Today’s internet users want more than generic landing pages and irrelevant pop-ups. They expect a digital experience tailored to them. In fact, Adobe’s Definitive Guide to Web Personalization reports that over 85% of website visitors expect personalization as part of their online experience. By leveraging audience data, you can serve content and experiences that feel strikingly relevant.
Website personalization begins with data collection. You need to understand your audience, their needs, and—most importantly—what motivates them to make decisions. Understanding why someone arrives at your website and what information they’re searching for can help you deliver content that’s most relevant to them.
Gathering Information
The simplest method is to survey your audience and use their responses to personalize their experience. Questions like “What brings you to our website today?” or “Are you a prospective student or a high school guidance counselor?” ” help uncover your visitors’ intentions and motivations. A more advanced approach involves using demographics and psychographics to segment your audience. Explore Carnegie Darts and Motivators.
Implementing Website Personalization
There are several ways to implement website personalization. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll focus on the tool I know best: Carnegie Clarity™. Clarity deploys personalized interactions, such as pop-ups, for website visitors. Each part of a Clarity interaction can be customized using dynamic variables—essentially data points you know about your audience. The magic happens when you combine this powerful tool with your audience’s motivations.
Using Segmentation To Customize Your Website
1. Custom Call-To-Actions
A CTA is a vital component of a landing page but having too many or one that’s too broad can be a detriment toward actually getting users to take an action. As we said, different users come to your website for different things and should be called to take different actions. Custom pop-ups that prompt juniors to schedule a tour and seniors to fill out an application are a small but simple way to get more visitors to click.
2. Dynamic Homepages
The homepage is often a visitor’s first stop and provides the direction of where they’ll go next on your website. Use segmentation to make sure the user is delivered information that’s relevant to them such as directing them toward a preferred major or how to request more information.
3. Personalize Key Pages
Your website probably has a lot of pages, but some of them, like admissions, are more action-oriented than others. Getting users to engage the way you want them to on these pages is critical. By delivering personalized, relevant information, you can significantly increase the odds of users taking the desired actions.
Any method of personalizing your website is better than not personalizing it at all. But if you want to maximize ROI, start personalizing by motivation. Understand your prospective students—are they academically driven, seeking a rigorous curriculum, or social butterflies eager to participate in every extracurricular activity? Once you know their motivations, speak directly to them and provide the content they’re looking for.
If you need help getting started, Carnegie’s proprietary audience segmentation and targeting tools are ready to transform your enrollment strategy. Reach out and start a conversation to learn more.