Defining audiences is the first step in developing an effective personalization strategy. Here's how to create audiences with Unless.
The basic premise of personalization is that page visitors have differing needs and expectations. So, delivering one site experience to everyone, leaves you with a website that doesn't truly resonate with anyone. By grouping your visitors into audiences you can tackle this problem and create targeted experiences.
Example: Here's how Blogger changes the homepage for different audiences.
Conceptually, audiences are groups of visitors who have something in common. When deciding on an audience you should keep two things in mind.
To maximize the impact of personalization, your audience should have a high reach which is either defined by volume or value.
You must be able to identify members of this audience. Unless is not a crystal ball, we don't magically know everything about your visitors. Creating audiences based on gender, age, job title, interest, and more can be valuable but remember that the data has to come from somewhere. Ask yourself; can this audience be identified using the data and conditions provided by Unless? Can I provide the necessary data myself (e.g. by sending data through UTMs or the API)?
In Unless, you can use three types of audiences:
In Unless you will find four types of targeting conditions: context, behavior, profile, and predictions. You can mix and match all available targeting conditions using and/or options.
The first targeting condition we will look at is context. Under context you can define audiences based on:
This category is a marketer's dream. Here you can set conditions based on where a visitor came to your website from, are they new or returning, did they accomplish any goals etc. as well as parameters which allow you to pass information from your campaigns to Unless.
Under the profile category, at first you will only see the default trait: email. This can be sourced through our email capture add-ons. There are also custom traits; personal visitor attributes such as name, gender, email, job, purchases, etc. that are unique to your account and business. These can be sourced through the API (set up by your developer). We also offer firmographic enrichment based on IP address. To learn more about this, please get in touch with us.
At Unless, we use a machine learning algorithm to calculate and predict the engagement, attention span and stickiness of your visitors as well as their lead score which can then be used for personalizations.
For example, set up a "highly engaged" audience for visitors that have high engagement and have viewed more than 3 pages and show them a popup that gently pushes them towards scheduling a demo with you.
Alternatively, for visitors that have a low attention span and low stickiness, you can come up with an enticing offer or a piece of helpful content to create interest before they leave your website.
If you are just getting started with the and/or logic, it might be a little confusing at first. This setting indicates how many conditions have to apply so that a visitor becomes part of an audience:
Or: If any of the conditions apply to a visitor, they will become a part of the audience. Regardless of whether they match the other conditions or not.
And: Makes all conditions significant. A visitor will become part of the audience only if they match all the conditions.
Setting these up properly will make sure you target the right group of visitors. Usually, the and operator will create narrower, more specific audiences, while the or will allow you to create broader groups of visitors.
The membership duration defines how long a visitor remains part of an audience. You can set a time-based duration (in minutes, hours, or days) or limit the membership to the current web session. In general, your membership duration should be aligned with your sales cycle.
Let's say you run an ad campaign aimed at freelancers. Next, you create an audience and some personalizations around it. By setting a membership duration you can influence how long Unless will identify visitors who clicked on the ads as freelancers.
It really depends on your website and your use case, there's no magic number. In general, we recommend to start with 2-3 broad audiences, once you get the hang of it and see some results, you can create more. To find out for whom to personalize first, take a look at your Analytics data. Here's a guide on how to uncover audiences.