7 Tips to Make the Most of your Website Personalisations

Personalisation has been a feature on websites and in email campaigns for a while and is often a recommendation for improving the user experience, especially with eCommerce websites.

But how personalised do you go, and what do you personalise on?

Here are 7 quick tips on how to approach personalisation when people sign up for an account, or select preferences on your website.

▶️ Focus on what you really know about people. Things they've bought or where they are in the world tend to be safe ground as they show up automatically in order histories.

▶️ Don't assume you know people, or they even know themselves. We all make typos and mistakes are always possible when form filling. I'd be willing to bet you'll have a Mickie Mouse in your mailing list somewhere.

▶️ Don't ask too many options to 'personalise your experience'. Long forms are overwhelming and more likely to be ignored because people will zone out. Plus, the more specific the personalisation, the more work you need to do on supporting each user group with ever decreasing users in each.

▶️ Only ask what you need to know, and when you know what you're actually going to do with the information you collect. The more personalisation you offer, the higher expectation that people's preferences will be respected. You can't ask then ignore them.

▶️ Web users don't always realise that personalisation is intended to help themselves so they get to see more of what's relevant to them. They think it's to do you, dear site owner, a favour to make it easier to sell them more stuff so they're cynical. Make clear the benefits of filling in their preferences, and respect their time.

▶️ Personalise in a way that makes sense to people. Allowing people to set preferences by commonly understood properties such as size, colour or location is fine. But avoid jargon or proprietary terms that people are less likely to understand.

▶️ Remember, going too narrow can also cut off opportunities to share related material. You can't keep saying you might be interested in 'x' when they've been so specific in telling you want they want to see or hear.

And finally, make sure you update those merge fields {subscriberName}.