How website personalization with headless CMS turns visitors into loyal customers

Highlights

You’ll explore the role of a headless CMS in personalization:

• Scalable personalization: A headless CMS delivers individualized experiences without sacrificing speed or performance
• Dynamic content delivery: A headless architecture provides automated, real-time updates based on customer data, preferences and behaviors
• Integrates with various platforms: Connect with CRMs, analytics and CDPs for valuable customer insights and informed strategies
• Enhanced localization: Simplify translation and localization for global audiences

As more customers shop online, they miss the personal interactions with sales representatives in physical stores. When personal touches get lost, so do your customers. Why?

Modern digital customers expect a personalized experience even when merely browsing products or services online. 

That’s where website personalization comes in. Nailing your website personalization strategy helps you advance customers in their journey. According to Salesforce, 84% of companies that treat customers as individuals rather than numbers convert more prospects into loyal and paying customers

Serving up the right content helps you achieve this with less effort and time spent. Let’s find out more about how a headless CMS helps you achieve personalization. But first, what’s website personalization?

What is website personalization?

Website personalization is the process of delivering customized experiences to your website visitors. Instead of offering the same content to everyone, you analyze customer behavior, preferences and demographic data to recommend products, services or content that customers will find worthwhile and interesting. 

Showing generic content to every customer who visits your website is the perfect way to turn them away. However, individualized experiences have a lasting impact, encouraging customers to return for more personalized content and experience.

Web personalization enhances the customer experience by making your customers feel extra special. It includes:

• Tailored CTAs
• Custom landing pages
• Targeted images and video
• Personalized landing pages
• Location-specific offers and services
• Real-time chat support with personalized responses
• Behavior-triggered email or notification campaigns 

71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies, and 76% get frustrated when they receive generic messages instead. Every customer expects personalized interactions, so your business needs to transition to a headless CMS like Contentstack.

Benefits of website personalization

Here’s why you need to personalize experiences on your website:

Generates more qualified leads

Web personalization leads to a higher conversion of qualified prospects because it delivers experiences that meet the specific requirements of each user. You can utilize targeted content, customizable landing pages and personalized messages to increase visitor engagement. The result? Fewer people leave the website, and more customers make purchases.

Customers get helpful sales advice through personalized call-to-action buttons. These buttons lead them to information that matches their current buying stage. AI-driven analytics identifies visitors who are likely to make a purchase. It shows them content or offers that match their interests. This helps build long-term relationships with customers. It turns random viewers into potential buyers who can become loyal customers.

Accurate product recommendations

AI- and machine learning-based recommendation engines deliver targeted and relevant product recommendations. An e-commerce site checks out your browsing and purchase history. If you've just bought a coat, it might suggest pairing it with winter boots. This type of personalized shopping experience makes things easier for you while also increasing sales for the company.

Customized landing pages

Encouraging your prospects to open marketing emails, select your brand from a list of organic search results or click on your Google Ads is a great task to win. The success lies in routing your prospects to the landing pages. Once they’re there, you can nurture them into potential leads and convert them into paying customers. At this point, providing relevant content on the landing pages separates you from competitors. 

Enter web personalization. By analyzing your customer data, you can create customized landing pages. You can also show products and services that interest each customer the most.

Better-performing CTAs

Personalized calls to action (CTAs) are better than generic ones. They convert 202% better than generic or non-personalized CTAs. Why? Personalized CTAs address the customer’s specific needs and preferences. Tailoring the message drives higher conversions and engagement. 

Shorter sales cycle

Ask any sales team member and they’ll tell you what they hate and love most. While they love to close more deals quickly, they dislike having to validate leads or make calls to unqualified ones. Website personalization helps you segment customers into qualified and unqualified leads. It also significantly reduces the number of follow-up emails required to make a sale. 

Increases customer loyalty and lifetime value

When businesses personalize their experiences, customers are more likely to convert, driven by increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Your customized approaches build customer trust in your brand. Personalized experiences elevate customer lifetime value because they encourage customers to return to your products and services.

Improves SEO

When you deliver content that aligns with customer interests, your website visitors tend to stay longer. This enhances SEO performance and reduces the bounce rate. Changing customer data into valuable recommendations enables retail sites to personalize product suggestions based on items viewed. Website visitors stay on the page longer, leading them to explore more pages. 

Challenges of website personalization

Personalization is tricky, and you might face these challenges that prevent you from getting things done: 

Data challenges

All personalization efforts rely on quality data. Before collecting and using customer data, ensure compliance with relevant data privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA. Achieving compliance becomes more difficult because incomplete data and poor data hygiene practices complicate the process further.

Segmenting challenges

Your marketing campaigns can succeed or fail depending on how you segment your audience. For instance, creating too many segments can complicate your workflow, while insufficient segmentation prevents you from addressing customer needs.

Scaling challenges

Your strategies may become challenging to implement as your customer base expands. Expanding customer base creates a major scalability issue since you must provide individualized experiences to large customer bases without compromising performance and speed.

How a headless CMS overcomes website personalization challenges

Implementing a headless CMS like Contentstack makes your system scalable and flexible. The headless architecture decouples the presentation layer from the content repository layer. Using headless features, you execute personalized marketing strategies at scale.

Simplifies dynamic content delivery

Content personalization functions because the front end separates from the back end, enabling tailored content delivery based on individual preferences, location and historical behavior data. The e-commerce site delivers personalized product suggestions to returning customers who have previously made purchases, and new customers receive welcome messages with discounts.

Ensures real-time updates

A headless CMS provides a real-time personalized user experience. As a headless CMS adapts website content based on user session data, you create custom browsing experiences. For instance, customers who review a product category will receive customized suggestions. The headless CMS dynamically modifies homepage content to meet their needs. 

Drives automation for scale

Personalizing every engagement for a large number of visitors is a complex task. But automation optimizes these interactions by utilizing predictive analytics and dynamic, automated landing pages. The built-in AI functionality of headless CMS platforms uses customer data to generate specific product recommendations, such as complementary product suggestions.

Integrates with other tools for enhanced insights

A headless CMS enables integration with CRMs, analytics tools and CDPs, such as Lytics, to generate highly insightful data. Such information provides extensive customer knowledge, revealing customer preferences. Using customer data, you create personalized marketing solutions. These solutions enhance customer journeys and enable business leaders to make informed decisions.

Helps in localization

Global users benefit from headless CMS capabilities because they enable the localization and translation of content, generating targeted information for each end-user. With this capability, the website generates personalized travel suggestions for users in both English and French, thereby strengthening customer engagement measures.

Case study: How Contentstack helped Leesa achieve their personalization goals

Leesa transitioned to Contentstack's headless CMS system as a solution to the problems it encountered with Shopify. The website's performance improved as load times dropped from six seconds to below one second; users received a better experience, and the company witnessed enhanced SEO results. The deployment process took only half the time it used to, while organic user traffic increased 30 times. Leesa achieved a complete website redesign in five months. The content management team at Leesa now operates efficiently, allowing developers to spend extra time developing innovations. 

After using Contentstack, Richard Bilton, Director of Technology at Leesa, said:

“Headless has brought us into the future. A content editor can update content in a few seconds if there is a typo or an issue. We can release features in two weeks instead of a month, with half the number of developers. When we started working together, I originally asked Contentstack to reduce our onload time from six seconds down to two. Today, it’s less than one.”

Read the complete case study here.

Checklist for getting started with headless CMS personalization

Define your personalization goals

Clearly define your personalization goals. Your goals can be improving customer engagement, increasing conversion rates and strengthening customer retention.

Know your audience

Segment your audience by age, interests and behaviors. Create detailed profiles to gain a deeper understanding of their needs.

Select the right headless CMS

Choosing a headless CMS represents the optimal solution because it enables personalization, integrates seamlessly with existing personalization tools and makes your system flexible to meet future requirements.

Integrate with analytics

Use analytics to gather insights: Integrate your CMS with analytics tools to monitor customer actions and receive insights that assess the performance of your personalization strategies. 

Build a flexible content model

Create a structured content model that allows you to reuse and personalize content for different audience groups.

Test and optimize

Perform A/B tests to know your most effective strategies. Use the testing results to optimize your personalization strategies.

Ensure compliance

Comply with GDPR and CCPA to protect your customer data from cyber criminals and build trust.

Train your team

Conduct training sessions to help your team use the new headless CMS and teach them how to execute personalization strategies using a headless CMS. 

Review and improve

Track performance, review results and make adjustments to enhance customer experiences and achieve your goals.

FAQs

What is personalization on a website?

A website personalization tailors content, layout and customer experience to meet specific customer preferences, behaviors and requirements. Website personalization uses customer data like behaviors, demographic information or historical interactions to develop tailored interactions.

What are the four D's of personalization?

The 4 D's of personalization are: Data, Decisioning, Delivery and Design.

• Data: Collecting and managing customer information
• Decision-making: Analyzing data to produce actionable insights
• Delivery: A strategic delivery method that presents specific content through targeted channels at the right time
• Design: Creating intuitive and appealing visuals that support personalization goals

What are the five promises of personalization?

The five promises of personalization are relevance, consistency, efficiency, engagement and trust. 

What are personalization examples?

Website personalization examples include recommending products based on a user's browsing history. 

Learn more

People who purchase from your company expect individual attention throughout their entire customer journey, which begins with their first Google search. Digital customer success now depends on website personalization, as it serves as an essential factor in providing exceptional digital interactions that exceed customer expectations. With a headless CMS, you drive personalized content, improve user engagement and deliver results that scale effortlessly. If you’re ready to get started with website personalization, there’s no better starting point than a headless CMS. Talk to us to know how Contentstack delivers personalization.