Personalized Landing Pages: The Future of Marketing

The marketing world is always in flux. Companies are constantly searching for ways to engage with their audience and get more attention for their content.

Personalized content has been a major element of social media feeds for years now but bringing personalization onto our own landing pages and microsites has been a complicated endeavor. But it's a worthwhile endeavor because personalized landing pages have been shown to be highly effective at increasing the interest level of potential customers.

Because of this, personalization is something a lot of marketing teams are excited about, and for good reason. Personalization is the future of marketing, not just because it's an effective way to convert visitors but also because it is focused on delivering better user experiences for website and landing page visitors.

The point of personalized landing pages is to make sure the marketing message resonates with a potential customer rather than just delivering any old message to any old visitor via a static landing page.

It is about delivering the right content to the right user on the right device at the right time.

This can be a powerful way to increase your conversion rates with your target audiences and generate more qualified leads for your company.

With all the hype around personalized landing pages, you'd think every company would be doing personalized landing pages all the time everywhere. They might if it were a simple process. But unfortunately, the technology to make building personalized landing pages easy has been notoriously difficult.

Many companies are able to do it well with their personalized ad campaigns on social media with the aid of powerful algorithms and access to large piles of data. But on landing pages or microsites, things are often much more complicated.

Let's dig into personalized landing pages and hopefully demystify the concept and help you get a better understanding of what personalization can look like for your landing pages.

How do you start the process of creating a personalized landing page? What are the things you should consider when you create personalized landing pages? What are your options and best practices for personalized landing pages? These are the questions we'll be answering in this article.

What are personalized landing pages and how do they work?

Personalized landing pages are a growing concept and will soon become an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, but it can often be a difficult process. Simply put personalized landing pages require a thoughtful approach on how you want to display different landing pages to your target audience.

Displaying personalized landing pages and microsites is a process that starts with data. You need to figure out who your target audience is and what they want in order for them to have the experience you desire with content that will really resonate with them.

Creating personalized landing pages is a powerful way to build better experiences for your visitors and increase conversions with visitors to your site and generate more leads.

It all starts by understanding what personalized landing pages can look like when integrated into the marketing strategy of a company's website or microsite, knowing how it works best in different mediums, and identifying options that work well together.

In many ways personalizing a landing page can be a great way to practice landing page optimization.

There are many different ways you can personalize landing pages.

You can explore using the following data: audience segmentation, geo location, behavior-based targeting, device detection/fingerprinting (device ID), real-time data feeds such as weather alerts and live sports updates (data feeds), and customizing content to the visitor's specific profile based on the relevant demographics on the visitor.

You can also take information from relevant ads and use data from your personalized advertising campaigns to create dynamic landing pages. Consider the traffic source like google search or social media even referring websites or a specific marketing campaign.

You'll need to collect data to create personalized landing pages.

There's the easy data that many marketers are used to receiving from their google analytics like new versus returning, geography, device type, etc. This data is fairly straightforward.

But many marketers want to use more specific data as it relates to their visitors' desires and opinions. This is the data many marketers struggle with. From a high overview, there are 4 categories of user data. Zero-party, 1st-party, 2nd-party, and 3rd-party.

Zero-party and 1st party data are data you've collected directly from your visitors. Zero-party being data they have willingly given you via surveys, quizzes, and other direct response interactions with your brand and 1st party data like CRM data, email marketing data, and their past behavior with your brand, to name a few.

You can also use data from other sources both second party and third party data feeds to create a personalized experience. The new tools available through data feeds offer some interesting opportunities but there are also concerns over privacy and potential misuse by marketers.

The first step in creating a personalized landing page is understanding what personalization can look like when integrated into a marketing strategy of a company’s website or microsite, knowing how it works best in different mediums, identifying options that work well together, and knowing what data you have access to.

Understanding the challenges to creating personalized landing pages.

One challenge with personalization has been convincing customers they want to take part in this type of interaction - but supporters of personalized content say that it’s just a matter of time before customers ask for these types of experiences. In many cases they already are.

There are also concerns over privacy and potential misuse by marketers. Marketers need to be cognizant about how they use the data they have access to in order not to seem intrusive or cause any issues with customer trust, which can lead to negative consequences such as decreased conversions and churned customers.

The last challenge is getting the technical side up and running on your site - there's plenty of great tools but you'll want them configured correctly so you're using best practices for personalization when building a landing page or microsite.

Ultimately personalization is both a development challenge and a content challenge. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be beneficial as you develop a personalized landing page.

What does a successful personalized landing page look like?

When we think about effective marketing strategies, personalization is a no-brainer. It's the future of marketing and it doesn't have to be difficult or complicated, especially when you aim to be more subtle when personalizing your landing pages and microsites.

Personalized experiences are only successful if they're achieving business goals - so let’s discuss what some of these might look like in different types of industries. For example, an educational institution may want visitors to sign up for class offerings while an e-commerce website will want visitors to make purchases.

A great place to start building personalized landing pages is by using the basic data available and then applying simple logic.

Perhaps the educational landing pages can find a good starting point by displaying imagery from the geographic location of a visitor on their landing page.

Someone from California? Have the images display the Malibu coastline, San Fransico Bridge, and Santa Monica Pier. H

as the potential student come back to the landing page again? Display different dynamic content variations with a slightly different Call To Action (CTA).

These subtle ways to utilize personalized landing pages can be just as powerful as using zero-party data.

However, perhaps the e-commerce website has had visitors take a few quizzes and surveys about their favorite colors, fashion styles, as well as their body shape and size dimensions. They can now use that data to personalize the products on display to their authenticated visitors and drive higher conversion rates among their buyer personas and create happier customers throughout the sales funnel.

Teams that use readily available data can start to build personalized landing pages faster than those that wait until they have collected large amounts of zero-party and 1st party data.

Ultimately figuring out how to engage your traffic and invite them to provide their data with your brand will help you build personalized landing pages that are very targeted and engaging and keep people interested in your messaging.

What are the technical requirements for personalization?

This is where a lot of marketing teams will struggle. Implementing personalization technology does require technical expertise and publishing tools that are properly integrated with your data and personalization logic. You'll need to manage not only the front-end experience and content but also a complex array of technical tools, APIs, and server-side logic into your marketing stack.

Some may opt for all-in-one platforms that promise to do it all for you. These tools often have a lot of features already built-in and have created a lot of the necessary development to make launching personalized landing pages easier to achieve, but these tools have also made a lot of decisions for their users.

They may not be very flexible and may have limitations and complexities that cause them to be frustrating over the long term.

The technical debt of using these all-in-one suites may make them very expensive over the long term and can make staying ahead of the curve and implementing new and creative ways of personalization difficult to impossible.

Instead of becoming reliant on one single platform we recommend creating a team of both content and development experts to help you personalize your experiences fast. There are plenty of smaller dedicated tools and microservices that can be glued together to form a very flexible and resilient system for creating personalization.

This is exactly what we have built with our W-Studio. It is a powerful tool that is extremely flexible and adaptable. Our internal service team helps our customers develop their own customized stack for building personalized landing pages and microsites that have no limitations. WebriQ Studio handles all the personalization at the network edge for faster performance and a more stable experience.

A powerful tool for personalized landing pages.

The key to successful personalization is understanding your data and the technical requirements for how you want it to be displayed. It is important to be strategic and plan out your personalization but also be willing to adapt and get creative with your personalized experiences.

Marketing teams that are interested in using personalized landing pages should start with the basic data they have readily available on their customers, keeping it simple in the beginning can be a great way to develop early successes. What matters most is having an idea or plan for how personalized customer experiences will affect business outcomes.

Some marketers may opt for all-in-one platforms that promise to do it all for them - these tools often come with substantial technical debt and they may seem like a great idea up front but they can become very expensive if you decide to migrate away from them later.

Instead, we recommend creating a team including both content experts as well as those with technical expertise that are able to work together seamlessly.

There are many smaller dedicated tools or microservices available that can be glued together in a way that suits your needs - making it easier than ever before to create personalized experiences without limitations from start to finish. WebriQ Studio is a great way to get started today.