Every day, a whopping average of 92,000+ articles are published. Although it may be difficult to wrap your mind around this figure, this is the competition today’s media and publishing Industry is facing. And while you are reading this article, there are so many distractions like emails, notifications etc. struggling to get your attention. With the content opportunities being so vast, it’s time for this industry to revisit their tactics and lock in hyper-personalised experiences to engage readers.
Amidst this truckload of content, what am I offering you? Relevant information? Easy access? Content on your preferred channel? At the right time? Well, this is what personalization is all about. And this is what captures my attention quickly, compared to others.
Personalization in Publishing: A necessity, not an option!
Content is created at a rapid pace, consumed at an even higher speed and it’s not easy to keep up with the ever evolving consumer behaviour.
Are you still wondering whether to use print, website, mobile app, video or audio channels? The only choice is choosing all of these and packaging content in a way that resonates with an individual customer needs. And these factors have forced this industry to adapt to digital transformation. That too quickly. You ought to have a holistic approach towards personalization that can truly digitally transform your business rather than looking at it as an extra tack onto your business.
Before we dive into what really personalization brings to the table, it’s important to understand why this industry needs personalization at all. Well, the 5 points below will give you a clear picture of personalization being a necessity and not an option.
- Surviving and surpassing competition in a digital world that remains saturated with content
- Retaining existing users by giving them a reason to stick to your brand even in the presence of innumerable alternatives
- Acquiring new users by offering something that makes you stand out in the crowd
- Determining users’ most preferred channel as they are active across multiple channels
- Turning your readers into subscribers who drive revenue growth
You are likely to get millions of readers on your site who will scroll through a few articles and then go away. But the real meat lies in capturing the attention of your user in the first few seconds that would make your users subscribe. There’s no better way than personalization to do this.
You can read about: Mobile App Personalization: 10 Ways to Convert and Retain App Users at Scale
The Personalization gateway
Now that we are convinced about the need for personalization, we can move on to know what exactly personalization brings to the table. There’s a common theme in all the pointers covered above – ‘customer centric’ approach. Your customer should be at the centre of everything you do and the personalized experience should be unique at every stage of the customer journey.
Related: Smartech Personalization: Revealing the 15-Minute Integration Secret
Once you begin your personalization journey, you will stop by many landmarks in terms of:
- Providing easy and quick access to relevant content
- Driving deeper and meaningful engagement
- Increased user retention
- Reduced bounce rates
- Increased CTR’s
- Increased Ad Revenues
And you finally get to your destination where you turn flyby users into subscribers and you then enjoy the wallet share of a loyal set of customers.
Now, let’s talk numbers. Delivering personalized experience offers you 8-13% increase in conversions and revenue, and around 30-60% increase in CTR.
Checkout: Smartech’s Omni-channel Personalization
Personalization strategies picked from the best
While these numbers above look impressive, it’s important to know how one can get there.
We have seen this industry evolve over the years to embrace the changes in the digital and consumer behaviour landscape. We’ve observed brands become much more accepting towards the whole concept of personalization.
We live in times where opportunities are plenty and so are challenges. But these challenges also give publishers a chance to get creative with the kind of content and the channel through which they offer it to their readers.
We’ve picked some of the best personalization strategies that big brands across the globe are employing.
- Website Personalization
You now have all the tools you need to offer a unique experience to every visitor, and this is what they expect. With a recommendation engine you can easily predict what your user is looking for. This allows you to deliver real-time, personalized experience on an optimised website.
That’s not it. Based on the browsing and purchase history captured by the engine, you can be rest assured that the right content and recommendations will be shown to your users at the right time.
There’s scope for dynamic content where recommendations are specially curated for every visitor, based on his interests, demographics, location and many other parameters.
For instance, BBC has a unique homepage for every user. Their homepage shows videos, channels and articles based on the preference of the user. A user can add topics that interest him, in his account. Users can also set their location and demographics for weather and other personalized content.
Eventhe publishing giant, New York Times, uses the reader’s past behaviour to make relevant recommendations. They have a link that leads the user to a page with extensive content.
- Email Automation
Emails should be a preferred channel to reach customers because of the simple reason that publishers want to drive traffic on their website and emails are a way of leading your readers directly to your website and further engaging them.
Smartech’s Email Automation allows you to effortlessly automate the delivery of highly personalized email content relevant to the different customer segments and does give you higher open and click rates.
Penguin is one of the companies that has excelled email marketing. They keep it simple yet engaging and fun. They try to create a bookshop experience through their emails. Based on subscribers reading habits and preferred genres, they offer relevant recommendations.
- Behavioral Segmentation
Hang on. There’s more. Leveraging the huge amounts of customer data, brands create unique user profiles and serve content as per their liking. These tailored messages and campaigns that are unique to every customer, depends upon the type of articles the customer usually reads, customer loyalty which depends upon repeat subscriptions by users, and also predicting what the customer is most likely to read next. With all this is place, brands are most likely to drive customer engagement at higher scales.
Business Insider builds a user profile based on previous interaction across various platforms – This is their winning strategy that is used to show personalized content across different channels for better engagement.
Buzzfeed segment readers and offer publications based on specific brands. In addition to this, they also ace their email and website personalization strategies. They offer a ‘More like this’ – section of suggested content based on previous content consumption.
Well, after you have put these strategies to use, you can dive deeper into your automation platform to gain insights into the engagement levels, revenue and ROI and based on that you can decide what works and what does not work for you. You can always learn from your results and build on your best personalization tactic to keep your users engaged at every stage of their journey.
Final Thoughts
These are some strategies that set these players apart from the rest of the market. And the key to unlocking these strategies is data. The marketing data you feed to your AI engine is what differentiates a good strategy from an ineffective one. By analysing and capturing recommendations on the basis of previous articles read, preferred channel to consume content, the right genre, right category and many more parameters and making it available on a single platform is what will make personalization create value for your readers and keep them coming back to you for the great experience that only you can offer them.
To know more about Netcore Smartech’s Omni-channel Personalization, you can Schedule a Demo with us today!
