Personalising and segmenting web content is a significant marketing trend in 2015. Personalisation technology is increasingly cost-effective and marketers are acutely aware of significant benefits to dynamically segmenting web content to improve user experience, increase engagement and achieve a competitive edge.

As Marketers, you’re no doubt aware of endless case studies citing the increase in engagement created by personalised content. However, when we talk about web personalisation, let’s emphasise that personalisation isn’t just about greeting prospects or customers by their name – it’s about delivering relevant content based upon their interest areas, needs or their position in a buying cycle.

Our Sales colleagues seem to have evolved a lot faster than Marketers in this respect. The Sales function is heavily focused upon understanding needs and then delivering / selling a tailored solution to fit. This begs the question – if our customers & prospects all have slightly differing needs from your product or service, why on earth would you drive them all to a generic web page and hope to create engagement? If we adopt the principle of B2H (Business to Human) people are more likely to want to interact with something if it’s specific to them and relevant to their needs. Creating a customised user experience contributes to engagement, which in turn has a direct impact on conversion.

For those that utilise e-mail marketing as a channel, you have known for years that personalising email content yields far better results in terms of both click through and conversion rates. Marketers who personalise their web content are now also seeing uplifts in engagement & conversion. Web personalisation usually involves tailoring different content and calls-to-action for varying groups of visitors but it can also be far more granular by tailoring content based upon the actions taken on the web page by setting journey maps & rules.

The process of personalising your content starts with analysing your data based on what variables are available. At a basic level this may include language variants, content based upon geographic location or job function. Although the possibilities are endless, you won’t be able to personalise everything for every visitor, so pick some key audience segments to begin with.

Personalisation technology is improving at a phenomenal rate and it’s now possible to deliver this technology not only via direct marketing efforts via PURLs (www.usepurls.com) but also linking this technology to PPC activity which in turn will substantially reduce PPC costs but drive higher conversion (PPC 2.0)