How Kentico supports user profiling and personalisation

We’re all inherently online. The digital world and everyday life are no longer two separate entities, but a seamless blend of online interactions that impact offline decisions. As more and more businesses move to ‘online-only’ or an online-first approach, how can brands ensure they’re still delivering an engaging online experience?

Website personalisation is at the very core of creating a memorable user journey and helping your brand stand out from the crowd. But how can you effectively personalise your website? Customer profiling helps you to narrow down your audience and create relevant, highly personalised experiences on your site.

In this article, we discuss why personalisation is so important, what customer/user profiling is and how Kentico can support your personalisation needs.

What is personalisation? 

Simply put, personalisation is the process of tailoring a journey to the user and creating a more unique experience on your site. Instead of serving your audience with identical information, offers, banners and more, personalisation allows you to amend what your audience sees based on their preferences, interests and history with your brand.

Personalisation isn’t anything new. Our experiences in person have always been customised to each user but how can you translate this to your website? This can feel especially tricky to navigate for sites that aren’t eCommerce stores, where personalisation can be implemented through product recommendations or discount codes for frequently browsed items.

How does website personalisation benefit your business?

Whether your goal is to sell, encourage email sign-ups or entice users to download your eBook, you need to create a memorable and positive user experience on your site. By failing to personalise their journey with your brand, you’re likely losing out on business. In fact, a study found that 62 percent of people expect a personalised experience and if you don’t deliver that, they will take their business elsewhere.

From reducing the cost of customer acquisition to increasing brand loyalty in a time when loyalty to businesses is on the way out, personalisation has never been more important.

How Kentico can support personalisation

Recognising the importance of personalisation is one thing but being able to implement it effectively across your site is another issue. When replatforming or building a new site, it’s imperative to take the time to research platforms and how their capabilities can support, or hinder, your goals. One of our platforms of choice is Kentico, who are renowned for their easy-to-use interface, with next-level marketing capabilities, including personalisation.

Using its EMS functionality, Kentico offers you advanced capabilities such as A/B testing, email integrations, analytics, and content management. This integrated marketing solution provides those on the platform with a broad range of tools. These tools are designed to improve the user experience and create truly personalised experiences for their audience.

When considering personalisation on your site, you first need to understand your users or target users, and what they want from you. Every business has multiple audiences or user types with their own set of requirements or needs from your business. Understanding these motivations and characteristics is key when implementing personalisation. Kentico allows you to really boost your users' experience on-site with their user persona and segmentation capabilities.

User profiling: what is it?

Building user profiles based on who may be using your site, what they hope to gain from your site and what you can tailor towards this person is the first step in creating a truly personalised experience on your website. Once your site is up and running, you can build out your customer personas based on real-time data from your website.

Creating your user personas

Targeting the right people and ensuring your messaging is relevant to your audience is the key to great on-site personalisation. But how can you make sure you’re speaking to the right people? User personas help you to identify your audience, their individual needs and pain points and how you should speak to them. Getting user personas right means some initial leg work that your web agency can support with. To help, here’s a brief breakdown of getting started with user profiling:

1. What do you want from your site?

Now’s the time to pin down your business objectives and what you want to achieve on your site. Ask yourself, what are your goals and what actions do you need your audience to take to achieve these. Break this down further by considering what user personas and customer segments you may have within your audience and how each audience can support your objectives. Focus on their individual requirements and unique pain points.

2. Evaluate the data

Pull data from your existing bank of data points such as your website, social analytics, your CRM and email marketing. With a wealth of data to work from, you identify various trends, such as key user groups within your audience. Using this information, you can start to build user personas. Once your new site is up and running, any new data can be used to continuously expand your personas.

3. Create your personas

Researching user types and collating data done and dusted, you can now concentrate on creating personas for your site. Your personas are fictional, ideal, customers with their own individual identity. Consider things like location, gender, age, vocation and more when putting together their profile. Personas can then be grouped into segments. Using these segments, you can format a plan to provide each group with targeted, relevant content that speaks to their unique requirements.

Kentico and user personas

User profiles or personas are an integral part of getting your on-site personalisation bang on the money. Kentico’s persona functionality allows you to be in the driving seat, setting your own rules and attributes. Using personas that accurately reflect your users enables you to create memorable and relevant experiences for your audience when on your site.

Alongside this, Kentico gives you the option to create segments, whereby your audience are automatically grouped on set data points and assigned to your chosen personas. Content can then be filtered out to the relevant segments, providing them with the information most relevant to their needs.

Implementing personalisation: when, what, how and why

Personalisation should be considered from the start of your web project but doesn’t need to be set in stone from the get-go. Understanding the value of it and how you may wish to incorporate it into your site as you begin your project is never a bad thing, but being flexible in your approach allows you to really harness its power as your website develops.

As your website grows and adapts with your business, Kentico allows you to easily update or amend your site to reflect your changing audience. With more data to work with, you can easily implement new features or functionalities relevant to your growing audience. Your personas and segments, and associated content, can also all be updated along the way.

So, while it’s good to have personalisation in mind throughout a website project, it’s not something that you need to have pinned down from the offset. Personalising your website is an ongoing project, that needs to adjust with your business and your changing goals. Thanks to Kentico’s flexibility, this is easily manageable no matter what stage your website is at.

Our experience with Kentico and website personalisation

London property developer, Essential Living, were looking to improve their user engagement and lead generation online. Understanding their objectives, we knew that an integrated marketing solution would help to support their long-term goals. Utilising Kentico’s EMS functionality, we helped Essential Living create personalised experiences for their audience, with filtered content depending on previous searches and location. By providing their audience with highly relevant information and a personalised experience, the team experienced an uptick in qualified leads.

Boost your user engagement with next-level personalisation

As we’ve seen, those who fail to personalise their websites fail to attract or maintain users. Personalising your site is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a necessity. If you’re looking to boost your user engagement, increase leads or boost sales, personalisation needs to be a key part of your digital strategy. With a range of experience supporting brands in various sectors, you can rest assured that the team at IDHL can support you on your personalisation journey. Reach out to us today to see how.