All over the world, people are embracing website personalization. Current stats prove that many marketers have embraced it too. To be precise, 98% of marketers believe in web customization – it is the future of digital marketing! The main goal of digital marketers is to attract more clients to buy their products or services. Website personalization offers an excellent opportunity to achieve this, with minimal resources.
Benefits of Website Personalization
Website personalization comes with great benefits. First and foremost, it helps increase the conversion rate from calls to action. One of the most prominent challenges marketers face is creating content which will convert. Personalization makes it easy – by doing it on your website, you can quickly increase your conversion rates. How?
The practice allows you to target a specific audience and give them what they need. By doing so, you get to understand your customers well.
Personalization drastically reduces the amount of follow up emails. These mails are not the best – nearly 50% of your customers won’t read them. By understanding your target audience better, you will only have to send fewer emails. For instance, Netflix doesn’t send its customers numerous emails when new shows come up. Instead, they recommend shows which are similar to the ones they have already watched. This mostly impacts the customer experience and reduces time-wasting.
Another merit of website personalization is geo-location targeting. Through data gathering, they can send emails to the corresponding potentials at the right time, depending on their location. This practice is common, especially for airlines and hotels where they customize their prices and services based on the geo-location of their visitors.
Disadvantages of Web Personalization
While website customization offers excellent benefits, it also comes with downfalls that are worth noting. For instance, did you know that through website customization, you might end up breaching some privacy and compliance regulations?
To properly implement website customization, you need to collect data using cookies. However, some countries, especially in the European Union, have put in place regulatory restrictions on the use of cookies. Such statutory limits present a considerable challenge to clients who wish to provide their services to their best ability.
Scalability is also an issue when it comes to website personalization. It is difficult to consistently provide quality content which meets a specific group of people. To continue providing quality content, you will need to employ several copywriters to provide consistent updates.
Web customization can become a challenge to the end-user. The problems mainly stem from geo-location.
For instance, while Netflix uses website customization to provide excellent services to its customers, this becomes a challenge to customers who wish to watch content from a different country. Netflix uses geo-location blocking to restrict certain content from being shown in a particular country.
The same problem is also evident in airline and hotel booking. When it comes to online booking, one pays higher depending on their location. For instance, an end-user in Sweden will pay more for a hotel room in California as compared to an individual in California. The same also applies to online air ticket booking.
How to Solve Website Personalization Challenges Using Proxies
The good news is that all of these challenges can be solved using proxies. Before we dive into how proxies can help solve these problems, let’s briefly discuss proxies. What are they?
What Is a Proxy?
A Proxy, also known as a proxy server, is an application gateway that connects a local network with an extensive scale network. The server will intercept and relay information between the local network and the internet.
So how do proxies help in solving website personalization challenges?
If you wish to personalize content for customers in European Union countries, use proxies located in the targeted countries. This way, no regulatory entity will notice your breach of the regulatory restrictions.
Proxies work best in bypassing geo-blocking. For instance, if you are located in China and wish to access U.S based content, you only need to use a proxy server and access such content with ease.
For online bookings, you can use proxies to get cheaper hotels or airplane rates. All you need is to buy private proxies and set up the proxies to the local area you wish to book your hotel room or airline ticket. The system of the hotel or airline will detect a local requesting a service. Thus, they will offer local rates that are cheaper than compared to foreign prices.
With almost every trade going online, web personalization has become very common (as an intelligent business tactic). One of the limitations of web personalization is geo-blocking. However, this should never be a challenge anymore – you have a better option – you got proxies!
