Retailers have become adroit at creating customer experiences in brick-and-mortar stores. They study the placement of every product and put high-demand items at eye level, where customers can easily see and grasp them. In contrast, less valuable products sit in less visible spots. Snacks and other small items are easy to pick up as you pay, so retailers strategically place them on the shelves before the cashier. There’s science behind the design of these shops to maximize revenue.

The design and content placement on your website should also be carefully planned. You offer content in exchange for conversion, just like stores offer products in exchange for money. In this article, we share five tips for creating AI-driven customer journeys with personalization software.

Begin with context and behavior 

Before the visitor has given their contact information, personalize your site based on what you have — context and behavior. Customer journeys are not linear but a maze of repeated visits, pieces of consumed content and other actions. Customers come from different circumstances and have varying needs for information. 

You already have data about the interactions, context (location, weather, time of the day) and behavioral patterns of other site visitors. Use that data wisely to make every experience as relevant as possible.

Use retargeting on your site

Most people dislike ad retargeting across the internet because it feels spooky — but it may still be worth it. This image visualizes a three-session customer journey on a content-driven website, where registration is the end goal.

Based on our experience, the beginning of the second and third sessions are the most underserved points of the customer journey. When a customer returns to your site, you should help them pick up where they left off instead of showing the standard home page. Try providing content that is popular among other visitors, currently trending content, or even pieces of content the visitor has previously read.

Email workflow is not enough

Most organizations have an established practice of launching a targeted marketing automation workflow after a visitor has downloaded some interesting content. By combining website personalization with marketing automation, you can make the customer journey even more granular and focused. 

This allows you to acknowledge every customer need and personalize the entire customer journey – not just the page where you expect a  conversion will happen, or the landing page from a marketing campaign. As you grow the amount of information you have about the visitor, you can provide them with recommendations and content that are even more personalized. 

Dynamic content recommendations

No more “Uh, I forgot to update that!” moments. With tight resources, it’s challenging to pay attention to every single part of your site. Dynamic content recommendations are always up to date and based on visitor interest. They help you feel confident that you don’t accidentally display outdated manual content recommendations on a subpage somewhere on your site. 

Use popular content-recommendation strategies

Get started with the most common content-recommendation strategies. The most popular content-recommendation strategies across Frosmo’s customer base are:

• Trending content 

• Overall most popular content

• Others who read this also read

• Most popular in this category

This is just the beginning

After getting up to speed with these foundational strategies, you can add more data points to visitor behavior, context and AI predictions. Continuously optimize the customer journey with the best-performing content by applying AI-driven testing and experimentation. 

Read how a leading media site A-lehdet created better customer experiences and agility with website personalization and modern content infrastructure. 

Frosmo is fully integrated with Contentful and React. You can read more about personalization with Frosmo and Contentful.

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