What are the pros and cons of personalization in web design

In short, website design personalization is an extension of personalized marketing including marketing strategies and recommendations for each user. Generally, personalization experience is carried out by combining data collection and analysis, automation, and even algorithms. The final purpose is to make customers feel like this website is designed just for them. It might be an effective leverage tool for conversion rate but also might be a major undertaking to design and implement. In this post, we will analyze the merits and demerits of web personalization as follow:

  1. PROS
  • Give users personal experience

Among multiple choices available on the market, this kind of experience will differentiate your website from the crowd and hook a user for the long term. How would the personal experience be? It includes using a customer’s name, making recommendations, suggesting new products or services or even allowing a user to dictate the way a website looks, such as changing a background image or font size.

  • Offer better customer service

When customers highly appreciate your website, it also means that your customer service is good. Web personalization brings a close feeling for your visitors, it’s like you’ve already known them.

  • Create consistency

A personalized website experience creates consistency across devices. Regardless of the devices customers use: mobile, desktop or tablet, the look and feel of the content are still the same. This creates a distinct appeal for users that don’t want to be distracted by having to learn the same thing over and over again.

  1. CONS
  • You Don’t Always Get It Right

When you call customers by a wrong name offer a suggestion that offends their sensibilities, you might hurt their feeling and as the result, you lose them permanently. Working with online data and algorithms can be a pretty tricky business.

  • Get expensive fast

It will charge you a quite expensive cost, which is an undeniable fact. What you have to do is collecting and analyzing data, building profiles and personas, developing a user list and base and maintaining a team. You also need a design team that can actually create and develop these experiences for users across platforms. In a nutshell, that will not be an easy and simple process; it will require your time, effort as well as money.

  • Time-consuming

As I said before, that will be a journey and of course, it takes your time. Just think of how much research goes into the concept of personalization before you even sketch out the first wireframe. You can’t finish it just in one or two days. Even when your website has already launched, you still need to keep up with user wants and preferences. Maintaining a set of working personalization also requires revisions, constant updates and plenty of data storage and management, can’t stop the process.

Conclusion

There are both sides for everything and if you have the plan to go with website personalization, let’s make sure to plan it well and devote a team to perform ongoing maintenance and testing so that experiences remain fresh and engaging for users.

 

Frequently asked questions

What are the pros and cons of personalized marketing?

Pros: messages and offers feel relevant, customers feel recognised and the experience stays consistent across devices. Cons: it costs money and time to collect data and build personas, it needs constant updates, and a wrong name or tone-deaf suggestion can lose a customer.

How does in-store personalization compare with online personalization?

In a store, staff personalise by reading the customer in person, which feels natural but does not scale. Online personalization uses data and rules to reach every visitor at once, but it depends on accurate data and can feel intrusive when it gets things wrong.

What is personalization in a CMS?

It is a CMS feature or plugin that changes page content for each visitor based on data such as location, past visits, purchases or segment. Editors define rules or variants, and the system chooses which version each visitor sees.