Personalised, joined up user experiences are the way to go for digital marketers – but it's hard to achieve. Here's how you do it…
Customers think about your brand in its entirety. They expect a consistent experience across channels and for you to recognise and communicate with them in a very relevant way.
As a brand, creating a digital presence that’s driven by individuals receiving a personalised experience will lead to much richer user experiences while helping to drive that optimisation of conversion. So how can you create deeper personalised web experiences for users?
Personalised web experiences have long been shown to increase ROI. But for most brands, delivering a consistent customer experience across channels is easier said than done. Website tagging, customer data sources, and messaging is often fragmented across teams and technology platforms, leading many brands to spend huge sums of money on technology solutions that they can’t then implement successfully.
Typically, online marketing starts with a very one-dimensional view of individuals. However, understanding users and their browsing behaviour across different devices is paramount to tailoring content and experiences.
That’s why tagging your website to feed visitor information directly to a rich data layer is key.
Traditional tagging methodologies track the pages visited and, where provided by search engines, give you basic demographic information such as gender, age and location. However, without a clearer picture of the individual, conversion rate optimisation can be more challenging.
Indicia Worldwide’s Intelligent Digital technology creates a 360-degree view of digital users, enabling you to drive timely, relevant and personalised content whilst ensuring a consistent retargeting approach across all devices (you can watch a webinar all about optimising personalised online experiences right here).
By looking at a typical user journey, we can see how using Intelligent Digital can help you tag and retarget individuals. Let’s start with an anonymous interaction with a webpage – a user browsing your website on their iPad. Traditional tagging is tracking the pages that the user views, and you can see they are interested in a certain product.
This information is being passed across to you to store against this site visit and the device, allowing you to perform some real time retargeting on social channels like Facebook with relevant content based on their viewing behaviour.
But what about when the same device accesses the website later on, in a separate browsing session? We can see the same device is accessing the website, but at this stage they are still anonymous.
Intelligent Digital technology performs a process known as stitching - taking the previous anonymous viewing activity from the same device and attaching it to this new session.
This means we can serve content relevant to the user based on their full viewing history as soon as they land on the site – recommending the products that they viewed on their first visit. The additional information we gain from repeat visits continues to build the profile and allows for retargeting ads to be more and more specific to the products viewed across each anonymous session.
Now, let’s say the user identifies themselves to us, either by signing in or signing up using their email address. Now we know who the anonymous user is, we can continue the process of stitching the data gathered from their anonymous visits and associate it with the email address throughout their continued journey.
Further to this, we can match back to your customer data files which will allow us to enrich the user’s profile with data such as purchase history. As well as being able to enrich content and drive greater site personalisation based on the additional information, we can also match it to their marketing consents and consequently follow up with them on different channels.
We have a pretty good view of our user with all of the information we've gathered. We know what they have browsed anonymously, we know what their purchase history is, and their consent status. But what happens if they login from another device?
The device ID will be different to the iPad the user was browsing on originally. With Intelligent Digital, we can take that identified login and continue to stitch the user profile together, taking all learnt browsing behaviours across all devices and matching to the known user profile and purchase history.
Throughout this entire journey our user will have been presented relevant, timely content, designed for them based on their interests.
Intelligent Digital technology helps brands create cost-effective, joined-up customer journeys that improve both brand experience and ROI. Find out how it can create new value for you today.
Read more about customer centric marketing in our resource: Why consumer centric retail marketing gets results (and how to do it).