campaigns, every touchpoint feels uniquely crafted for the individual.
The further up the web optimization pyramid you go, the more understanding you’ll have of your customer’s needs. Starting low and slow will drive immediate results, but delivering hyper-targeted messaging for individual users will yield stronger, deeper relationships with your customers.
Personalization strategies should be ever-evolving, but sometimes it’s difficult to know what that looks like in action. Thankfully, we have the perfect example on how to expand and mature a personalization strategy effectively through iterative testing. Let’s take a look.
Case Study: Iterative Testing Drives Tremendous Growth for Home Chef
Challenge: Home Chef, a direct-to-consumer meal kit service, faced challenges like outpacing their competition. They partnered with us to help them find and expand on high-impact, high-return personalization strategies.
Solution: First, we jumped into conducting a customer journey analysis across Home Chef’s digital touchpoints using Iris, our integrated reporting and data platform.
After discovering bottlenecks and friction points, we developed a quantitative, full-funnel strategy to build brand trust, boost customer engagement, and optimize their site with a series of 25 iterative A/B tests. With each test, we unlocked growth opportunities and identified high-level learnings that allowed us to personalize at a deeper level with the next test.
For example, introducing a splash page for returning visitors with a paused subscription led to a 65.65% increase in reactivations and a 16% drop in exit rates. Further refinements—like adding personalized elements and streamlining copy—enhanced user trust and drove reactivations by an additional 1.5%.
Additional tests across the site uncovered:
- Interstitial ads and social proof build brand trust while multiplying downloads
- Personalized quizzes drives engagements and sign-ups
- Shortened landing pages lead to more conversions
- Conversational language increases reactivations
- Highlighting app value boosts downloads
Result: Our strategy drove significant growth for Home Chef:
- +2.4K app downloads
- +83% increase in reactivation clicks
- +37.1% boost in subscription sign-ups
Like 97.1% of our enterprise clients, Home Chef continues to partner with us to refine and expand its success. As the marketing landscape evolves, our data-driven approach ensures sustained growth and adaptability.
2. What’s Blocking Your Team?
Reaching the next level in your personalization evolution might be easier said than done. There’s a slew of hurdles seizing the opportunity to get in your way. It’s up to you to jump over them. Lucky for you, we have some ideas on how to leap over common obstacles.
Solution: Invest in data governance, integration, and automation tools to ensure high-quality, accessible, and unified data. It’s also crucial to utilize a customer data platform (CDP) to inform personalization decisions. You can also leverage AI-driven analytics to extract insights and break down silos.
Solution: Choose scalable, flexible, and interoperable personalization platforms that integrate seamlessly with existing systems. Platforms such as Optimizely, Klaviyo, and Amplitude streamline customer experience and optimization, prioritize automation, and offer real-time data processing for maximum efficiency.
Talent Gaps or Siloed Teams: Lack of expertise in data-driven personalization or siloed teams, can create inefficiencies and prevent businesses from fully leveraging their personalization strategies.
Solution: Foster collaboration by aligning marketing, data, and tech teams around shared goals. Invest in ongoing training to upskill employees and ensure cross-functional expertise, and implement a culture of experimentation to encourage continuous learning.
Half the battle of personalization is identifying and overcoming the challenges getting in your way. The other half is getting started. Your personalization transformation doesn’t have to be perfect immediately, but even minor adjustments to your site can make a huge impact.
The key, as we learned with HomeChef, is to test into personalized experiences. Collecting information about your customers as you go, and creating custom engagement paths based on that data, will yield much better results than making assumptions without any weight behind it.
3. What Should We Do Next?
Whether you’re reaching new heights of the Web Optimization Maturity Pyramid or just starting your personalization journey, there’s always new ways to elevate your strategy.
Maybe your teams or data are siloed, making it impossible to get a zoomed-out look across your customer journey. Perhaps you’re looking for insight on what technology stack works best for your organization or need help identifying friction points across your site. Regardless of where you’re at, we have your back.
We help companies at every stage of optimization maturity, so reach out to our team for a free consultation. Our team of experts bring strategic consulting, engineering capabilities, and all the tools needed to drive expansion across your organization.