In the increasingly digital age, offering a personalised user experience is essential. Yet, this presents challenges when it comes to capturing meaningful data, user identification and maintaining user privacy. Let's delve into the strategies that can be employed in a world moving away from cookies, where visitor identification and understanding intent are paramount to maximising personalisation.
Visitor Identification: Turning Anonymous Users Into Known Contacts
Visitor identification, the transformation of an anonymous website visitor into a known contact, is an account-based lead generation approach. It helps organisations identify website visitors and link them to other contact or account information. Here are the top six strategies to navigate this complex process:
- User Account Creation or Loyalty Programs: Encourage users to create accounts or join loyalty programs. By offering rewards or benefits, you can incentivise users to provide identifiable information.
- Email Capture and Tracking: Offer opt-in opportunities for users to subscribe to newsletters or updates. Users who provide their email can be associated with known contacts.
- Session tracking via IndexedDB: IndexedDB can be used as a tool or implementing session tracking using its key-value storage system.
- Forms and User Surveys: Surveys or forms filled out by users can provide personal information which can be used to connect anonymous users with known contacts.
- Social Media Integration: Leveraging information from users' social media accounts can help identify and connect users to known contacts.
- Cross-platform Data Sharing: Integrating data across multiple platforms (website, mobile app, CRM) can link anonymous users to known contacts.
Understanding User Intent for Effective Personalisation and Optimal Experience
After identifying the target audience, understanding their intent becomes critical. Identifying their exact wants and needs allows you to offer them the right products or services. Below are four intent types that can guide personalisation strategies to improve personalisation effectiveness
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Contextual intent |
Personalization based on keywords or search ads when users arrive on the website. |
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Behaviour-based intent |
Personalization using browsing history and previous content engagement data. |
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Stated intent |
Personalization by explicitly asking about users’ needs or areas of interest on the site. |
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Profiled intent based on customer experience journey |
Customer profiling using and integrating customer data from other platforms. |
Personalisation effectiveness is depending on the degree of intent recorded for a user and the level of historic customer data applied. After identifying a user, understanding their intent, needs and wants becomes critical to offer relevant content, services or products.
Common Website Personalisation Types
Personalisation involves tailoring the content, layout, and user experience of a website to meet specific needs and preferences of individual users. Personalisation effectiveness is depending on the degree of intent recorded for use and the level of explicit personalisation applied. Here are some common types of website personalisation:
- Content Personalisation: Displaying targeted product recommendations, blog articles, or news items that align with a user's interests.
- Personalised Landing Pages: Tailoring landing pages based on the referral source, ad campaign, or search query.
- Dynamic Content: Changing website elements dynamically based on user data.
- Progressive Profiling: Gradually collecting user information over multiple visits to build a more complete user profile.
- Geolocation Personalisation: Tailoring content or offers based on the user's location.
- Personalised Emails: Customising email content based on a user's interactions with the site.
- User Segmentation: Dividing website visitors into distinct groups based on specific criteria.
- Time-Based Personalisation: Presenting content or offers at specific times that are relevant to the user.
- Device-Based Personalisation: Optimising the website's display and user experience depending on the device the visitor is using.
- Social Proof: Showing user reviews, ratings, or social media mentions to create a personalised experience.
- A/B Testing: Experimenting with different variations of the website's elements to identify what resonates best with different user segments.
- Recommendation Engines: Using algorithms to analyse a user's past behaviour and provide personalised recommendations.
While maximising personalisation in a cookie-less world may seem challenging, understanding user intent and effectively identifying visitors can make it possible. Implementing these strategies can help businesses navigate this transition while continuing to deliver a highly personalised user experience.
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