Website Personalization Strategy & Implementation: Boosting Member Engagement with Tailored Content

SUMMARY
For marketing and technology teams looking to drive engagement on their website, consider personalization! This blog explores the strategies, tools, and steps for implementing an effective personalization strategy that can work for your different user groups and personas.

Table of Contents

• Start with a Solid Website Personalization Strategy
• High-Impact Areas to Personalize
• Leverage the Right Tools for Differentiation
• Center Your Visitors’ Needs
• Avoid Common Pitfalls
• Homework: Easy First Steps for a Website Personalization Strategy
• Key Takeaways

Personalization offers a really strong ROI. According to McKinsey, companies that invest in personalization find that personalization grows their revenue 40% more than their other initiatives. So what's your best next step?

Start with a Solid Website Personalization Strategy

A robust website personalization strategy answers critical questions such as your purpose, goals, how you will measure success, and the type of content that you already have that differentiates your brand. It also helps guide future content needs to include in your content calendar. We love a good 2-for-1, and a thoughtful website personalization strategy checks that box!

Key Components of a Website Personalization Strategy

1. Purpose: Define clear objectives, such as increasing engagement metrics or driving conversions.
2. Content to Narrow or Differentiate: Assess your content and your audiences and determine where there is the biggest opportunity to highlight more relevant content or to deliver different messages to different user groups.
3. Data Sources & Segments: Inventory the attributes you already have or could have for a given visitor. These might include user profile data for a logged-in member, browser-based data (language, device, IP location), or data you could collect (selection of a filter, submission of a form, view of a page). Group those attributes into manageable priority segments such as membership types or regional locations. 
   
   PRO TIP:
   It's easy to go down a rabbit hole here or feel overwhelmed with the data. If you are first starting off, document the easy wins, and then create a list for your future state that you can refer back to later.

High-Impact Areas to Personalize

Not all pages are created equal. To maximize impact, prioritize personalization for high-traffic areas and use it to narrow your high-volume lists. Pages we often see that are great candidates for personalization include:

• Homepage: Showcase personalized hero messages or highlight member-exclusive benefits.
• Member Dashboard: Tailor content like upcoming events, resources, or account alerts.
• Product or Event Pages: Recommend courses or events based on user activity.

Starting with these pages ensures that your efforts have the biggest immediate impact. And we always love a good ROI story! 

Leverage the Right Tools to Make Personalization Manageable and Effective

Managing Differentiated Content

In most cases, you will manage content for your defined user groups and/or personas within your CMS. Depending on the CMS, this may be part of the core capabilities or accomplished via plug-ins or modules, which means development effort may vary.

• In Drupal, user data can drive the assignment of roles. Roles can natively be used for the conditional display of blocks. Smart Content is a suite of contributed modules that gives you a way to set visibility conditions for any given block on the site (including Layout Builder blocks that we LOVE) tied to browser-based events or other user attributes. What's most exciting is Drupal's evolving AI ecosystem, including the Drupal AI module and Agentic Framework, which promises the automation of personalization decisions based on behavioral data, metadata, and contextual patterns!
• In WordPress, you can leverage an Advanced Custom Fields block that checks the user’s audience for a logged-in user and customize the theme using Timber functions and Twig. There are also a number of paid plugins, such as If So or Logic Hop. And as WordPress and plug-ins continue to evolve, many are starting to integrate AI for predictive personalization, real-time content targeting, and audience behavioral insights.
• Proprietary CMSs like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Sitefinity, or Kentico tend to have fixed solutions and/or add-ons to provide this functionality. These platforms are beginning to bundle AI-powered engines that deliver automated content recommendations, dynamic segmentation, and real-time decisioning to drive smarter, more adaptive experiences.

Detecting and Collecting Data

For logged-in visitors, you can typically pull in profile information from your CRM or AMS. A customer data platform (CDP) collects and unifies first-party customer data from multiple sources into a single, comprehensive customer profile. It can help build on that logged-in data and fill the gap for logged-out visitors. The space is crowded, but a few we like to use include:

• Lytics will create segments (that you can customize) to drive conditional blocks or Lytics widgets that are then available within Drupal (via Smart Content Lytics module) or WordPress (via Lytics Personalization Engine on Github).
• VWO and Optimizely are well-suited for A/B testing and also offer personalization capabilities. They can each layer onto your existing content management system.

Focus on Your Visitors’ Needs

Understanding and addressing visitor needs is the secret sauce. Ask yourself:

• What saves time for your users?
• What content will they appreciate most?
• How can your site be more helpful and proactive to meet your users' needs?
• What are the key tasks your users come to your site for?

Transparency is also essential. Highlight when content is personalized (e.g. “Recommended for You”) and how it is personalized (e.g. “Based on Your Recent Purchase”). This builds trust and improves over user satisfaction.

Avoid Common Pitfalls

While personalization offers immense potential, it’s important to avoid:

• Overwhelming Complexity: Start small. Personalizing one or two high-impact areas can build momentum.
• “Creepiness” Factor: Use data thoughtfully. Avoid crossing boundaries that might make visitors uncomfortable. There is a line you can cross between being super helpful, or creepy.
• Stagnant Content: Regularly update personalized content to keep it relevant and engaging.

Homework: Easy First Steps for a Website Personalization Strategy

Ready to dive in? Start with these actionable tasks:

1. Update your homepage hero message for logged-in members (this is such an easy and fun way to communicate unique messages just for your members).
2. Add a site wide alert to remind users to renew memberships (a great metric to show year over year renewal growth based on website behaviors).
3. Integrate tools like Lytics for initial data collection and segmentation (the more good data you have, the better your personalization opportunities, plus you can collect a bunch of other insights and goodies).

These quick wins help demonstrate the power of personalization while setting the stage for more sophisticated efforts. We'd love to hear what you did! 

Key Takeaways

Effective personalization is about creating meaningful, tailored experiences that drive engagement. By starting with a solid strategy, focusing on high-value areas, and leveraging the right tools, marketing and technology teams can unlock the full potential of personalization.

Want to learn more? Contact us to explore how we can help your organization craft a winning website personalization strategy. We can help you implement it to, and develop a roadmap for continued growth. Onward and upward!