Balancing Personalization and Brand Consistency With Drupal

Getting what you have been looking for or even before you realize its need lets you experience the real power of personalization.

Great consumer experiences are what make up a brands' value. However, the problems that marketers face is that very few people show interest in buying complete, off-the-rack, & pre-defined customer journeys. 

Studies also show that consumers do want personalized messages provided it’s done right- i.e, not overly grisly or overly intrusive. 

This might prove challenging for brands in regards to decide on how far to take it and what may go beyond the line, but ultimately brands need to figure this out to deliver a seamless user experience.

The new technologies have also led to the disruption of the traditional paths of purchases. Gone are those days when people used to visit shops! Nowadays, it’s one click and service is provided at their doorstep.

Therefore, it’s critical for enterprises now more than ever to find out ways to stand-out in the crowd by focusing on customer engagement and building a more open and transparent relationship with them.

Personalization is the key factor in delivering engaging and custom experience to the users. Drupal, an open-source platform, can help enterprises in delivering relevant content tailored to their visitors to showcase them their value, convey their message and keep them on their site. The longer they are on the site, the likelier they are to engage in whatever way you need.

What Is Web Personalization? What Are Its Benefits?

Personalization is the practice of presenting web visitors with the relevant content that is customized and unique at the same time to each one of them 

Personalization is the practice of presenting web visitors with the relevant content that is customized and unique at the same time to each one of them as per their likes and dislikes. Enterprises can enforce personalization by gathering the data of their visitors and creating buyers’ persona to know more about their preferences, age, buying nature, and many other things, to deliver a user-centric experience at every stage of buyers’ journey.

B2B companies and online retailers have already realized the importance of personalization as it helps them make product recommendations, send personal messages, discount offers, and many more. Check the benefits mentioned below-

1. Personalized CTA= Increased Activity on Site

CTAs or call-to-actions are one of the finest and interactive ways to entice your visitors and let them take action on your site

CTAs or call-to-actions are one of the finest and interactive ways to entice your visitors and let them take action on your site. A catchy and carefully crafted CTA can encourage your website visitors to take a free trial, read an article on the site, take the survey, and even watch a demo they may otherwise have been least interested in. 

Shopping sites like Myntra and Jabong use soft CTAs through both the products catalog and also the information is displayed alongside engaging visuals.

This prevents people from leaving the site and instead re-engages them with the platform to improve their probability of purchase.

As per research by HubSpot, personalizing CTAs can boost website performance up to 202% better than generic CTAs.

2. More Relevant Content Recommendations

Irrelevant content recommendations on the website can leave any visitor disgruntled and ultimately cause them to leave the website. This can be avoided when visitors are fed with the content, products, or services that interest them and are fresh, concise, and relevant.

This will not only cease them from leaving the website but also reduce the bounce rate or exit rate. A simple way to enhance users’ loyalty and ultimately see an improvement in retention rate.

Google, out and away, is the most apposite example here. The search engine produces accurate data as per users’ browsing history, takes note of their behavior, and uniformly shows content that matches their preferences and priorities.

3. Better Qualified Leads

Leads that are properly taken care of, categorized, and shown relevant content, are more likely to enter your sales funnel

Leads that are properly taken care of, categorized, and shown relevant content, are more likely to enter your sales funnel. There is a higher chance of them buying or subscribing to your products or services than new visitors on your website.

For example, to channelize large enterprise clients speak to its sales representatives, Vyond, a SaaS DIY video maker, compels these enterprise visitors to contact them for custom enterprise pricing by mentioning it clearly on their pricing page alongside personal, business, and professional plans- which visitors can directly buy through its website.

4. Increased User Engagement on the Website

Give your visitors what they demand and you will see them sticking around on your website for a longer time. The noteworthy examples of these are YouTube and Netflix where engagement can be measured through the higher watch time. Users are provided personalized OR recommended content options or like Amazon.com which shows multiple product recommendations under “you may also like section”.

5. Increased Conversions

 B2B companies who have been practicing this approach have seen a significant rise in sign-ups, lead generation, and general conversion

Incorporating web personalization helps businesses enhance their online sales and conversion rates provided they nurture their leads with quality content. B2B companies who have been practicing this approach have seen a significant rise in sign-ups, lead generation, and general conversion.

Integrating web personalization gives enterprises qualified leads in addition to serving up what it's buyers want. 

Taking Forward Web Personalization With Drupal

The significant drop in the face to face interactions makes it apparent that digital experiences have already filled that void and have become the expectation rather than the exception.

The advancement in technology has also revamped the way the content should be personalized

However, it’s on enterprises and businesses to improve and evolve the digital experience of every visitor having unique characteristics and browsing behavior- ultimately putting an impact on their engagement metrics and conversion rates.

The advancement in technology has also revamped the way the content should be personalized. For Drupal users, Acquia Lift has been playing a constructive role in eradicating the notion, one-size-fits-all and thereby enabling marketers to speak directly to individuals for addressing their unique needs. 

Acquia Lift is a marketing solution that enables you to fragment audiences based on their age, interest, and search history, to deliver them personalized and unique experiences across any channel or device.

Optimized for Drupal, it allows enterprises to utilize customer data and customize content distribution to cater to their target audience’s specific wants and needs.

Similarly, the Smart Content module built for Drupal 8 can be incorporated easily within any data source to facilitate enterprises in delivering segmented content via Drupal admin, as per industry, buyer stage, location or other crucial segments.

It ensures the personalization of any anonymous websites in real-time. Marketers can leverage browser conditions, cookies, or third-party APIs to display various content for anonymous and authenticated users. 

In addition to this, Acquia Mautic is a marketing automation tool that enables organizations in multi-channel communications at scale- irrespective of the size of the organization, and at the same time customizes the experience for individual contacts; thereby saving time, eradicating errors and improving efficiency by automating all such cumbersome and repetitive tasks.

It’s modern and highly flexible design provides the team members the freedom to move quickly & adapt easily to changing business needs. And since this is also open, it can be easily customized for each user’s specific needs.

Brands can automate, personalize, and assess the entire customer lifecycle from an open platform and integrate customer experience tools seamlessly

Users, as a result, will witness innovation at a faster pace, increased agility and flexibility, and better integrations. It will also facilitate brands to automate, personalize, and assess the entire customer lifecycle from an open platform that is scalable and hence can seamlessly integrate with the latest, and most groundbreaking customer experience tools.

Features of Acquia Mautic-

1. Multi-channel campaigns

Comprises of an intuitive visual builder that makes it easier to integrate automated campaigns. You can also send emails, text and web messages.

2. Website tracking

It can prove an effective way of knowing your visitors and accordingly creating their buyers’ persona to deliver personalized experiences.

3. Email marketing

Comprises of creative and flexible templates to help marketers deliver and optimize effective emails.

4. Landing pages

Facilitates you to customize individual landing pages in the way you want-tweak content, change design layout, or whatever you like.

5. Dynamic content

Leverage buyers’ persona to deliver a real-time personalized experience on your website and in your emails through relevant and high-quality content to individuals in your audience.

6. Integrations

Native plugins, integrations, and open APIs enable you to connect Mautic to all of your business-critical technology solutions.

Watch this video to further understand about personalization via Acquia Lift-

Modules To Enable Personalization on Your Drupal-powered Website

Drupal modules simplify the task of marketing teams in boosting the level of personalization on their websites. Check how-

Engagement module enables enterprises to attach engagement scores based on the various interactions with website visitors; primarily via rules module or API calls. 

Once this module is enabled, each RedHen Contact in the system is given an auto-calculated engagement score field, whose value is 0 by default until you create some type of engagement scores through the configuration interface and attach cases or examples of those scores to contacts in some way.

This way, you will be able to re-assess the value of a particular type of interaction by changing the score at a future date, and all the past interactions would reflect the new value.

2. Personalization

It adds highly configurable implicit and explicit personalization to Drupal websites based on geolocation and taxonomies

                                        Source: Econsultancy

Though designed for larger content-heavy websites but works effectively for any, this personalization module adds highly configurable implicit and explicit personalization to Drupal websites based on geolocation and taxonomies.

This implies that you can deliver relevant content to your visitors that are aligned as per their interests based on their location and behavior on your site, which further can help you in building buyers’ persona of them. Besides, it comes with a “suggested content” block and numbered listing to indicate developers call the functions of the modules directly to retrieve users suggested content and personalize their experiences.

It is a cloud-based, centralized content distribution and syndication solution that compels customers to publish, reuse, and consolidate content across a network of Drupal websites.

Note about Acquia Lift Support-

Acquia Lift currently extends support to Content Hub 1.x for content personalization. If you wish to do content personalization with Lift, download and install Content Hub 1.x. If you only want to do content syndication, it’s recommended to install 2.x. In case you intend to both content syndication and personalization, use 1.x.

Provides enterprises an easy-to-use dashboard to attract new users, grow traffic, commercialize their content, gain values and insights, and monetize their traffic

All-inclusive content development and monetization platform, Shareaholic encompasses related content recommendations, promoted content, social sharing, following, site monetization apps such as affiliate linking, and social analytics. This module makes it a no-brainer for any website- big or small, to attract new users and grow their traffic, commercialize their content, gain values and insights, and monetize their traffic, through a powerful but easy-to-use dashboard.

This module is actively developed by GitHub and maintained and supported by Shareaholic.

5. Contextly 

Contextly aids publishers in keeping readers busy with reading and by suggesting interesting content recommendation widgets at the end of posts and in sidebars. 

It also provides an elegant way to 

• Add links to the body of stories’
• Choose related posts without links
• Add sidebars into the body of posts.

The service which doesn’t tax your database has a free tier for personal bloggers and paid tiers with extra features, including in-house ads, for publishers of all sizes.

Features of the module-

1. Provides support to all Contextly features, encompassing sidebars, widgets with related links, easy UI to add links to the post without any hassle.
2. Sidebars are added into the Drupal text formats system
3. Configurable position of the Contextly widget on the node page
4. Few selectable Contextly-enabled node types and taxonomy reference fields are sent to the service.

Setka module ensures quick integration with the Setka Editor that facilitates users to create an easy-to-understand editorial design tool 

Setka module ensures quick integration with the Setka Editor that facilitates users to create an easy-to-understand editorial design tool for creating beautiful layouts that attract, engage, and convert. 

This installation process lets Drupal replace text area fields with Setka’s page builder, to further ease and accelerate the designing of editorial content.

Now you can also design highly-impactful layouts and deliver great content experiences with Setka Editor and it’s features-

• Grids

Re-structure your content in a refined way to improve its readability and gain control over every element on your page in just a few seconds with this grids system.

• Interactive design

Show some level of creativity in your designs that obligates users to spend more time on the content and the website. Add animation, anchors or full-width and background images to your layouts on the fly to make your post more engaging.

• Alignment and indents

A couple of clicks and your content’s horizontal and vertical alignment & indents is fixed.

• 100% customizable inline icons library

You can easily upload, edit colors, and adjust your icon library with ease. The icons, when brought in use, automatically adjust to font sizing.

• Post styles

You can specify your post stylings in Setka’s Style Manager. Pick your text formats and fonts, choose the colors and go creating dividers. You can create as many post styles you like - your rest of the site’s look will remain intact.

• Reusable templates and design elements

Create & save post templates to reuse these design elements as “snippets” with just one tap.

• More freedom with typography

There are hundreds of Google fonts to choose from and connect to your Adobe TypeKit or simply upload your custom fonts. 

• Seamless production process

Setka Editor ensures easy designs. That’s why it has made its tool work seamlessly within your editorial, technical, and content building processes. It ensures a hassle-free experience by providing features like- True WYSIWYG, Mobile-friendliness, Team collaboration and rights management, Extra customization through code, and SEO best practices.

Summing up

As per a report by eConsultancy, there are only 32% of members who witnessed that their current CMS is capable of driving personalization, which implies that there are still plenty of companies who are struggling to incorporate personalization in their customers’ journey and are unable to decide on technologies to be used for effectively carrying out this process.

There are also 63% of people who are already irked by the way brands continue to rely on passe’ techniques of exploding them with generic messages repeatedly. 

Simply put, businesses should now adopt new, improved technologies to personalize websites not only to increase leads and conversion but also to content website visitors and earn their loyalty by giving what they want.