If you and I sat next to each other right now and opened up YouTube, an Amazon email, or the Airbnb app, we would each see radically different content. Thanks to my experience with these platforms, I’d see Shark Tank videos, laptop cases, and rentals in Italy. You’d see something much more interesting to you, improving your odds of spending time on those websites or making a purchase.
We have content personalization to thank for this. There are endless amounts of content online, and sifting through all of it would take eons. A content personalization strategy is a powerful tool when leveraged correctly, and it's not just for the internet behemoths — a business of any size can create personalized content right within your content management system (CMS).
Delivering personalized content is a mixture of understanding your target audience and using the right tools. Here’s what you need to consider before personalizing the content for your audience.
Table of Contents
- What Is Content Personalization?
- Why Personalize Content?
- Types of Personalized Content
- Ways to Personalize Content
- How to Integrate Content Personalization Into Your CMS
What Is Content Personalization?
Content personalization is the act of offering tailored content using a mixture of user behavior and demographic data. This can be simple and done manually, such as identifying your ideal target audience and speaking directly to them. This can also be more complex, using customer data platforms to gather and analyze user data. Many marketers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help with this.
Statistic: 77% of marketers report using AI to create more personalized content.
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Why Personalize Content?
Why should you deliver personalized content to your readers? Here are the benefits waiting for you on the other side.
1. Improved User Experience
Content personalization can help users have an improved user experience (UX), but it needs to be done correctly or it'll have the opposite effect.
“The main goal of personalization is to enhance an already good experience, but it's not going to fix a bad website experience,” warned Raf Tudela, product designer and co-founder of Italian travel website Mamma Mia Indeed. “A website already needs to be very well structured and easy to navigate before trying a personalization strategy.”
Raf went on to tell stories of broken websites and ruined user experiences that could haunt you. He warned that too much clunky code slows down websites and is counterproductive. Use personalization as the sprinkles on top of an already well-baked cake.
2. Attention
In a world where AI can pump out enormous amounts of content, attention is the most powerful tool David has against Goliath. Creating a personal, tailored experience helps keep people engaged with your brand as long as possible.
Statistic: 47% of U.S. agencies and brands expect to be more focused on attention metrics in 2024.
3. Convenience
Can you imagine scrolling through all of YouTube without tailored results, seeing results randomly in all languages for every search? It would waste an enormous amount of time. An outcome of your personalization strategy should be making content convenient and easy to navigate.
In anticipation of users’ interests, Raf Tudela designed Mamma Mia Indeed to be as convenient as possible for site exploration:
This is particularly important for SaaS companies. When users are searching for new software, they're looking for the most convenient choice. How convenient your website is to use will be a part of their decision-making process.
4. Conversion
The longer a potential customer spends with your brand (watching short-form videos, browsing your website, etc.), the higher the odds that they act on your call-to-action (CTA).
5. Self-selection
Not everyone who lands on your website is going to be the right fit for your brand; while most of your personalization will be aimed at making visitors feel like they belong, some of it should help visitors realize you can’t help them.
Pro tip: What product complaints or refund requests does customer service get? Your marketing and sales team should be hearing this feedback and incorporating it into marketing materials to help customers self-select successfully. Customer service teams have great value in informing a balanced content marketing strategy.
6. Engagement
Sometimes, personalized content is so seamlessly integrated into a website that you don‘t even realize it’s happening. Take Amazon, for example: While looking at a product, you‘re offered custom recommendations based on other users’ interests.
It's using customer data to help offer you a more engaging experience and lengthen the amount of time you spend on the website.
7. Customer Loyalty
Sometimes, content personalization is as simple as making users feel seen and a part of your brand. Loyal customers are the best advocates that a brand can have, and you encourage that loyalty by letting users see themselves reflected in your content.
Statistic: 96% of surveyed marketers say that a personalized experience increases the chances of buyers becoming repeat customers.
Types of Personalized Content
What type of personalized content can you offer to viewers? Here are different popular content types that you'll likely recognize from your own consumer experience.
1. Website Personalization
Users need to see themselves in your brand and be presented with the right information to compel them to act. Your website needs to be personalized to reflect two things to reach its conversion potential:
- Your target audience. This comes down to demographic data, copywriting, and market positioning.
- Where they're at right now in their journey. This is a matter of content being recommended at the right point of the customer journey.
2. Landing Page Personalization
Landing pages aren't one-size-fits-all, and businesses can improve conversion rates by targeting different buyers, motives, and budgets.
For example, let‘s say that I sell safari trips and I’ve written multiple guides on my website for different demographics looking to book a safari. One guide might target customers looking to book a safari experience on their honeymoon, and then lead back to a customized landing page that targets honeymooners. Another guide might target retirees, and likewise would lead back to a customized landing page speaking to older travelers.
Pro tip: I think this is particularly useful for running ads. Ads are most effective when they're targeting a very specific persona and when the landing page is customized to their pain points and needs.
3. Email Personalization
A priority of almost every modern company is building an email list, and there are many easy ways to personalize email content for higher conversion rates. Email personalization is a very common personalization strategy that you‘ve probably already encountered once today. For example, you can reference a user’s:
- First name.
- Recent purchase.
- First purchase.
- Abandoned cart.
Example of an abandoned cart email from Liquid Death that has the subject line “Maybe you died?” I‘m glad I wasn’t drinking while I read this, or I might've spit it out.
Pro tip: This can be leveraged both by an email service provider (which mass-emails many individuals at once) and an individual using a customer relationship manager (CRM) tool like HubSpot's free CRM.
4. Ad Personalization
Just as landing pages can be personalized, so should paid ads. When you invest in paid ads, you should be targeting a very specific individual with a very specific message, tailoring your offer to account for:
- If they've heard of your brand before.
- How much money they're willing to spend.
- Their concerns about your product.
- The transformation your product is going to offer their life.
I recommend A/B testing to help you find the highest-converting ads and landing page designs. You can A/B test directly inside the HubSpot CMS platform:
Ways to Personalize Content
Now, I’ll share some of the most popular ways to personalize content.
1. Recommendations Based on User Behavior and Data
Customer data is a powerful content personalization tool when used to recommend products or pages based on browsing behavior. It comes with a catch, though.
Warning: When users reject your website cookies, you lose a lot of data available to you.
On a technical level, this can get into browsing history and website analytics, but I’ve found you can also circumvent this by approaching recommendations on a common-sense level. You can anticipate a lot of user behavior and interests and provide personalized content recommendations through:
- Internal linking (this also has huge SEO benefits).
- Related email freebies.
- Product pop-ups.
For example, if a customer is reading a top-of-funnel blog post, you don't need to recommend a buyer objection article next; relevant content will be much more influential and improve conversion rates.
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Here’s an example from the calligraphy website Loveleigh Loops. While they teach a variety of different lettering styles, they don’t offer the same email opt-in on every web page. On beginner-lever blog posts, they offer beginner worksheets to improve conversion rates.
2. Timed Pop-ups
Have you ever landed on a website and immediately hit a pop-up with some invitation, like downloading a freebie or getting a discount? It's a missed opportunity for the company; website pop-ups are highly effective when they make the right offer at the right time.
One of the most common content personalization tools is a timed website pop-up, which can be personalized depending on:
- Which page a visitor is on.
- If it's their first time visiting.
- Where they're visiting from.
- How far they scroll down the page.
- If they're about to leave the page.
Here’s a discount popup from the company Buoy that appeared as my cursor was about to close out the window:
3. Geographic Personalization
Geographic-specific content is a popular type of contextual personalization. This can be highly effective for businesses that cater to a specific economy, such as a car rental company with multiple offices.
Here's an example from the WordPress plugin If-So. The website automatically detects my location and uses shortcode to speak directly to me:
4. Content Segments
Rather than offering viewers all of your content at once to sift through, you should organize your content based on viewer behavior and interests.
If you reflect on your own browsing experience, you‘ll notice that this is done on many large platforms. On Pinterest, content is organized on boards. On YouTube and TikTok, content is organized in playlists. Content isn’t organized on Instagram or Facebook, which makes finding something from a specific brand a needle-in-a-haystack search.
I suggest you segment your content to save viewers this headache. This can be as simple as using basic tags, or you can be creative like the recipe index below from mocktail recipe creator The Mindful Mocktail to help users find relevant content:
5. AI Content Translation
If you look inside your Google Analytics, you can see which countries your viewers are in and identify translation opportunities. You can offer your website content in multiple languages without needing coding skills within your content management system with AI tools like Weglot. I think this is a simple but highly effective personalization strategy.
6. Interactive AI
You can tailor digital experiences like never before with AI. Using conversational AI, users can ask questions, receive an immediate response, and engage with your library of content in an interactive way. Here’s an example below with the AI travel planner Mindtrip, which I use all the time:
7. Dynamic Content
Dynamic website content offers viewers an incredibly personalized experience with your content. This works best for consumer products, like these glasses I virtually tried on from Warby Parker. Technology like this allows each user to have a completely personalized experience with your content and improves conversion rates.
8. Retargeting Ads
Have you ever browsed a website and then immediately noticed ads for those products showing up on Facebook? No, that wasn’t a coincidence; that was a retargeting ad. Retargeting ads are highly effective because users are already familiar with your brand and might just need more exposure or a special offer to be compelled to buy.
Dividing your customers into different segments, also called audience segments, will help you gather an enormous amount of data that you can use for ads. After virtually trying on the above Warby Parker glasses, I opened Facebook and saw a retargeting ad trying to bring me back to the site.
9. AI Knowledge Base
AI content personalization offers endless opportunities to businesses, one of the most popular being an AI knowledge base. I love that you can help a user find exactly what they‘re looking for using a custom GPT model that’s trained on your content. This model can be trained on:
- YouTube video transcripts.
- Email correspondence.
- Sales call transcripts.
- Blog posts.
After the model is trained on your content and hosted on your site, users can ask it questions and get directed to the exact resources on your website that they need.
Statistic: 77% of surveyed marketers who use generative AI report that it helps them create more personalized content. On top of that, 56% of those same marketers say their AI-generated content performs the same or better than their fully human-created content.
10. AI Chatbots
AI chatbots are trained on your business and offer immediate, personalized solutions to viewers. That can help improve customer satisfaction and offer a personalized customer experience. Every conversation is unique and answers the exact questions that each user has.
Statistic: Almost two-thirds of consumers expect a response from a company within 10 minutes for any marketing, sales, or customer service inquiry. That response time isn’t possible for all sales teams, but AI can handle a lot of these customer queries instantly.
Our AI chatbot software is free to use and can be generated quickly to offer this personalized experience to your website visitors.
11. Quizzes and Surveys
Sometimes advanced customer data platforms are needed to gather information, but sometimes you can also just ask nicely for customers to share their thoughts.
Rather than using behavioral data to try to make a personalized skincare recommendation, Beauty of Joseon invites website visitors to take a quiz that offers personalized recommendations. As a user, I like knowing that the company is trying to help me find the right product for my needs.
12. Dynamic Fields
Dynamic fields are a budget-friendly way to add personalized content to a WordPress website.
“You can use a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields, which will work with any theme, or if you use a page builder like Elementor, you can use their built-in dynamic fields to display things like the current date and time or use URL parameters to pass and store data about where the user has landed on the page from to customize the content displayed," shared Kate Smoothy, founder and director of Webhive Digital.
“If your site offers user registration, you can also use dynamic fields to display their name, location, and any other metadata you store for your users.”
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13. Comments
Comments are an old-school way of offering a personal experience with your brand, and they aren‘t just an engagement hack — they’re a low-cost, quick way to offer tailored content to individual customers. One of my most popular blog posts has 100+ comments where I‘ve been able to help users regain access to their Pinterest accounts. It doesn’t take me long to respond to questions, but the value for users is high:
How to Integrate Content Personalization Into Your CMS
Let‘s look at how you can integrate content personalization directly into your CMS. Don’t have a CMS yet? Use our free content management system.
1. Define your personalization goals.
Fail to plan, and you plan to fail! Why are you pursuing content personalization? This question needs to be answered before you begin. Consider these different goals, like increasing:
- Time spent on website.
- Number of returning visitors.
- Number of sales.
- Click-around rate.
- Email subscriber rate.
My personalization goals are to improve click-around rate and direct users to relevant products in my shop, as well as building trust and loyalty with readers.
2. Identify target audience demographics.
The OG personalization tool is a well-defined buyer persona. Who are you trying to attract and convert on your website? Identifying this person is key. Use our free buyer persona generator to help with this.
Consider who these people are, demographic data (where they live, how much money they make, etc.), and the transformation they want to see by interacting with your brand. Then, as you design your website, reflect this persona.
I teach my readers how to blog and use Pinterest marketing more effectively. My readers are new to the marketing world and on a budget. I deliver tailored content to my persona by always explaining jargon and recommending budget-friendly tools.
Here's an example from my website where I show users how to submit a Pinterest help ticket:
3. Provide related content.
Next, you should show your viewers content related to what they're already viewing. Within the free HubSpot CMS, you can do this automatically by creating tags for your content:
Then, adding a recommended content block that pulls content from your tags automatically:
You can also do this through manual internal linking, which is essential for strong website SEO:
4. Create conditional content.
Conditional content uses an “if THIS, then THAT” model to deliver personalized content to viewers. You can customize content using a huge number of conditions:
- Location.
- Language.
- First name.
- Previous website visits.
- Engagement with an ad.
Here's an example from the plugin If-So demonstrating the benefit of location-dependent conditional content for an ecommerce site:
5. Enable comments and reply.
Replying to comments is one of the easiest ways to provide a personalized website experience to your readers at no additional cost. Based on my experience, I recommend taking these steps:
- Enable comments on all blog posts and product listings, but not landing pages or your homepage.
- Don't allow automatic publishing; require each comment to be reviewed (this reduces spam enormously).
- Approve comments regularly and reply when appropriate.
Some people say that website comments are dead, but I have hundreds of them and I disagree. It‘s an easy way to engage with your viewers and comments are also good for SEO — it’s a win-win.
6. Don't rely on personalization.
Website personalization is like sprinkles on top of a cake: You‘re happy to see the sprinkles, but their presence won’t fix a half-baked pile of mush.
Companies lose when they rely too heavily on personalization tools; many users will reject your cookies request, which means that you can't collect data and your ability to customize content is limited. My biggest takeaway is, champion the user experience above all else.
Getting Started
Reflecting on your own browsing experience, can you remember seeing any of these personalization tactics? I’ve learned that common sense personalization trumps bells and whistles, and the brands that make users feel the most understood are going to be the ones reaping the benefits.
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- Build a website without any coding skills.
- Pre-built themes and templates.
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- And more!