How to provide personalized digital experiences: 10 examples

Did you know that 69% of customers appreciate personalization, as long as it’s based on the customer data they willingly gave out to a business? Plus, 66% of customers expect a company to understand their expectations and needs.

Tapping into personalization is a safe way to: provide a better customer experience, win more new customers, retain existing customers, and increase your revenue. In short, it benefits absolutely everyone.

The best way to get started is to provide a personalized digital experience to your customers. Here is how to do just that.

What is a personalized digital experience?

A personalized customer experience is when a brand caters its sales, marketing, and customer service data according to the needs of individual customers. Instead of all the customers having the same customer journey, they get a unique, personalized one based on your customer data, and all of that in real time.

There is abundant research testifying that current customers expect personalization. It has become a standard for digital experiences. And thanks to modern tools, businesses can provide a personalized experience by collecting data seamlessly and with consent.

A personalized digital experience can be something small, like changing a call to action on a landing page, or something as major as showing an entirely different website layout based on previous visits.

But to make sure that you respect your customers' privacy and provide a highly personalized customer experience at the same time, you need to take care of one thing first.

A digital experience platform (DXP) and how it fits in

A personalized customer experience means offering a unique experience to each customer based on the data you have around them. To get to this point, a traditional approach to marketing, sales, customer service, and customer loyalty is no longer enough.

Rather than a traditional website, what really works is creating engaging digital experiences. And a digital experience platform (DXP) is the piece of technology that will help you do it. With a DXP, you’ll enjoy:

• seamlessly collecting information from your website visitors
• having a centralized database for all of your marketing and sales content
• managing your entire e-commerce store and stock from one place
• personalizing the shopping experience based on the previously collected customer data
• editing your website content in just a few clicks without reaching out to a developer
• sharing relevant content across your website and social media with one click

A DXP such as Kentico helps you offer more customer personalization without sacrificing the customer experience or intruding on users’ privacy. On the other hand, it allows customers to get better recommendations and more value without lifting a finger. Everybody wins.

10 examples of personalized digital experiences

Whether you want to increase your average order value, bump up your customer satisfaction scores or offer amazing multichannel experiences, here are some examples that can get you inspired.

An improved PPC campaign experience

Let’s say you have a PPC campaign set up and your company offers car loans. In a typical setup, your customers click through an ad on Google and end up on a landing page. They have two choices: click through and purchase or not.

With personalized customer experiences, you can go beyond that. As this person clicks on an ad, they end up on a different, personalized version of your website. For them, car loans are the first option on the website menu.

The website changes in real time based on the source of the traffic. Everyone else sees the same version of the website but these visitors are given a look and feel that makes them more likely to convert.

This lets you manage customers' expectations properly from the very start and gives them the feeling that personalization comes by default every time they open up your website.

A different website for repeat visitors

When someone visits your website more than once, they are familiar with your offer and more likely to convert into a paying customer. Why not give them a customer experience with personalized content then?

Digital experience platforms such as Kentico allow for this form of customer experience personalization. When someone visits the website more than once, they see calls to action higher up on the (product) pages than someone seeing those pages for the first time.

Alternatively, they see the CTAs in the same position but with different copy. For example, instead of seeing "learn more", they'll see "buy product".

With the simple use of cookies and by collecting very little personal data, you can offer a better customer experience.

Providing a unique experience for brick-and-mortar store visitors

If you offer both online and in-person shopping, creating personalized customer service can be a challenge. But not with a DXP.

Here is an example of a setup you can use: a customer usually shops at your brick-and-mortar store. They now visit your website and see a new product they're interested in.

Since you already have data on them, you create an offer on your website for this visitor to go and pick the product up in your store, rather than purchase it online. This way, customers choose the option they prefer the most according to their own buying habits and you don't have to force them to make a choice that would cause them to churn.

This way, you provide a unique customer experience and enhance customer loyalty even further.

Personalized calls to action

Every marketer knows that calls to action are crucial to increasing conversion rates. Some marketers spend hours split testing the best call-to-action design, copy, and placement. But what if you didn't have to do any of that manually anymore?

Thanks to digital experience platforms, CTAs can be changed automatically to provide the most personalized customer experience.

For example, someone is in your online sporting goods store. You have a range of different CTAs, depending on the page but you're not accounting for the individual customers.

Let's say someone is interested in a specific football jersey and that's what their search history is all about. If they visit a page for the team’s fans, they'll get a call to action to sign up for your newsletter and get a discount.

But if they're on a product page for T-shirts, they get a CTA to purchase immediately. It's a small hack for a personalized experience that gets more powerful as your number of visitors grows.

Personalized customer experience based on the time spent on website

You could try and pay attention to how much time someone spends on your website and offer them personalized content based on that fact. However, most of the software that already does this is heavily bloated or requires a lot of consent forms to grab relevant data.

With a DXP, you can start your personalization strategy within a single product.

For example, if someone visits your blog a few times within a month, they may be interested in what you have to say, but they are not yet ready to purchase.

The third customer has visited your blog, your landing pages, and your FAQs. This visitor gets a popup window offering to book a demo or a call with your sales team to discuss their needs further, related to the pages they were visiting in those sessions.

What's even more, you can base the popup on their previous browsing history and offer them exactly what they need. You no longer have to wonder what customers want - you just monitor their customer journey and provide the kind of solution they are looking for.

Moreover, you can account for the same visitor using different devices and changing the content they see based on the device. That way, they get the ultimate mobile experience instead of seeing the same pages on their phone and a laptop at work.

Offering a personalized experience to existing customers

If someone is already your paying customer, you can take your personalization efforts to the next level. You already have abundant details on them throughout their customer interactions on multiple channels. And you have something even more valuable: previous purchase history.

Based on this history, you can give them personalized recommendations on what else to get. For example, they've already got a mortgage from your bank. You can offer them additional products such as insurance or a personal account. Or perhaps a loan for a car big enough for the family.

If you offer fashion and your users have purchased clothing items from you before, they may have already given you their preferred sizes for both clothes and footwear. The next time they log in, they can get a completely different view of your stock. For example, if you don't have a certain item in their size, it can simply be removed from their recommendations.

This type of customer experience personalization is easy to implement with the right tools and it can have a massive impact on customer satisfaction while improving your revenue.

Creating personalized email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is still one of the top-performing channels today, its revenue is reaching almost 11 billion by the end of 2023. If you're like many companies who don't get that much value from email, it doesn’t mean that you're sending the wrong kinds of emails. You're just not personalizing them to the right extent.

With a digital experience platform, you can use the information you have from your analytics tools to create highly personalized emails.

Here is an example: someone is already on your email list and they subscribed to a newsletter. You can see in your CRM systems that they regularly interact with your emails. You now use that customer information and send them a link to a personalized offer instead of sending them another newsletter email.

If you run a hotel chain and your user repeatedly clicks on links to your weekend pack offers, you can send them an email for an entire category or specific hotels that they visited before. These personalized experiences are easy to set up and they can provide a massive value.

You can certainly do this the old-fashioned way and have customers select their email preferences when they sign up to receive your messages. However, this increases friction upon signup and many customers can simply drop out because they don't know your data management policies.

Instead, personalized digital experiences mean adapting your strategy on the go based on users’ behavior.  

Customized member portal

Associations can effectively use personalized experiences for membership portals. You can tailor content and interactions based on each member’s preferences. This will enhance members’ engagement and foster a sense of belonging.

For instance, if you work for a healthcare organization, you could implement personalized dashboards that showcase relevant industry updates, exclusive resources, and upcoming events based on a member's specific interests and career stage.  
This customization adds value to the member experience and strengthens your connection with its diverse membership base, ultimately contributing to increased satisfaction and loyalty.

These personalized strategies are easy to pull off with the right data.  

Personalized website content

You no longer have to wait for customer feedback to find out what they like consuming on your website and social media. Simply use personalization strategies for the hard part of the work and set up your digital experience platform for the rest.

Think of the following scenario: someone just landed on your website, headed to the blog section and then clicked through to a webinar you recorded and put up on your website. You record their next visit and this time, they skip steps one and two and head straight to the webinar.

The third time they come around to your website, you have your personalization tactic ready. You give them a popup on the homepage to check out your latest webinar series.

This neat little trick can help you:

• improve click-through rates
• deliver content customers really want to consume
• influence customers' buying behavior
• provide more relevant experiences for repeat visitors
• increase customer satisfaction

It may not sound like all that, but think of it like Netflix for your website: the moment someone opens it, they get personalized recommendations about things they'd also like. Once again, everybody wins.

Geo-targeted offers

Targeting users based on their location is one way to make the entire customer experience even smoother. Based on the customer's profile, you can serve them special offers and add or remove certain parts of your offers.

For example, suppose someone is located in Austria and you have an international store offering healthcare products. In that case, you can offer content more likely to interest an Austrian audience than one from Canada.

Or another aspect of your offer: you're selling your products across the world and your website shows product pages in local languages and prices in local currencies. Your visitors will always be more ready to buy from you if you offer them localized content.

You can also use a concept called Purchase Power Parity, where customers pay a different price based on location. Your digital experience platform can detect their IP address and their country. If someone is from a country such as Vietnam, they're going to end up paying much less than say, someone from Australia. Your digital experience platform can detect their IP address and their country.

Wrapping up

Personalized customer experiences are no longer nice to have. With customers requiring relevant content, personalized shopping, and a unique customer journey, brands need to pay attention and adapt.

The beauty of using a personalization strategy is that you probably already have all the data you need to personalize customer experiences. The missing link for this omnichannel personalization is a digital experience platform to tie it all into one place.

We can help—Kentico gives you the tools to tie your website, social media, and other channels in one place. Create a personalization strategy that makes your customers happy and improves your bottom line!