Personalisation is a great way to target your audience and tailor your website to their needs. The travel industry in particular is a perfect example of how to use data to improve overall customer service.
Why do you need personalisation?
For the best chance of success, websites must be engaging and dynamic, as well as playing a part in creating the company's overall online presence.
Personalisation uses the priceless information you gather about customers, both new and returning, to tailor content, information and offers. This gives visitors the information they're likely to be looking for quickly and easily, reducing the amount of searching required.
In the travel industry especially, competition is so fierce that, if companies don't deliver a perfect customer experience, they risk losing out to competitors. Monitoring users and collating data is a priceless tool for marketers, as this information can then be used to increase sales through a more personalised website for each customer.
A personalised experience online, where the site adapts to the visitor, can secure that you actually can bring your segmentation strategy online, which means that you can communicate to each target audience in a unique way.
Award winning travel company Co-operative Travel is a great example of a company utilising personalisation techniques to deliver a superior customer experience. The personalisation features used by Co-operative Travel enable customers to seamlessly glide through to booking pages, providing an easy to use and integrated site, increasing conversion rates, and reducing the number of customers dropping off after an initial search.
In 2011, since the joint venture switchover, Co-operative Travel has seen a 95% increase in visitors and 217% increase in revenue, demonstrating just how much personalisation can help your business increase sales.
Think context
Consider how you contextualise the experience for the visitor. One of the best ways to start is using geography, or localisation. Using a visitor's IP address to determine location, companies can gear content on the site, including offers and promotions.
For example, if a customer logs on from Bristol to book a flight or holiday to Tenerife the airline can, via IP, identify where the visitor is located and automatically suggest relevant holidays from Bristol Airport.
A second step for contextualising the visitor experience is to use external factors, such as the most popular day and time when people search for holidays, for example, more people search for holidays on Mondays as they suffer Monday blues after the weekend.
Based on search terms entered by a customer too, the presentation of offers can be tailored so that if a customer searches for beach holidays the site can automatically display all offers for travel destinations with hot weather. It is all about serving the appropriate content in the right context to help your visitor!
Return on investment
To effectively measure the return of your personalisation strategy, you need to determine tangible business value metrics, identify and record real-time or long-term shifts in customer behaviour, and build teams capable of monitoring the results.
It's also important for strategies to remain dynamic in order to respond rapidly to any information or customer insights you obtain and use them to evolve your online content.
The online landscape is constantly changing, so it's important to consider what the future holds for online marketing, and remember that consumers will be the driving force for change.
Maria Wasing is VP of Marketing Europe at EPiServer and a guest blogger on Econsultancy.
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