Piece #7: Personalization

Meeting customers where they are

Jun 05, 2020

Hello everyone,

Let me just say that I haven't fallen into a time hole. I know it's Friday, and I know that this newsletter should've been published, like, yesterday. Literally.

My apologies for this week's delay 🙏

Now that the new piece is here, let's dive right into it.

I'm not sure if you could tell from my previous writings, but brand messaging is one of my favorite things to do.

So, recently I’ve got involved in a pro-bono naming project for a UK-based SaaS company. I won’t go into details, but here’s the challenge.

The new company name + key messages need to be appealing to both audience groups. One group includes HR managers, chief people officers, and operational staff in large corporations. The other group includes individuals, employees, people whose problem is this software going to solve.

It’s not impossible. But it’s hard.

Not the naming itself (although that’s not a breeze either), but conveying clear messages that will simultaneously explain benefits and values to both audiences without overcomplicating it.

Theoretically, it can be done. But..hmm..it would be a messy, overcrowded value proposition if you ask me.

The possible solution is to build separate pages and flows for corporate folks and separate ones for individual users (we haven’t got to this point yet, so I’m not sure whether founders are going to accept my suggestion).

This solution is nothing other than a way to personalize the digital experience.

Personalization means writing with a single user/customer in mind, making the copy instantly understandable and relatable to them, and using just the right words to evoke just the right emotions and just the right engagement on every step of the user's journey.

[If you haven’t read previous Content Puzzle pieces about brand positioning, audience personas, and journey maps, now would be a good time. I’ll wait right here]

Personalization is a technique of meeting users and customers where they are, providing the information they need at that point, showing them options they’d benefit from at that stage, and helping them understand what’s going on.

Let's look at it this way.

Imagine you work in a store that sells hand-made shoes. It's a high-end brand that offers tailored shoes. You've been working there for several years now, and you have a lot of regular customers who are happy to return whenever they get in need of a new pair of shoes.

Every time a loyal customer comes in, you already know them, you know their taste, their shoe size, you know their name, and you even know bits about their family because this person has been buying shoes for some special family events over the years. So, you can instantly offer them the best fits, new models, and accompanying accessories.

Now, every time someone new enters the door, you ask about their preferences, needs, style, occasion, and you learn about their taste. The more you know, the better shoe models you can show. Eventually, you'll find just the perfect shoes for them.

That’s in-real-life personalization.

The same is happening online.

If you think in terms of digital marketing, personalization expands to many other things: social media feeds, targeted ads, people-also-viewed items, you-might-also-like offers, retargeted ads, cart-abandonment emails, and so much more.

Here, we'll just focus on personalization in the realm of writing for digital products.

Content segmentation

When you've done your research, created audience personas, and outlined user journeys, it will be so much easier for you to know what to say, at what time, and in what format.

You'll know how to write:

Informative website pages
Detailed product descriptions
Instructional guides for first-time users
Script for a demo video
Script for an explainer video
Tutorials for advanced users
Special reports for long-term members
Onboarding materials for new members
Scripts for members-only courses
Help documents for different questions
Educational blog posts
Different blog series
Outlines for old vs. new features
Step-by-step guides for early adopters
Changelogs for early adopters
Separate landing pages for separate audience groups
…

Research is the foundation of everything. You'll get all the data you need regarding users' habits, behaviors, intentions, struggles, expectations, obstacles, and preferences.

With all that data in hand, content you create will become intentional, purposeful, relevant, relatable, and engaging for every user. And you'll avoid the information overload and content overwhelm.

Personalized onboarding

Every time someone visits your website for the first time and decides to start a free trial of your app, tool, or software, their product journey begins.

When people start using your product, there's no need to throw an all-you-need-to-know 100-page eBook right at them. Go step by step. Provide enough information to help them transition smoothly to the next stage. Give people time to adjust, familiarize, and get comfortable with the product.

Also, don't try to differentiate from competitors just by using different name labels. Using 'subgroups' instead of 'categories', 'types' instead of 'tasks', or 'entities' instead of 'events' might be confusing and too hard to accept for some people. It could increase your churn rate.

Now, let's take writing for the Home page for example. You’d need to be aware of the psychology behind people's online behavior to decide where to put which information on a page.

Here is a great Tutorial Tuesdays webinar with a conversion copywriter Joanna Wiebe. She talks about four types of decision-makers and what they look for on the page. This is how she explains it:

S-C-H-M decision-making types are based on the framework of fast, slow, emotional, and logical decision-makers.
Spontaneous is a fast-paced emotional type. They usually decide to act based solely on the hero section of your page. They might quickly scan the page looking for buttons, too. Or, they could immediately start an on-site search for the information they need.
Competitive is a fast-paced logical type. They usually scroll down the page looking for more information, features, and lists. They look for subheadings and subsections to quickly learn more before making a decision.
Humanistic is a slow-paced emotional type. They look for a human touch in your copy, they want to know there are real people behind the product, they want to see what others are experiencing. They look for emotional benefits. So, it's useful to put reviews, testimonials, and your team members out there. Conversational, friendly, highly-relatable copy is what appeals to a humanistic type the most.
Methodical is a slow-paced logical type. These are the people who look for facts, figures, charts, comparison tables. That's why it's always a good idea to include numbers and stats in your home page copy if you have those. Plus, to display the copy in a form of tables and diagrams.

When you know all this, balancing navigation, content hierarchy, CTA prioritization, forms, and different landing pages becomes a lot easier. Although, addressing different types at the same time is never easy.

Keeping your content inclusive and accessible is another major asset. Find some great resources in the sections below to learn more about first-hand experiences and barriers that people with disabilities experience while interacting with digital products.

Personalized emails

Email is a huge channel. A very important one, too.

If you want to create an exceptional user experience, you'll carefully think through your email strategy. Because you don't want to overwhelm and spam your users, right?

You might wanna consider some of these, depending on your business type and offer:

Welcoming emails
Onboarding emails
After-purchase emails
Cart-abandonment emails
Emails for returning customers
Emails for people who haven't interacted with your product for over a year
Email newsletters
Promotional email newsletters
Topical email newsletters
Pre-launch emails
Post-launch emails
…

That's a lot of emails to write. Use them wisely.

With email service providers like Mailchimp, TinyLetter (by Mailchimp), ConvertKit, HubSpot, MailerLite, Emma, and so many others, you get to automate the audience segmentation and personalize the email experience for your users and customers.

Writing email sequences can be automated, but be thoughtful about them. Especially about pre-launch, time-sensitive offers you inform your users about.

It seems to me that email marketing is broken. And there's something that's been really bothering me lately. It's the time-sensitive urgency that transforms into a 7-pushy-emails-per-day kind of spam.

The clock is ticking, buy now!
Get it today or you'll never get the chance again
The last chance: 12 hours left
The price is going up, up, up in just 6 hours
3 hours left for the purchase of your life
Only 60 minutes left, don't be sorry later
Oh, snap, you just missed the deadline. But, hey, we thought it might happen, so we've added 6 more hours, buy now!

Sound familiar?

I've been getting a lot of these. And I can't say I love them. I understand the reasoning, but it just feels so wrong. It easily becomes irritating and repulsive. It makes me wanna unsubscribe immediately never to look at those companies again. That's not what those brands had in mind, right? No one wants to lose hard-earned trust.

What I'm saying here is this: If someone wants to buy from you, they will. There's no need to pressure them with so many urgent nudges.

People will buy when they are ready. Even if you never send a single email. The overall experience is what counts. And the words you write are the essence of that experience.

Read on

"No two customers look the same, so it’s critical you have a plan for how these different personas will get up and running with your product." In this article from the Segment Blog, learn how to increase conversion with personalized lifecycle campaigns and how to craft emails that speak directly to those different buyers.

Who owns customer/user experience in your org? Is it a sales team, designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, writers, support, marketers? Or, is it all of them together? Here is a 2020 CX Report, but it's not what you think. It's about "the other CX: computational experience". It's a deep dive into the realm of digital relations.

Have you read The Story of 100 People by Teisanu Tudor in the UX Collective publication? It's about understanding your users and how they interact with your product. But not just the average users in ideal situations. It’s about "illustrating people’s diversity often ignored in hasty, assumptive one-fits-all designs".

Understanding how people think and act can help you make better content choices, write better copy, and defend your content decisions with science-backed data. The article from the UX Collective written by Sarah Vollmer Mohs is all about the principles of cognitive psychology and their relation to UX writing.

Here’s a great read about the Equivalent Experience, written by Eric Bailey for Smashing Magazine. As he explains, equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately built to be used by the widest possible range of people. "To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience".

There's a new Smashing book in town, too. Paul Boag has written a detailed guide on how to increase conversion and boost business KPIs without alienating customers along the way. The book Click! How To Encourage Clicks Without Shady Tricks shows you how to increase clicks, build trust, loyalty, and drive leads while keeping users respected and happy at the same time.

When writing a UX copy, you need to be thoughtful about people's habits and anxieties. Here is an excellent article about this. How habits and anxieties keep people from using your product is an excellent article by UX designer Adam Amran.

Speaking of Adam Amran, he is also the designer of Untools: Tools for Better Thinking. It's a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions, and understand systems. The tools include Issue trees, Iceberg Model, Second-order thinking, Inversion, Connection circles, Abstraction laddering, and others.

Read all about the advice, recommendations, and suggestions that web design and development companies shared for the DesignRush Blog. Learn how to build custom websites with strong user experience, and see how content fits the picture.

Listen & Watch

For the first-hand personal experiences of people with disabilities, and the barriers they need to overcome while interacting with digital products, listen to the insightful bite-size episodes of the A11y Rules Soundbite podcast series. The host Nicolas Steenhout, a developer who's been championing web accessibility for more than 20 years, welcomes the guests to talk about their endeavors on the web.

Marketers who want to create an omnichannel customer experience need a continuous flow of accurate and trustworthy customer data from across the system. Watch the webinar Closed Loop Marketing: Optimizing the flow of customer data across your business to learn more about this topic. It's a session constructed from the feedback of over 100 marketing leaders and CMOs around the world, ranging from data storage and accessibility to marketing segmentation, and more.

Coming up on June 24, here is another interesting and useful webinar. Underpinning your personalization strategy with a Customer Data Platform is going to give you insights and abilities to build customer journeys and marketing campaigns with content personalized to each customer’s intent and needs.

That's all for now, folks. All for this should-have-been-published-on-Thursday piece of Content Puzzle.

Enjoy the week ahead, and don't forget to be mindful, thoughtful, and respectful for your users, customers, and all the people around you.

This world really, truly needs to become a better place for everyone. It feels like the change is coming. Let us all be the part of the solution 👊

Best wishes to y’all,
Nadja

Content Puzzle