Have you ever checked out a website and then bounced because it was just meh? You may say “quite a few.” With everyone fighting for attention online, it's essential to make your customer experience stand out. Personalizing a website is an excellent way to achieve this feat.
The best part?
It’s easier than ever to personalize a website using Drupal’s powerful tools and features. Personalization is the secret sauce for a killer user experience, as well as higher conversions, customer loyalty, and more cash in your pocket.
To back this claim, The Relevancy Group and Liveclicker released a report where they revealed that marketers who prioritize advanced personalization efforts could expect to see significant returns on their investment, with a potential return of $20 for every dollar spent. In the article, you will learn the 6-steps to personalize your Drupal website effectively.
How to get started with Drupal Website Personalization?
Drupal website personalization is the practice of tailoring a unique digital experience by modifying the website’s content, design, and managing to match users’ needs, behavior, and preferences. Here are the 6-steps to get started with Drupal website personalization:
1. Define your goals and target audience
The first and foremost step before stepping into personalizing your Drupal website is to define your goals and the audience you want to target. For that, you have to identify specific metrics you want to improve within your website–click-through rates, conversion rates, or average session duration.
Now consider how personalization can help achieve your goals, it may be through delivering more relevant content, improving uiux experience, or engagement. You can take help from tools such as Google Analytics or Drupal’s built-in analytics module to understand your target audience better and build a solid foundation for your website personalization.
2. Develop user personas and map journeys
Once you know exactly who your target audience is, it’s time to develop user personas. Based on the real data and research obtained by analytics tools, you can create personas that cater to users’ specific needs, interests, and behavior. You may even consider running surveys and user interviews and gaining insights into demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and pain points.
Now you can use Drupal’s segmentation and personalization module, the ‘Personalization’ or the ‘Context’ module, for support. To create a user map journey, analyze different touchpoints and interactions the visitors have with your website–from the initial landing page to the final conversion CTA. This will help you identify areas such as visitors dropping off or moments where users lose interest.
3. Use personalization tools and create dynamic content
Personalizing websites has become easier since the announcements of Drupal modules such as Acquia Lift, Optimizely, and Siteimprove. You can use these tools to track user behavior, segment users, and deliver personalized content.
Drupal also allows the creation of dynamic content using custom views, blocks, and templates. You may use machine learning technology with Drupal to recommend content to users based on their browsing history or personalize the search results. To add further, Drupal’s Simplenews module will allow you to run personalized email campaigns and distribute website content to relevant and segmented users.
4. Provide recommendations and personalize search results
Providing recommendations and personalizing search results will drastically improve user engagement and may even improve conversion. Drupal’s modules –Commerce Recommender and Amazon Product Advertising API will help you analyze the browsing history or purchasing behavior of your users effectively.
A website that wants to win points with users needs to make finding stuff a breeze, and personalizing search results is a surefire way to do it. You can do that by using Drupal’s search API module and highlighting popular or trending products based on individual users.
5. Set engagement values and establish a team
Setting engagement values means determining criteria to measure user engagement on your website. For that, you can track how users interact with your personalized content and determine its effectiveness. It’s not possible to personalize a website and sustain it without an experienced team.
That’s why establishing a cross-functional team–marketers, developers, and data analysts will help in creating effective personalization by developing a strategy, identifying tools and technologies needed, and analyzing user data to drive conversions. The best part about Drupal is that it helps to achieve this because of its modular architecture, which makes it easier to collaborate within the team.
6. Evaluate results and revisit strategies
Evaluating results and revisiting strategies is an ongoing process. You may test different versions of your website and content, such as images, headlines, and CTA using Drupal’s A/B testing module. This helps to get a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t. You may test metrics of conversion rates, click-through rates, and engagement rates against standard measurements. Understand that user behavior and preferences changes over time, so it’s essential to sit with your cross-functional team and revisit strategies and make necessary changes if required.
Drupal’s flexible CMS will support you in every step of the process, and if you focus on providing the best personalization on your website, there’s a huge probability that you may multifold your conversion and increase business revenue.
Conclusion
How would you improve a user's experience if you knew everything about them? This is what website personalization is. When you are able to provide great personalization, it not just creates a lasting impression on your users but also increases convert visitors into loyal customers.
If you’re looking to take your website to the next level, our Drupal developers at LN Webworks can help you achieve your website personalization goals. Your Drupal website is capable of so much more than you think. Get in touch now. Your website visitors and your bottom line will thank you for it!
FAQ
Website personalization and customization are often used interchangeably, but they are indeed different. Website customization is making changes to the website’s look and feel–altering the color scheme or font without considering the user’s needs and preferences. But website personalization is a few steps ahead. It uses data and technology to deliver customized content and experience based on users’ behavior and preferences.
The benefits of Drupal website personalization are plentiful. A few of them are increased engagement, higher conversions, and better customer satisfaction. When you deliver relevant content and experiences, it enhances the overall experience and builds a stronger relationship with your users.
You can determine the success of your Drupal website personalization by monitoring a few important metrics. A few of them are tracking changes in user behavior–increased time spent on site, page viewed, and conversions. One of the key metrics is ROI. Compare the revenue generated from personalized websites with the cost of implementing and maintaining the website.
Apart from focusing on delivering a great user experience, it’s important to keep an eye on privacy. You can achieve that by implementing a transparent privacy policy that clearly explains what data is being collected and how its purpose. Personalization is sweet, but respecting user privacy is sweeter. You can Implement opt-in and opt-out personalization features for a happy user base.
Author Information
Pankaj Kumar
Co-Founder & Managing DirectorPankaj is a Senior UI/UX specialist with more than ten years of industry experience who focuses on usability, user experience, and user research in his designs. He has worked with small and large teams, including management of LN Webworks Organization.
