The 80/20 Rule of Website Personalization

What is your best first step?

Recent years have seen an explosion of new tools for marketers focused on personalizing the experience of company website visitors. The goal of all these sophisticated technologies is the same: increase web visitor conversion by dynamically modifying web content.

This new breed of marketing automation technologies works by performing advanced analytics and enforcing behavior-based content recommendations with the help of scoring models.

They’re powerful, but also very complex and disruptive: most likely you will have to replace your existing CMS, invest resources into deep data analytics, and redesign established workflows, requiring significant investment often into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, specialized knowledge and even dedicated teams to work.

Before undertaking such an initiative, it makes sense for marketing teams to see where they’re going to see the majority of payback and make sure there’s not an easier way to get 80% of the value with just 20% of the work.

The Big Win of Location-based Personalization

Behavior-based website personalization is based on web visitor history and rule-based content management, but you can get to a similar level of personalization using location & demographics as a proxy for individual data.

By looking at your data at the city level (or zip by zip), you can make a good profile of customer behavior. This “broad-stroke” abstract view will capture the trends of the region, but you’re avoiding the effort of individualized personalization.

You’ll also be able to account for weather-driven needs, or new trends ripping through a region that past clicks just can’t predict.

In other words, get the easy 80% of personalization before you hit the steep climb of diminishing marginal returns.

Dynamic website localization is about securing big (easy) wins. It assures that web visitors are presented the most likely wanted products and points of sale from their very first page view. It’s simple and inexpensive to implement. It is the “80” in the 80/20 rule of improved web conversion.

Web marketing automation is focused on gaining incremental (harder) wins. It builds visitor profiles based on repeated interaction and only then reacts by presenting personalized web content. It is complex and expensive to set-up and maintain and as any stock broker will tell you, past behavior is not always the best indicator of future performance. It is clearly the “20” in web visitor conversion’s 80/20 rule.

There is a role for both types of solutions in every web marketing department. The priority and sequence with which they are pursued, however, is important.

Once you’ve mastered location based personalization with conversion rates above 15% , then you can look at the data and see if it’s worth chasing the final 20% of personalization potential with a more complicated approach.

You Can Have It All, But Start with the Low Hanging Fruit

Advanced marketing automation is cool. Applied effectively, it can improve web visitor conversion in predictable ways. It is, however, extremely complex, and requires significant effort, investment and knowledge acquisition to implement.

So before taking that (massive) step in web marketing, it just makes sense to cover the “80” of web marketing’s 80/20 rule.

The low hanging fruit in website personalization is dynamic content localization. Web marketing organization should start with that simple, impactful step to maximize budget effectiveness and secure maximum results.
Simplified tools like CloudEngage recognize a user’s location from the first click and spring into action.

Read on for whether your customer base has good geo-segmentation opportunities 

Or request a personalized demonstration today