3 Critical Elements of Website Personalization and Optimization

In a recent Forbes Tech Council post, Pranav Desai, a Senior Vice President at Reputation brought up the subject of the 3 V's and the link to profitability. The 3 V's he referred to are Variety, Velocity and Volume, which were originally defined by Doug Laney in reference to big data.

This article resonated with us because it brings up the very valid point of having the right data to gauge customer sentiment towards a brand. It also discussed how the 3 V's are equally important to improve  customer experience (CX).

We’re pretty passionate about improving CX because we believe that’s where brands can add more value to their customers and to their bottom line. But CX isn’t static, it’s a constantly moving target that shifts as various market factors and customer preferences change. This is why website optimization strategies to improve CX must factor in variety, velocity and volume.

Variety: Improve website personalization with different experiences

With demands for greater levels of personalization, brands have to find ways to serve unique experiences to first time website visitors and repeat customers to get them to engage. If a website receives upward of 100,000 unique visitors a month, that could be a daunting task.

How does a brand know what experiences will resonate with visitors or what they’ll find relevant?

Traditional A/B testing tools aren't especially useful for this type of use case because it takes months to generate answers, and even then, it can only test to hopefully find the best choice between a small number of options. Being able to serve up a variety of unique experiences requires the ability to see how visitors are interacting on a website in real time, and to respond to those actions with relevant contextual information.

This is one of the key advantages an AI-driven optimization platform can offer. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can identify visitor interactions on a website and find the experience they’re most likely to respond to, based on previous learnings. This continual learning approach enables brands to serve up a variety of experiences that achieves greater levels of personalization.

Velocity: Increase the speed of experimentation

The ability to respond quickly to changing customer needs and preferences is a distinct competitive advantage. Brands that want to leverage this need to know what data is relevant, be able to access it in a timely fashion, and most importantly sort and extract relevant information quickly. AI is ideally suited to this task, especially when the amount of data comes with many variables attached to it.

AI-driven optimization can work towards achieving specific metrics such as increasing average order value (AOV). It can zone in on the visitor behaviors linked to the target metric and identify the best experiences to achieve better results as quickly as possible. Increasing the velocity of experimentation enables brands to respond to trends rapidly, ensuring that the digital experiences being served remain relevant and contribute to the bottom line.

Volume: Exponentially scale the types of experimentation

Today it is not just speed that’s critical to gaining a competitive advantage but also volume. With so many variables in play, a brand needs to be able to experiment with multiple ideas. Also, top performing experiences might be made up from many different combinations of ideas.

AI-driven optimization can experiment with hundreds of different variables and thousands of combinations simultaneously to determine which experiences resonate most with website visitors. This goes far beyond the capabilities of A/B testing tools. More significantly, AI-driven optimization can expand the volume of experimentation to both mobile and desktop. Experience has shown the value in this because often the top performing experiences on mobile are usually not the same as desktop.

Sometimes ideas that don’t perform on one platform often end up being the top performers on another. If brands are only optimizing on one platform and assuming all experiences are the same, they could be losing out on opportunities to increase sales or achieve other KPIs. Being able to scale and increase the volume of experimentation across mobile and desktop will equip brands with the insights they need to improve CX.

CX has already become a primary differentiator between brands. Having the ability to optimize digital experiences and achieve greater levels of personalization is becoming a distinct advantage, especially when brands can leverage AI to experiment at scale with variety, velocity and volume.

Using these optimization strategies when personalizing your website can be a huge competitive advantage. To learn more about how Evolv AI can take your site to the next level, contact us or visit our customer experience optimization page.