Personalization Is On A Rise And Drupal Shall Help

Businesses are struggling to implement effective strategies to increase their user engagement. Despite acknowledging the value of the personalized content you are unable to generate the due value from it.  

To keep your content relevant to your end user, it is important to identify your audience and connect with them in a way they want you to. Apart from monitoring metrics and funnels, you should be understanding factors which affect their behavior. 

A study from the University of Texas tells us that the advent of customizable technologies is what keeps the users glued to a website. Not only it fulfills the psychological needs of the user by creating the illusion of ‘control’, it gives them a greater authority over what is shown to them. 

Web technologies like Drupal are intricate and they can get the job done your advanced needs, productively. Dealing with the general visitor connection requires not just complex apparatuses but rather a protected and stable CMS as well.

Personalization is...“The automatic tailoring of websites and messages to the individuals viewing them so that we can feel that somewhere there’s a piece of software that loves us for who we are.” 
-David Weinberger (Technologist)

The Science Behind Personalization

With regular advertisements playing at monotonous intervals, the consumer yearns for something more. Something that satiates their needs materialistically as well as psychologically.  And that’s exactly where personalization comes in.

Desire For Control    

The above study from University of Texas tells us that our choices and preferences stem from 
1. The desire to control 
2. The excess information

Even though the two factors remain independent of each other, today, when the technology is accessible and overloaded with information, people want a greater sense of control.  The psychological reasoning behind this desire stems all the way back to our innate desire for control. The consumer wants to control and engage with the experiences on a personal note . 

The Power of Choice

Various books and studies have shown how increased alternatives play an important role in determining the relevance of our choice. As a marketer, if you find a way to provide your consumer with alternatives, personally relevant choices, it would add a sense of greater control to their minds. 

When you are able to personalize your website, products, forms and pages, emails and calls-to-action (CTAs) it increases the engagement with the user. 

And all of this truly works when your consumer knows that the process is in progress. Which means to satisfy the collective desire for control, it is important that your end user knows that personalization is actually happening. 

Drupal Enhancing Your Web Personalization

‘It all starts with the data and your technology’

Only when you know what your user/visitor wants, can you serve them better. And it is the modules that help you identify the interests and preferences.

Improving Customer Personalization 

As you build and grow your user-base with time, Drupal’s dynamic caching adds to its ability to leverage javascript and PHP libraries creating an optimally personalized data-driven experience. 

To improve the level of personalization, your CMS must support and encourage structured content. Separate the presentation and content, to bring out the personalization.

You can use the Five Star Recommender (available only on Drupal 7), or Browsing history Recommender (D7) and Commerce Recommender (D7) which make content recommendations based on their profile, browsing history, and visitor's past behavior towards a certain category of content.

Its other modules like Personalize (D7) and Personalization (D7) provide a suite of extendable plugins and APIs to personalize your content. They work as efficiently for a unique visitor as for any authenticated user. And as effectively for any content laden site as for static website.  

Among all these, it is Acquia Lift Connector (Available for both Drupal 7 and 8) which works uniquely and merges content and customer data into one tool, to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels and devices. With the ability to target audiences in real-time, you can scale up your web personalization efforts in order to drive conversions and your bottom-line.

What Does Acquia Lift Do?

• Works on any platform
• Designed for marketers to be fast and easy
• Unifies unknown and known user profiles
• Utilizes existing content for A/B testing and personalization 

Another reason your customer prefers personalized experiences is that it helps reduce the unnecessary information overload. But it’s not a substitute for a content-rich website. According to Hubspot, personalized content brings 42% more results, while Kissmetric estimates the number to be around 48%. 

Personalization is the next phase of the web. Transforming the customer behavior than any other marketing technique. 

While increasing conversions remain the top priority for businesses, customer retention is what you should shoot for. A survey by Evergage (2015) tells us, increasing visitor engagement remains a top priority across online businesses followed by customer experience.

Often addressed as “Decoupled”, Drupal’s ability to work in synergy with different front-end frameworks like Ember.js, Angular JS, and Backbone so your front-end developers, too, can get creative with presentation and delivery of the product.

Another problem which comes with personalization is, administrators and consumers, don’t always speak the same language. To eliminate language barriers, the user and website admins are provided with their language of choice.

Every part of the interface can be translated and customized as per their region and device to enhance the level of personalization.

As Tom Erickson, the former CEO of Acquia says “The next generation of digital experiences is all about personalization, contextualization”, and Drupal 8 is leading the change by setting the new standards of an optimal user experience with its object-oriented API based architecture.

Conclusion

When the trends are changing at the speed of a blink, organizations and businesses need to mold themselves according to their customers.With web personalization, you can increase the engagement and offer a consistent and appealing user experience, which eases the conversion process. Today, that’s the very least your visitors will expect. 

We offer personalization where we learn about visitor's preferences and interests, based on the insights, use machine-learning as well as rule-based learning to automate the delivery of personalized content.Drop a mail at [email protected] and let us know how we can assist you.