For e-commerce marketers, traditional tools like analytics dashboards, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and surveys have long been the primary ways that teams try to understand user behavior and gather feedback. Consequently, 65% of consumers recently stated that brands have gotten better at personalizing advertising and marketing in the past few years, which suggests marketers are headed in the right direction.
While these tools can be valuable for monitoring trends and gaining direct customer input, they’re often restricted by timing and scale when it comes to understanding what drives user behavior. With a staggering 91% of consumers indicating they see at least one irrelevant ad every single day, there’s still a significant gap between improvement and actually delivering experiences that resonate.
This is where website personalization technology can reshape current practices. By responding to real-time behaviors and intent signals as they happen, advanced website personalization technology fuels customized website experiences in real time, surfacing meaningful insights that your brand can put to work across different systems, powering recommendation and marketing automation systems, A/B testing and dynamic content creation.
Together, the right data and technology will help you deliver experiences that feel extremely relevant and timely to anyone that visits your website.
In 2024, a global survey revealed that nine out of ten business leaders saw personalization as an invaluable factor in their business success. That said, personalization can only be effective when it’s based on meaningful, data-driven insights.
With a tailored website solution, you can turn everyday, on-page activities—like browsing history, cart abandons and email signups—into clear signals that can help you understand exactly what users care about and how to engage them better. In practice, these signals tend to fall into a few core categories:
Behavioral patterns track how users engage with your site or app, including clicks, scroll depth and dwell time. These insights can help you build a more in-depth picture of how segments engage with your content.
Intent signals reveal users’ interest in your products or offerings by helping you understand which categories they browse and which promotions they respond to. You can use this data to increase conversions by surfacing messages in real time that present the most relevant options.
Preference data captures user choices such as styles, sizes, categories or prioritized features. You can better understand users’ individual preferences through interactions such as interactive quizzes or guided customer journeys designed to capture quality leads and deliver highly customized digital experiences that anticipate their needs.
Interaction data tracks engagement with specific elements, including CTA variations, navigation paths and signals of abandonment or friction points. Understanding this type of behavioral data supports A/B testing by showing which elements drive conversions.
Aggregating the actions that your customers naturally share through their interactions with your website is a powerful way to increase loyalty and drive engagement. What matters next is how you leverage these insights to effectively shape customer experiences that adapt in real time and resonate with site visitors.
When your website can adapt to user behavior, it’s not just more meaningful to your customers, it also reveals user intent and what actually matters to them.
Customizing website experiences puts you in control of the consumer-brand conversation by allowing you to actively shape onsite experiences and quickly understand how users respond, rather than waiting for outdated reporting. This means you can optimize your website in real time while gaining valuable insights into your customer’s needs.
Website personalization platforms, like Epsilon Accelerate, allow you to run A/B tests, deploy dynamic content and deliver personalized website experiences that resonate. These capabilities remove development bottlenecks and allow your teams to launch and iterate on website experiences quickly.
Faster experimentation with website customization and customer interactions means your marketing teams can see what works as it happens and apply these insights right away. This makes it easier to see short-term improvements, while also building a solid foundation for longer-term personalization.
A home design furniture retailer was looking to maximize lead generation and find ways to convert interest into sales. They used Epsilon Accelerate’s advanced analytics to identify when customers wanted deeper guidance versus design inspiration, boosting product discovery and conversion rates. The strategy also resulted in a 55% increase in email lead generation, a 27% increase in revenue per lead, and a 23:1 ROI.
Reaping the full long-term benefits of real-time personalization begins by partnering with the right website personalization platform. Here are some of the key features that allow you to act on insights quickly and deliver the right message at the right time:
Partnering with an industry-leading data and technology provider can help you avoid headaches further down the line by reducing technical bottlenecks and supporting your teams to make proactive adjustments. In turn, you can deliver more effective, customized website experiences that increase engagement and improve performance.
When trying to understand your customer better, it can be tempting to gather as much data as possible. However, simply stockpiling more data—pageviews, product preferences, purchase history—doesn’t add value on its own. In fact, collecting metrics without knowing what you’ll do with them often wastes time and adds confusion later in the process.
What really matters is the quality of your data, which impacts your ability to interpret it effectively. Bringing together fragmented customer data will transform sets of disconnected touchpoints into a meaningful narrative that helps you identify each customer and easily pinpoint where friction occurs, eliminate drop-offs and surface relevant messages that motivate visitors to convert.
A data-driven personalization platform is built on a solid foundation that gives you complete control—enabling you to manage the end-to-end customer journey and accelerate your speed-to-impact—without relying on scattered tools or bloated engineering teams. This enhanced control strengthens your website's personalization efforts and enables more relevant, meaningful customer interactions.
A fashion brand was looking for ways to strengthen customer engagement with its product range. Epsilon Accelerate helped the brand obtain rich first-party data using interactive quizzes and a guided selling flow to gain insight into customer preferences. Consolidating these first-party data interactions helped the brand engage customers better in the moment, generating 93% more leads, with a 19:1 ROI.
Today’s leading e-commerce brands use data-driven insights to understand their audiences' needs and adapt quickly. Those who rely on static pages are quickly falling behind.
By leveraging rich customer insights in real time—preferences, intent, behavior—you can make interactions with your customers more relevant, timely and meaningful. A robust website personalization solution gives marketers more opportunities than ever to build adaptive website journeys that continuously improves based on how your users actually behave.
Epsilon Accelerate gives e-commerce marketers a straightforward way to own the website experience, giving you access to a solid data strategy that lays the foundation for future growth.
