Personalization: Where and How to Make it Meaningful

The concept of personalization is either overrated or frequently misunderstood. 

The perceived need to create tailored experiences for every donor – across the entire media set and website journey – is overwhelming. It’s also impossible and not recommended. The time, money, and technology investment required is also very unlikely to pay off.  

That said, there’s no doubt that personalized experiences increase conversion rates. An old quote from Salesforce that 52% of consumers don’t convert on generic emails still holds.

But practicality is of the essence, and with a limited budget stretched thin across multiple initiatives, focusing your effort on personalizing only those touch points that matter – and only for those donors that can move the needle – is the only way to succeed.

Here’s how you do it, followed by 9 experiments to play with:

1. Identify who of your current or potential donors is worth personalizing for. 

Luxury apparel brands provide custom tailoring services that H&M or Zara would never do because of the much higher profit from every transaction. The same rules should apply to nonprofits. You don’t need to personalize the experience for everybody visiting your website. Be selective.

A useful first step is to focus testing and measurement efforts by limiting the “focus group.” Look into the common behavior characteristics of your current crop of recurring, monthly donors. You need to understand what is common amongst their early-on media interactions and website sessions. 

How?

Utilize your web analytics platform and CRM to find common patterns – channels they used to find your website for the first time, topics they donate to, how many and which pages they browsed before the first donation, and how long the period is between the first and the second donation. 

The goal is to identify common aspects across no more than the top 15% of your existing and best donors – and then use these as a filter for new, anonymized prospective donors.

Take it another step further by understanding the psychographics of those donors through data enrichment and filtering both by anonymous behavior and personal “match” – read my post on the topic here for more detail.

2. Use that subset of donors to identify the touch points that are most important to personalize. 

Amazon is lauded as a wizard of user personalization. However, they don’t personalize your entire journey. Not even close. Instead, they ingest several artificial sections that suggest the next best step to users most likely to either spend more or bounce. 

We’ve all seen the sections “Other Products you might be interested in,” “Similar products,” etc. Each of them aims to hold a user’s hand through pivotal junctions – the forks in a user journey – proactively decreasing the bounce rate and increasing the conversion rate.

To create the same logic for your donation journey you need to first map out the junctions where a Supporter could go one layer deeper into their journey or bounce.

Here are 10 Possible Junctions in a Donation Journey:

1. Click on the ad – measured by the click-through rate (not cost per click).
2. Bounce from the first page of the web visit.
3. Make a “meaningful visit” – measured by a custom metric derived from the first step – such as hitting a particular page of the website, spending more than X minutes on the website overall, or browsing not less than five pages total. 
4. Click the “Donate” button.
5. Choose a Donation Value.
6. Complete each step of your donation flow.
7. Second visit (return) to the website post first donation.
8. Second donation conversion rate. 
9. Second donation value.
10. Subsequent donation conversion rate. 

By analyzing the performance of your core audience segment (identified in the First step) against each of these, you can create a list of touch points where you’re seeing drop off or weakness. This list becomes your testing roadmap as to where personalization may yield 

positive results. Examples below.

3. Start experimenting. 

I’ve outlined my general approach to successful experimentation several times, most recently in this edition of SPN.

Take Netflix. They’re running tests at scale and their algorithms are a perfect example of drawing viewers in by leveraging the behavior of others like them. The algorithm’s get better over time the more you watch but not because Netflix is learning more about your personal preferences.

Instead, Netflix assigns you to a narrower cluster of “others like you” with every next title you watch or bounce from, sourcing recommendations from the list of shows they’ve seen but you didn’t have time to get to yet. They’re not personalizing the experience for every single person engaging with them.

The mechanics of personalization for nonprofits are the same. Personalize for specific clusters.

For example, one of your most vulnerable junctions could be too low of a conversion rate from a “3. Meaningful Visit” to a “4. Donate Button Click”. People hitting your website and performing a Meaningful Visit are “anonymous users” – you don’t know anything about them besides their behavior on the website. But you know that most of your best donors who have done that step have read the “About” page.

So, for the people matching the criteria defined in the First step all the way until Meaningful Visit, create an experiment that offers three distinct experiences on the website: 

1. Regular website “Control Group”
2. “About” page raised to the first position in the header “Test Group 1”
3. A pop-up window inviting potential donors to check your “About” page “Test Group 2.”

Did these experiences result in an increase in people clicking the donate button? What did you learn?

The same logic applies to testing donation amounts shown in the form based on the previous donors’ actual donations or a time frame for a follow-up donation email. 

Experiments to Run

Here are 9 more personalization experiments for every “junction” outlined above:

1. The emotion of the imagery used in creative – leading with happiness, fear or guilt to increase CTR.
2. Showing a video on the first landing page explaining a donation’s impact to decrease Bounce Rate.  
3. “Curating” the donor’s experience by adding the “check the XXX page” at the bottom of the page to increase the Meaningful Visit rate. 
4. Adding the “Donate” button at the bottom of every page in addition to the header of the website to increase the Donate Button Click Rate. 
5. Breaking the long donation form experience into three subsequent steps accompanied by the same image the Supporter clicked on to get to the website in step 1 to increase Conversion Rate. 
6. Dynamically adding “Impact you will provide” text next to the donation amount selected to increase the Average Donation Value.
7. Dynamically created personalized “Impact Pages” as the CTA in the follow-up email to increase the Second Visit rate. 
8. Ingesting videos from the field on the above “Impact Pages” to increase the Second Donation Conversion Rate. 
9. Dynamically adding the “cumulative impact you will provide” text in donation forms for second-time donors to increase Second Donation Value. 

Wrapping Up

This three-step conclusion is hopefully a helpful cheat sheet for thinking about the when, where, to whom and how of personalization:

1. Don’t aim to personalize the experience for everybody visiting your website. Instead, identify the anonymous “behavior” metrics and the psychographic characteristics of your existing best donors and personalize only for those who look like them. 
2. Identify the “junctions” that are your weakest spot – and prioritize them. 
3. Start your personalization efforts by leveraging what has worked for other donors already. As your anonymous new donors move through the funnel, they’re becoming more and more similar to those you already have in your CRM. Base your experiments’ rules on their behavior instead of creating new ones from scratch.