Feb 11, 2024
While personalization is a staple in the marketing world, brands still don’t utilize its full potential. Specifically, many teams focus only on personalizing the experience of known customers, i.e., those who’ve already provided some contact information like their email or phone number.
However, the majority of website traffic is usually made up of anonymous visitors. Without personalizing their experience, you’re losing out on potential conversions and revenue. Plus, you’re missing a chance to drastically reduce the time and money it takes to turn first-time visitors into paying customers.
In this guide, you’ll learn how anonymous visitor personalization works, why it’s important, and how to implement it. We’ll use Insider — our enterprise platform for delivering personalized experiences across all channels — to show anonymous personalization in action.
Insider can help you implement omnichannel personalization across all touchpoints, from your website and mobile app to channels like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.
How anonymous visitor personalization works
Getting started with anonymous web personalization
Personalize the entire customer journey with Insider
Like all other types of personalization, anonymous visitor personalization works by leveraging data about users’ interests, behaviors, and preferences. The difficulty lies in the fact that you don’t have any contact information, so emails, phone numbers, and other similar identifiers can’t be used to target visitors.
That’s why solutions for anonymous visitor personalization can:
For example, the screenshot below shows how Insider’s CDP stores anonymous visitor data, including all website actions, last viewed and abandoned products, and more.
Armed with this data, you can start personalizing the experience of unknown users with:
Now that you know how anonymous visitor personalization works, let’s see how you can implement it with Insider.
Once Insider is set up on your site or app, it automatically starts collecting user behavior data and creating 360-degree profiles of all customers and anonymous visitors.
For anonymous visitors, these user profiles contain essential information including:
Our enterprise CDP holds this anonymous visitor data for 90 days, giving you plenty of time to convert them into paying customers. Data for known customers is kept for five years, although that period can be extended depending on your needs.
Anonymous visitor personalization is actually one of our CDP’s main use cases for marketers. That’s why you can leverage the information Insider has collected from user interactions on your site, as well as data from various data management platforms (DMPs).
Plus, setting up the data collection isn’t complex or time-consuming. You don’t have to spend tons of engineering hours setting up our listeners and ensuring they’re working correctly.
In fact, if you have an eCommerce business, just one tag can crawl your site, start collecting behavior data, and create a product catalog. This is a perfect option for teams that want to start fast and experiment with anonymous personalization right away.
With your data in place, you start personalizing the experience of anonymous visitors. This includes all elements of your site — like banners, categories, product recommendations, and more.
For example, you can use Insider to launch different types of product recommendation campaigns. You can also choose where these recommendations appear — on every page, on product and article pages, on category pages, or on cart pages.
There are tons of user-based and cookie-free recommendation strategies to choose from, including:
Plus, Insider’s automated recommendation algorithm (Chef) — can automatically detect the best combination of these strategies by testing the most popular items, top sellers, user-based, highest discounted, new arrivals, and trending items algorithms for better conversion rates.
This is all controlled via a simple WYSIWYG editor, making it easy to launch personalized recommendation campaigns with zero reliance on technical teams.
Put simply, you have tons of options for building personalized product recommendations to help you engage and convert anonymous visitors much faster.
For a real-life example, check out our case study with Sapphire. They used our AI-powered Smart Recommender to improve product discovery by offering them a personalized glimpse into many available products. This enabled the company to achieve a 12x ROI.
While you can completely personalize the on-site experience, many first-time visitors still won’t convert right away. They’ll likely leave the site, continue browsing other ones, and in some cases — make a purchase down the line.
Using online ads across search and social media is the traditional strategy for overcoming this challenge. However, ads can get very expensive and eat into your profit margins.
This is where web push notifications are incredibly valuable. They let you bring back anonymous visitors to your site with personalized offers based on what they’ve shown interest in. Plus, there’s no additional cost in sending each one, making them a much more cost-effective solution than remarketing ads.
Web push notifications also don’t require any personal or contact information. Visitors just need to agree to receive notifications (we have templates for this), which is a much smaller commitment than providing an email or phone number.
The ability to bring these anonymous visitors back to your site is crucial for reducing acquisition costs since you don’t have to retarget users with expensive performance ads.
For example, Lenovo used Insider’s web push notifications to target different user segments. This allowed them to reach visitors who abandoned their carts and get them back to the site, leading to a 10% reduction in cart abandonment rates.
Insider can enable you to personalize the experience of anonymous visitors, resulting in:
If you’re interested in exploring this capability, click here to schedule a free demo with our team.
At the same time, Insider is much more than a solution for anonymous visitor personalization. Our enterprise marketing platform can help you unify your customer data, expand your reach across channels, deliver personalized customer experiences across all channels, and much more.
Besides creating anonymous visitor profiles, Insider’s CDP can also help you aggregate all customer data in one place. You can use it to unify first-, second-, and third-party data from any online or offline source, including:
Having your data in one place (instead of being siloed in different locations) makes it possible to understand the complete customer journey, avoid jumping between tools, and target customers more effectively.
For known customers, the 360-degree profiles can contain a ton of valuable information, including:
Once your customer data is in place, you can segment your audiences and reach various types of customers more effectively. Insider’s advanced segmentation allows you to segment your customers using:
These granular segmentation options let you home in on the right audiences for each campaign, resulting in higher relevance, engagement, and revenue.
Insider’s advanced personalization capabilities let you tailor every element of your site or app to each customer’s preferences.
As we mentioned earlier, this includes the product recommendations people see. You can easily launch product recommendation strategies on your site with zero IT dependency using the simple visual editor we showed earlier.
You can also choose from a variety of product recommendation strategies for unknown visitors and known customers, including recently visited products, highest discounted items, trending products, and more.
However, you’re not just limited to personalizing recommendations. With Insider, you can also tailor every other element to users’ preferences, including:
For a real-life example of Insider’s web personalization capabilities, check out our case study with Dover Saddlery. They used Insider to deliver personalized experiences across their web and mobile site, which allowed them to:
Insider also brings together 12+ channels under one umbrella. This enables you to scale your personalization efforts across all touchpoints from one platform.
For example, you can use Insider to reach customers via:
Overall, Insider’s broad channel support and personalization capabilities enable you to implement true omnichannel personalization and make the most out of every customer interaction.
As you can see, Insider can help you reach leads and customers on all touchpoints. Our platform also helps you tie these channels into a cohesive and consistent experience with Architect — our cross-channel customer journey builder and marketing automation tool.
Architect lets you:
If you’re interested, we explore this topic in our guide to how to generate more revenue with a customer journey builder.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).