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Let’s Talk Personalization!
Welcome back to our blog series, Optimization Deconstructed! This week we will be discussing personalization – an essential step to increase value, solve user-specific needs, and reach new demographics. Personalization is best harnessed within an already well-performing, optimized experience. Learn more about our approach to experimentation to maximize conversions, checkout our post Optimization Deconstructed | Part III: Elements of Experimentation.
The Power of Personalization
Personalization allows brands to target a user or group of users with a different experience than a completely anonymous user would encounter. It can help collect and track customer behavior to deliver targeted brand and product messages. Users want to feel engaged, and by making a web experience catered towards their needs, conversion rates increase.
A number of platforms on the market have powerful personalization tools that implement customer segmentation analytics and allow businesses to understand how to target their users. Users can be targeted based on their past engagements with a site, usage history, user preferences (as illuminated by analytics), product purchases, timezone, demographics, persona, and many other references.
A Personalization Plan for Specialized Bikes
As the shopping experience began converting at target levels, our Optimization Roadmap for Specialized Bikes involved harnessing personalization to further enhance the user experience. One particular campaign that saw great success was an initiative centered around driving awareness for product-specific sales to users who had previously shown interest. Optimizely’s personalization tool made it possible to track customers who previously visit specific content. They were placed into a segment that was served a buy-one-get-one offer through a campaign called Let’s Go Dutch. We used Optimizely’s personalization tool to serve this unique offer (and experience) to the group of users who visited three separate road tire product pages. These users were presented a simple red butter bar that encouraged them to participate in the promotion. We then used A/B testing to optimize messaging strategies throughout the campaign.
Given limited internal dev resources for this promotion, as well as abbreviated project timelines, roboboogie stepped in to make nimble changes on their site; serving messaging and hosting site changes through the Optimizely dashboard.
The Solution:
Target marketing through Optimizely’s personalization features
In the two months leading up to the campaign, the roboboogie team collected a personalization target list by setting up a ghost experience to determine which users were actively looking for tires. Users who met the criteria under that experiment were added to a custom audience in Optimizely. The users who made it into this audience then saw a unique promotional content bar during the final BOGO campaign, giving them extra visibility into road tire deals.
Utilizing Optimizely for testing, goal tracking and CMS (content management system)
Utilizing Optimizely as not only a test tool, but to push content as a CMS, allowed the team to promote and implement tested messaging on appropriate road tires. This strategy also allowed us to instruct users on how to participate in the sale on the campaign tire pages on mobile and desktop, without the assistance of an occupied Specialized development team.
The Impact:
- Road tire inventory sold out in less than a week – months ahead of expected sell-out date. (Additional product was added shortly after and has continued to thrive through personalization and added messaging.)
- The strategic messaging addition boosted add-to-carts by 11.4% on desktop and 7.3% on mobile.
- Personalization efforts boosted add-to-carts by 18.1%, and overall site sales by 21.4%.
- Revenue generated through personalization experimentation alone has provided more than four times the monthly combined cost of Optimizely platform and roboboogie agency services.
21.4%
Revenue increase
And most importantly, a happy Specialized team, excited about ramping up personalization efforts due to impact of personalization efforts with the Let’s Go Dutch campaign.
Part V Coming Soon!
Stay tuned next week for Part V in our Optimization Deconstructed Blog Series, Key Components of Experience Design. Want to start Fresh? Check out Part I: Foundations of the Industry.
