After a decade of pursuing website personalization, is it still worth it?

Is personalization out?

The last decade saw the rise of personalization. As an agency, we’ve helped vendors build and demo platforms for it. We've sold clients on personalization campaigns. We've helped plan, launch, and manage them across a variety of sectors. We've written blog articles about it. And 10 years later, the biggest lesson we've learned about personalization is that it's not the right solution for every brand. 

Indeed, as much as personalization continues to be a rising trend across marketing in general, we can see how interest in website personalization specifically has plateaued:

The thing is, web personalization is a big investment, no matter how small you want to start (we often recommend a crawl-walk-run approach). Right off the bat, personalization engines are expensive. Second, running personalization campaigns require a long time horizon, a tremendous amount of human capital to align on how they will be targeted — much less manage it on an ongoing basis — and after all that, it’s still tricky to attribute results to personalization campaigns that span across pages, sessions, and variables.

Optimization is in.

So, what have clients been adopting instead? 

Well, for years they’ve already been constantly evolving their digital experiences over time with A/B and multivariate testing. Now, they are effectively leveling this up into what we’d call an optimization model. It gives them an approach to practically look at smaller increments of their audience, experience, and content. Personalization becomes the end, optimization the means. The tests are prioritized based on which audiences, conversions, and other interactions will benefit the most. 

How is optimization different?

• Instead of personas and journeys, optimization is about improving specific interactions and use cases, and new ones can be identified and addressed over time (e.g. machines as customers). 
• Instead of long campaigns, optimization works on smaller scales and time horizons
• Instead of looking at the whole digital experience at once, optimization is focused on small wins compounding over time
• At the same time, optimization isn’t limited to a single audience at a time – the resulting improvements from each test can benefit all users
• The approach leads to faster learnings, better attribution, and simpler, smaller efforts

Optimization

In a world where we're all trying to do more with less, to  pivot and respond to change quicker, optimization is a practical approach, especially for brands with just a handful of dedicated web personnel. We've worked with multiple clients over the last few years on optimization work, and with the right team who can wear a lot of hats (e.g. light copywriting, strategy, and analytics), there are WYSIWYG tools out there that can empower even just two team members to partner with an agency and continually improve an experience with great results.

Wherever your brand is in your optimization journey — from adopting it as a new process, to building the right team or equipping them with better tools, to leveling up your existing pace and rigor — we’ve the experience, connections, case studies and best practices to help get you there. Reach out to us at your most optimal opportunity.