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Uniform blog/Tactical personalization: the right content to the right consumers
Tactical personalization: the right content to the right consumers
Tactical personalization: the right content to the right consumers
In an increasingly uncertain economic climate, marketers and merchandisers continuously have to do more with less because, even though companies are slowly investing in marketing again, budgets remain below prepandemic levels. Nonetheless, marketers are still expected to deliver high-performing digital experiences that keep up with consumer demand and that help brands compete in crowded marketplaces. To keep meeting their KPIs, marketers turn to personalizing digital experiences, but doing that has traditionally been challenging to deliver without a major investment.
How can businesses capitalize on personalization without busting the budget or overtaxing their marketers? By embracing a lightweight, cost-effective approach called tactical personalization.
Why not stick with traditional personalization?
As promising as personalization is, it poses real concerns. At the outset, it is a cumbersome process because personalized content is often inserted with JavaScript into your site while it’s loading, resulting in slow page loads and poor Core Web Vitals (CWV). Plus, to serve that content, the personalization vendor sends it from the vendor’s server back to your page, hampering the loading speed even more.
Slow loading sites frustrate visitors, resulting in cart abandonment and negatively impacting key metrics like conversion rates and SEO rankings. That’s because performance (page-load time) is now a ranking factor in Google search. Fast loads lead to higher SEO; slow loads can boot you to the dreaded zone of page two or beyond. Hence, poorly implemented personalization might not only waste money, but also actively undermine your investments in SEO and the commerce experience.
Personalization can easily get expensive. Many brands implement it with costly software suites, locking themselves into having to build experiences according to the vendor’s paradigms and roadmaps, which impacts their choices and ability to innovate in the future. Specifically, the following costs are involved:
- Systems and infrastructure to support personalization, which necessitate a host of custom code.
- Custom integrations for data lakes.
- Advanced tools and manpower that can segment audiences, analyze large data sets, and create huge amounts of content.
- The expense of tanking performance.
Nonetheless, the potential return on investment from personalizing experiences is huge: Deloitte reports that 80 percent of customers prefer to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences. That’s why the smart choice is to implement tactical personalization.
What is tactical personalization?
Tactical personalization means delivering compelling content fast with fewer resources and no loss in speed or scalability. As a result, you understand your customers better and propel them to conversion—without lowering your experience’s performance or other marketing investments.
Moreover, tactical personalization is an economical technique that fits into existing workflows. You can then forget about the complex scenarios you’ve heard about others building and simply personalize at the scale that makes sense for your organization or team. With a small investment, you quickly see the ROI of delivering the most relevant products, content, or offers. You can then keep those benefits or scale even further.
Uniform brings tactical personalization to your digital experiences without using render-blocking scripts or expensive origin calls, delivering personalization at your edge of choice in milliseconds. We also offer simple-to-deploy tests that deepen your customer knowledge quickly. And, since tactical personalization does not affect page-load times or SEO rankings, your investments won’t impact other projects.
What are the benefits of tactical personalization?
Brands that adopt tactical personalization streamline their process and boost conversions without a complex workflow or sky-high budget—while keeping page performance and scalability intact. Specifically, with tactical personalization, you can—
- Iterate messages to customers with content from different sources.
- Deliver targeted content with A/B testing tools.
- Reduce spending and technical overhead on integration.
- Avoid complicated adaptations to workflows.
- Place marketers back in control of the experience-creation process.
How do you implement and deploy tactical personalization?
Implementing tactical personalization with Uniform is simple due to the following:
- Uniform integrates seamlessly with market-leading headless CMSes. We offer quick integrations with popular vendors, including Contentful, Contentstack, Kontent.ai, and Sanity.
- Uniform can connect other headless CMSes or commerce platforms through its own interface so that you can easily combine personalized content sources to maximize their benefits.
- By connecting Uniform personalization to your Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can create personalization rules based on your knowledge of your customers. For example, ensure that customers who have only viewed and bought formal menswear before are shown content that highlights ties instead of, for example, bikinis.
- With Uniform, you deliver personalized content from the edge side of leading CDNs, such as Akamai, Cloudflare, Netlify, and Vercel. Consequently, your personalized content loads quickly, avoiding the flickering of slow pages and content in traditional personalization. That’s because Uniform does not depend on third-party scripts, delivering high performance, a better user experience, and happier visitors.
Privacy is always a key consideration for personalization. In the past, the default was to harvest all possible data about visitors. Now brands must comply with legislation like GDPR and CPA, which restricts what data to collect and how to use it. Therefore, you must adopt a privacy-first personalization strategy, whereby data stays in your visitor’s device, and focus more on the visitor’s in-the-moment intent. With Uniform’s signal and intent tools, you can readily adopt such an approach with UTM links and on-site behavior to quickly build personalized content without breaching privacy regulations.
How do you start tactical personalization?
Tactical personalization offers a fast, lightweight way of delivering highly relevant content while giving brands an edge in today's fiercely competitive market. With Uniform, personalization is a fast-to-implement and high-ROI tool that helps marketing and merchandising teams deliver results and conversions without adding staff or processes, or incurring heavy license fees.
For more details, download the whitepaper Understanding and Mastering Personalization of Websites and contact us for a demo.
