Over the last decade, user expectations on the Internet have been altered by mobile devices, multiple channels, and social experiences. Personalization is now the name of the game, and companies that don’t meet this expectation will fall short against the competition.
Creating consistent and personal online experiences through identity and first-party data is the best way to guarantee that consumers are continually engaged. To get you started, we’ve included three strategies to nurture personalized user experiences that drive consumer loyalty and ROI.
1. Integrate first-party data with existing technologies
As the Internet became the main thoroughfare for consumer traffic, a number of technologies emerged to help marketers find their way. Tools like recommendation engines and analytics software promise to piece together your customers’ behaviors across the web to build out user profiles. While these tools provide valuable insights for marketers, they ultimately fall short because they lack the degree of specificity needed to create truly personalized experiences.
Integrating first-party data, such as interests, gender, location, and more, with these tools completes the user profile. Instead of simply drawing insights from cookies and trying to map behaviors to IP addresses, first-party data gives marketers the opportunity to deliver personalized experiences based on who users actually are. For instance, electronics retailers use recommendation tools to know that shoppers who purchase tablets are likely to purchase a case for it as well. Rather than suggest generic cases to a single user, retailers who leverage first-party data will know that male shoppers living in New York who like baseball are likely to buy a Yankees case.
Adding this layer of insight to recommendation and analytics tools helps users discover products and content that connect with their individual interests, rather than those of the general population. Investing in software to capture and store first-party data will increase the robustness of your existing tools and deliver the personal experiences users expect.
2. Standardize the user experience across all devices
Over the last few years, mobile has completely altered online user behavior. Today’s consumers demand immediate access to content on every touch point to the web. The challenge now is not just delivering the content, but creating engaging and personal experiences across the digital channels where your audience spends time. Implementing social authentication software offers major benefits to users and businesses, and is the surefire way to meet this challenge.
The Internet has never been more accessible to the modern consumer; smartphones, TV sets, and even cars are creating new touch points to the web. As the number of new mediums increase, social login enables users to bypass form fields and authenticate effortlessly across devices. Socially logged-in consumers are instantly free to generate and share comments, reviews, and other content with their personal networks while engaging with on-site community members. This ease of access creates immersive engagement experiences and drives the social connectivity across channels that users crave.
For businesses, social login provides an efficient way to keep track of individual users. When individuals authenticate socially, they are instantly recognized across new channels. Immediate recognition enables businesses to pin all consumer actions to a single user identity and provides valuable behavioral insights necessary for creating tailored site experiences. Consistently delivering all this personalized content becomes a much easier task, as businesses are fully aware of when and how an individual user is connecting.
3. Serve relevant ads
When done right, ads are great ways for consumers to discover personally relevant products or services; at their worst, they spam the user experience and turn consumers away in droves.
Outdated tracking and collection techniques for ad serving place many businesses squarely in the latter category. Almost every user can relate to the frustrating experience of having a one-off search follow them doggedly across the web. Even worse, ads served from personal or embarrassing search data create legitimate privacy concerns and can keep consumers from ever visiting a site again.
Investing in transparent first party data collection techniques is the best way to respect user privacy and serve relevant ads. Social authentication is a completely permission-based process, so users are fully aware of what information is collected and how it will be used. Engaging consumers with this level of transparency and consideration guarantees that privacy concerns are kept to a minimum. More importantly, businesses are now enabled directly by the user to leverage this data for highly relevant and timely ads. This mutual agreement benefits consumers and businesses frustrated with the traditional online ad experience.