27. Improve your website conversion rates with the power of personalisation

We all experienced the problem of having an awesome website that's like a work of art, but here's the problem – it's not exactly performing when it comes to converting visitors into die-hard fans. That leaves us frustrated and overwhelmed.

In today’s episode, Simon Harvey is talking with a web developer Levin Gubler about using personalisation to help clients improve the conversion rates on their website. They will discuss how to make your website a magnet, pulling in the exact people you're meant to serve and exactly how to achieve that.

Let’s dive in.

To help you create quality websites that convert, download the free storytelling website wireframe, which includes storytelling structure and techniques we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below):

demodia.com/storytelling-website-wireframe

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You know how important it is to establish meaningful connections with your website visitors. There are times though when they browse through your pages and their interest just doesn't seem to be piqued. When you've struggled to get them to your site in the first place, how do you make them feel special? In this episode... I'm going to be joined by our expert today Levin Gubler. Levin's a web developer and manages several large corporate websites. Together we're going to break down the detail of website personalization from understanding your audience to using dynamic content. In today's digital jungle where generic content runs rampant, personalization is your secret handshake to the world. Telling your visitors that you see them and that you value their unique needs and desires. So let's not just reach audiences. Let's connect with individuals and let's get started. Hi there and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice and help you create marketing that works. I'm your host Simon Harvey and I'm joined by my co host Daniel Kleeber. Hi there Daniel.

Hi Simon. Hello listeners. How are you doing today, Simon? What have you been up to this week? Ah

yeah, it's been a fun week this week. I was helping the kids out with homework last night actually. A bit of a trip down memory lane. I must say I really don't miss school at all. So they're going through at the moment doing geography homework. They've got a geography project that they're working on. Been looking around to try to think what it was we were looking at. Oh, we're looking at world population. That's right, what we were looking at last night. So you any idea what the current population of the world is at all? What the current population of the planet is? Um,

last I heard we were around 7 or 7. 5 billion, but that feels like ages

ago. Uh, you could say a little bit in there. It's not too far off the mark. I think we worked out it was about 8 billion or something like that last night, so it's quite unbelievable when you think about it. I mean, it's like 8 with 9 zeros after it, isn't it? Ridiculous.

Crazy. That's mind blowing. My grandma was born in 1944 in Austria. Oh yeah, yeah. Back in her day, the world had just over 2 billion people. Imagine, from 2 billion to 8 billion in just her lifetime.

That's quite unbelievable, really, isn't it? Yeah, that's some serious growth. I mean, I wonder what things were like back then, though. I mean, with not so few people, but far less people, basically. You know, it's got to have been simpler, and definitely things I'd imagine probably much more sort of intimate in that sense.

Yeah, absolutely. From stories that my grandma told me in her town back then, Lustenow, was like one big family and almost everyone knew each other and even in neighboring towns, you know, today with so many people, that level of personal connection seems like a fairy tale.

Yeah, you're right. I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's. Definitely changed a lot. I know. I remember in the village that I used to live in, you go into the grocery shop there and it was a, you know, very personal store that you go into and they know who you are. They know you by name. They know what your standard orders are or, you know, even you go into an electronics shop or something and you greeted there and used to be able to get advice, you know, Specifically on products that would work for you, you know, they'd talk you through all of that, and I really do think that that's something I miss today. These days, all the online shopping and stuff that's going that personal touch really feels like it's been lost.

Absolutely, Simon. And the challenge now is replicating that personalized feel in the digital realm. It's about ensuring every visitor feels valued and unique, even in a sea of billions.

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, and that's actually what I want to spend some time talking about today on this episode. You know, I want to talk a bit about website personalization and just how do we make these sites feel more like we're talking to an individual rather than the mass consumers that are out

there. Yeah, you're right. And one of the key things we're going to talk about here is what is known as segmentation. It's like grouping your audience based on shared traits, be it their preferences, demographics, or behaviors. For instance, imagine running an indoor skydiving company. You could have one landing page tailored for the pros and another for the adventurous souls just wanting to try it out. Different needs. Different

content. Yeah. How did I know you were going to pick that as your example skydiving there? But it's very true, isn't it? I mean, yeah, there's people like me that might be interested in going there as part of a party or a work do or something like that and just testing it out. Whereas on the other hand, there's somebody like you that knows all the basic stuff, not interested in the quick things, but wants to go and check out your new wingsuit or learn some new techniques or something like that. Very definitely. Yeah. And yeah. You know, I think you can think of each of these segments as different sorts of clusters that have got shared needs or shared challenges, you know, similar problem that they're trying to solve. And you can talk to all of them in a much more personal way if you focus on them. The thing I think that people shouldn't forget here really is that once you know a bit about somebody, then you can really start to up the ante a bit more and you can build more personal content. You know, the best websites personalize that experience for each visitor, and they create content dynamically. Based on what they know about those individuals in there, you know, that content shifts and adapts based on the user's previous experience and interactions or based on other sort of static data, such as data from their CRM system or something, you know. Pulling back that sort of real world experience, I guess, into the digital

realm. Yes, and that's what it's all about. Speaking of preferences, behavioral triggers are also something to be mentioned here. Uh, if a visitor's been diving deep into content about, say, cyber security, imagine popping up an offer for a free security audit. Makes sense. And that's meeting them right where their interest lies.

Definitely. If that's what they've been looking around at, that's the sort of thing you want to present them. You know, it's like giving them something that they didn't even know that they wanted. It's real value add in that sense. Exactly. The other thing that you can think about as well is when they're about to leave the page, you know, a well timed pop up that comes up as soon as somebody looks like they're about to click on the back button or move off to do something else may well just be the nudge that they need to make them stick around and take some other action in there. So I think you can look at that too. Right,

it's all about making every touchpoint count. If we're talking tools to pull this off, HubSpot and Salesforce come to mind. They're like the Swiss Army Knives for website personalization. You can gather data, tweak content on the fly, and even serve up those timely pop ups based on real data that you have already collected about a visitor.

Yeah, that's really true. I mean, we do a lot of that with HubSpot, um, and that's the great thing about these integrated suites. They've got all the tools built into there. You can obviously do it with individual tools, but if you've got something that's tied in with your website, that makes life a lot easier. Speaking of that, I'm thrilled here to have our guest today. We're going to be talking with Levin Gubler. So Levin's a web developer that's been working with companies large and small for many, many years doing web development. He uses personalization a lot During his role to help clients improve the stickiness and the conversion rates on their website. So here's my interview and conversation with Levin. Maybe you can introduce yourself, uh, a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Yeah, sure. So my name is Levin. I have been building websites probably since the nineties. I'm probably a website guy first and a digital marketing guy second. Um, since I've started out in the early days, building my markup in Dreamweaver and like all these outdated tools, and then seeing the rise of more easy to use environments to build all

this stuff. Dreamweaver. It's a long time since I've heard that name as well. It's something I started off with years and years ago too, so. One thing you definitely couldn't do with Dreamweaver back then, but we've been talking about on the episode today is looking at personalization within websites and how we can modify a user's experience and make content more relevant to a specific individual by personalizing the content that we show and the data and information and the Pictures and the whole style of the site. So from your perspective, maybe you could describe a little bit about what web personalization is to you and why that's important to people when they're setting up a business website.

So the main thing that changed is that now we have a lot of information about what people are doing on our web platforms. So in the Dreamweaver days, we basically had to guess. Build an experience that we thought would fit best for the purpose, and then let's see how it goes, right? And nowadays, with all the analytics we have, we can actually see what people are doing when they come in first time, what people are doing who are maybe further down in the funnel and are maybe getting closer to purchasing a service or a product or whatever it might be that we offer. And having that kind of information enables us to present relevant content. To the segments or the users at that particular stage, if you notice that someone is interacting a lot with maybe documentation or support articles, or maybe your blog. You can try and leverage that to, to highlight some of the things that are maybe related. So having a static HTML file won't

do it. So I'd like to come back and visit more on the technology in a few minutes, but there's something else in there that you mentioned is about presenting relevant content. So what's the benefits of that to a user? What do you call relevant content? And why does it matter to me? If we make

maybe an example from the e commerce space, if I hit up an online shop and I see a lot of Pony content presented to me. I am would probably not be inclined to click on it. However, since I'm a photography nerd. I would probably click on camera stuff. Yep. So, um, the sooner the platform knows about that, the more clicks it will get from me. So it's kind of similar if you are maybe building a product website or maybe a small business around certain consulting services, then you kind of need to figure out who your people are and yeah, maybe also have a hard look at your traffic data and see what kind of content is really interacted with. And leverage the one piece that might be hidden away a little bit, or maybe you've written a blog post a year ago, but it might fit a certain group of users who is looking for that

content. So the more relevant the content is, the higher the conversion rates are likely to be. If I can give you something related to cameras, you're much more likely to fill something in or interact with content in there than you are, as you say, if it's related to horses or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense, definitely.

I can also make some examples from my corporate job where we recently launched a personalization use case with five different segments. And we actually had quite a big difference between the conversion rates. So on the top end we had almost 2 percent of the users click through on the recommended articles and on the lower end it was like 0. 3 percent which is not great certainly and also might be related to maybe Showing outdated content that is maybe not up to date anymore and that would need to be rewritten by someone in order to

stay relevant. So the more personalized the content was, the more click throughs you were getting, the higher conversions you were getting in that instance. Yeah. You mentioned data a minute ago and using that data, what sort of data is important to have or what sort of data could you use actually to help personalize your content?

Obviously, the sorting point is different for everyone. I mean, if you've just recently launched your website, you might not have a lot of data available. But if you've been in the game for a while and you also maybe have some CRM data with newsletter subscribers and customer database information available, you might be able to tailor your use cases a little bit to these different groups. And whenever you do something like a personalized recommendation on the website. It's important that you kind of compare the thing you launch with the default state. And if you find out that there is no improvement to be made by your personalization, then you might not even need it at all. So that's kind of the important piece is not to forget about new people coming in, people you have no data on. You kind of need to take care of those people as well. But obviously if you have a newsletter segment and you maybe sent an email to these people, you have some data on them. If you have a link inside your email, you could change the look of your website or the content. And maybe present an opportunity to attend a webinar or something like that. But even if people are just browsing the website and they might still be anonymous to you, you can still look at their behavior and detect certain segments that are maybe more interested in sports. If you have a new site or you have a certain segment that's more interested in politics, And then you could maybe adjust your homepage featuring those topics. For the relevant groups then.

So even with the anonymous users, we can look and see the types of pages that they're viewing, the types of content that they're looking at, and then personalize other areas based on the fact that they've looked at 10 pages related to cameras or something like that, and we want to change the banner on the home page to be focused more on photography, for example.

Exactly. And I would definitely check out all the photography content. So you would have there.

You mentioned CRM data as well a minute ago. What sort of data in there is relevant that people could use if they've got a website that's integrated with something like Salesforce or HubSpot? How can that data be used within personalization efforts? So

you have the kind of platforms that work with a login system. So, um, like a web shop or maybe even like a customer portal of some sorts. And there you're basically working with the full profile and all the data points available. And so that's kind of the most comfortable position to be in to do personalization. But in most cases, you might not really have that luxury. So you would rely on either some kind of link parameters coming in from an email, or you can really just. rely on patterns of behavior. So for example, you could use a localized criteria, such as maybe a people from Zurich, and then you show them like a relevant event that is happening in Zurich.

So if I was coming to you, what might be a couple of things or suggestions that you'd make to me as to areas that I could start to actually deliver some personal experiences within my site that wouldn't be too difficult for me to do? So.

What you could do is think about location based approaches. These are usually pretty easy to implement. But obviously, you could also look at making segments out of your different users or visitors of the website. So if, for example, have a small online shop with a couple of products, you could see the different patterns of behavior from people who are maybe already buying your products. And you could think about ways to incentivize them to buy another product that might be related. to the existing category that they are interested in. And so thinking about making it easy for the visitors to detect the content they are looking for, that's kind of the first step and start thinking about what would really help these people who are coming into your website. And being helpful is kind of the first starting point. Thinking about how can I highlight relevant content. And what does relevant content mean for a certain group of

users? Another thing that I've heard coming up lots of times when it comes to advertising, particularly, and they say, Hey, I'm going to personalize your adverts. And it's all around cookies and privacy and things. Um, if I'm going to be implementing some sort of personalization websites, what sort of things do I need to consider with regards to just being clear and transparent to my end users when it comes to personalization? I mean,

we live in a world with a lot of technology, but we also have these regulations as a marketer. They are sometimes annoying to deal with, but I think as a consumer friendly business, it's really important to be transparent, to ask users for their consent. If you're doing any sort of advanced tracking on your platforms. And I think without the consent, it will be hard to build a proper profile of your users. So, this is certainly the standard nowadays when it comes to cookies and that sort of thing. You would need some kind of cookie consent management tool for your platform, where you certainly would lose out on certain data points if someone does not consent to being tracked. And that's a reality. And I mean, if you're doing campaign work and you're doing email marketing, You have a lot of options to do like URL based personalization, where you won't rely on really having a cookie set and a lot of tracking data available.

Perfect. So we talked a little bit at the beginning of this about technology and how to actually do this. What sort of tools are out there that people could be using to personalize their small business websites? How would I go about doing that from a technology perspective nowadays? We've moved on from Dreamweaver, so what can we use?

We've moved on a little bit. I mean, obviously there's these huge corporate solutions from Salesforce and Adobe, but I mean, all that stuff is probably not so easy to afford maybe for the smaller businesses. So if you're starting out with one of these all in one platforms like Squarespace and others, it's maybe worthwhile to just keep trying out the widgets they have available. So they do have a lot of things you can do. To build a smart components into the websites and recommendations, as mentioned, is one of them, but also just keeping in mind that you first should think about what you're actually trying to do before jumping in and onboarding all the technology you might not even need. What most tools do nowadays is they go really hard on pushing all these AI based features. Uh huh. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes you would be surprised how low tech these really are. Yeah. So AI is not the solution for everything, even though it can help, of course, but just maybe starting out, gathering some experience with simple A B tests could be a start to get you in. Okay. Yeah. And then you go from there where you can actually learn about your segments and trying to recommend the proper content to your relevant segments, that would be a nice step up. So what are the platforms you are using for maybe the smaller

projects? Um, a lot of what we're using is HubSpot based. So we do a lot of work with customers with HubSpot CMS specifically, so we can actually create what they call sort of smart objects or smart content blocks within web pages where you can link it directly up to CRM data or information that you know about a specific individual. Yeah, and

then you can actually connect. It's in the interactive element with segments who have built maybe out of the CRM or like other sources that are available

in HubSpot. It's precisely that. Yeah, you can say, you know, has somebody looked at so many particular pages associated with this type of content or do they come from a company that's within this specific industry?

Well, yeah, I mean, industry based recommendations are like. super relevant. I mean, we haven't even talked about it today, but this is absolutely a focus you should have. Yeah. If you do cross industry

business. And I think that's very relevant for B2B customers, particularly where you've got specific products that you're selling into specific market areas. If you know about those people, or the other thing you can look at is the role of an individual potentially as well, once you've got it connected to the CRM data. You know, if you've got a technical person coming in there, you might present one thing. If you've got a finance person coming in, you can present something completely different, for example. Yeah. And it

can even go down to the level of being account based and targeting individual companies as a group for your services to be marketed to. That

whole account based marketing area. Again, if you've got the website linked up to your CRM, you can see that somebody comes in from a specific company and you can very much promote content directly related to what you want to sell to that company. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, having that company information is super helpful if you do any digital marketing work, because based on the company already know so much that you don't need to do a lot of other data collection. Additionally, having an integrated stack is a huge relief, actually, to do the marketing, because if you buy all these different licenses from various providers, and then you need to cobble the platforms together, everything becomes a huge project, even before you can actually start doing the marketing work. So having that technology problem solved for you, it just makes your life easier.

So any other thoughts that you've got, any other comments that you want to add about personalization generally, or your experiences, or anything that we haven't sort of talked about?

I just really want to reach out to small business owners, or maybe even marketing people working on a smaller scale to just be a bit more courageous in trying things out. There's honestly not a lot that can go wrong if you dabble in this area of personalization on your platform. You should really not be scared of maybe also having some bad KPIs or some analytics that go in the wrong direction because you can learn from that and it's actually really worthwhile. to run a bunch of things. Um, yeah, to just start your journey.

Cool. I really liked that idea. Yeah. Don't be afraid to learn. Don't be afraid to get things wrong. Definitely. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Levin. That's been much appreciated. I really appreciate your insights and your thoughts in there. And yeah, thanks for the conversation. Pleasure. So you now know what you need to do to create a more personal experience for your customers. Personalization doesn't have to involve highly complex changes to your site. It can be as simple as changing a few images or headlines to tune it to the interest of your visitor. So if you're having problems setting up and optimizing your website, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your website. and give you an easier way to grow your business. So we're at the point in the show again, where I like to give you a set of concrete actions that you can take to help improve your website and drive business through your sales pipeline. Today, I'd like you to think for a minute about your different audiences and what's unique about what you offer to each. So, for example, in our conversation earlier, Daniel mentioned that if you run an entertainment business, one audience might be interested in corporate events and the other one might be interested in using your facilities for serious professional training. You know, they've both got different needs that you can serve. With that in mind, I want you to come up with a section of your homepage that includes some dynamic content that's tailored to each of those audiences. So then, if a visitor for example has looked at a certain number of pages related to that, or they've come in from an advert that's targeting one of those topics, then you can show them the content that's relevant to them on your homepage. I know it seems a little bit daunting at first and it's a little bit more technical to do but most CMS platforms or web tools provide some way of allowing that level of personalization. The thing is that once you've done it you're going to see immediate effects on the engagement within your site and you're going to see immediate returns in terms of the number of leads that you generate. That's all for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks for listening and don't forget to bookmark the podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. We love to share our knowledge so we can make your business succeed. See you next time.