How Adobe Target Can Boost Your Personalization Strategy
Many businesses still have a base website with static pages of content – a site that stays the same for everyone who visits. Why though? Those same companies likely send out different email campaigns to existing versus potential new customers or use different advertisements based on location and demographic. At the very least they probably have a customer database or purchase records. Why not do the same on the website?
People visit websites for different reasons, from different places, have different languages, and unique intentions. Capturing this information about your audience and changing your content and delivery to match their attributes is what we in the digital experience industry like to call Personalization.
Using Adobe Target for Personalization
There’s a considerable number of tools out there that help accomplish personalizing content, but I’m going to focus on a highly comprehensive one called Adobe Target. Even if you don’t currently use or have an interest in Adobe Target, I guarantee that I cover learnings you can apply to personalize content on any website. And if you are already using Target or other tools to personalize content, it’s still worth a read. We uncover some strategies that are useful to companies anywhere along in their personalization implementation.
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Adobe Target (formally known as Adobe Test & Target) is a suite of personalization tools for displaying customized content to visitors on any website. If you’re using Adobe Experience Manager, it offers additional integration support that we’ll cover later on, but if you aren’t, fear not! You can integrate Target with any Content Management System (CMS) or website.
Target allows the business to customize any content on the page – images, text, videos, layout, menus, and so on…based on any metric or user criteria the website can measure and send to Target. User criteria is the existing data you know about your visitors, whereas metrics are measured end results of someone’s behavior on the site. Using user criteria to drive an increase or decrease in a metric is where personalization comes in. For example, the business could decide to show a different welcome banner to users who fall within a certain zip code or have existing services with them; hoping to drive a conversion metric. Maybe you’ve wanted to only show upsell banners to customers with existing services, now you can, and influence your ROI for retention.
Effective Use of Adobe Target
The real key to using Target effectively is to identify which metrics matter to your business. The majority of businesses value sales and conversion rates more than anything else, so I suggest starting with those.
Some examples of user criteria include:
- Geographical location
- Target audience tied to that location
- Sale offer for specific zip code 90210
- Product or product tier availability
- Demographics
- Based on user’s site profile
- Estimations based on products purchased
- Any other source
- User’s past or current purchases / equipment / services
- Campaign entry method
- Landing page, referring email, etc
Some examples of metrics include:
- Sales conversion rate
- Page bounce rate
- Time spent on page/site
- Page count – Product views or Capture count (weighted page score)
- Was this page helpful? link
- Sign in/Create a user account
- Sign up for email newsletter
- Retention rates
The Value of Adobe Target
Businesses typically find value in Target because they are able to dynamically serve up the most relevant content to individual users. It supports their efforts to provide better customer service, increase buy flow conversion rates and upsells, create brand awareness, and test product advertisements. Let’s cover some ways to do this using different personalization strategies.
What are your goals?
I encourage you to create your own version of this table. What are you looking to get out of your website? What would you like it to accomplish? Personalization metrics can help you figure out how to get there, what works, and what doesn’t.
Adobe Target is a proven tool with comprehensive capabilities to maximize your personalization results. It is a fully adaptable and customizable integration that can help any marketing team meet their 1:1 user targeting goals. Let us help you explore the possibilities that Adobe Target can offer your business.
In our next post, we will look at some of the specific tools within Target and how they can be best used in your personalization initiatives.