Personalisation software options to enhance profitability. The website personalisation tools we recommend in this article enable you to identify visitors and then deliver the ‘next best product’ or ‘next best content’ within containers on your website as with the classic Amazon personalised recommendations.

“Digital experience personalisation is the dynamic serving of customised content, product or promotional offer recommendations to website visitors or app users based on their characteristics and intentbehaviour to support conversion and long-term engagement goals“.

Although many of us will have experienced personalisation through retail product recommendations like those from Amazon, the definition shows the relevance of personalisation to all types of businesses. For example, even B2B companies that don’t sell online can use personalisation to recommend relevant ‘next best content’ offers to sustain prospects’ interest in a business and so nurture them towards a sale.

Website Personalisation Software as Service (SaaS) for Ecommerce

This is specifically for ecommerce search and merchandising giving automated product placements using aggregated behavioural data (those that viewed this, also viewed that) and personal recommendations (you previously bought this and might like that).

These options can be considered the top retail personalisation services that should be on your long-list for comparing if you’re looking for a service that is separate from your e-commerce or content management solution.

• SwiftERM – Personal Product Selection Software
• Apptus
• Barilliance – SaaS Personalisation for e-commerce
• Bunting Website Personalization
• Certona
• Dynamic Yield
• Evergage (includes B2B)
• Monetate KIBO Intelligent Personalization Engine
• Omniconvert
• Personyze
• Optimizely personalization
• Pure360 – Ecommerce personalization
• Pureclarity – Ecommerce personalization
• Rich Relevance 
• Qubit
• Yusp

Personalisation online features available as part of CMS or Commerce management systems for your website

According to the comment from Damien of Digicon, Sitecore, Kentico and Adobe with Target have built-in tools to personalise content based on various rules, such as geolocation, search terms, referrers, lead scores and also provide more advanced personalisation based on user behaviour and profiles.

Episerver has an interesting approach to personalisation which they describe as ‘No-rules personalisation: more intelligence, less-work‘. Rather than traditional rules-based personalisation used by many of the specialist services, this applies machine learning and statistical analysis to visitor behavioral data to tailor category and product pages without the need for rules configuration.

The open source ecommerce solution Magento also has personalisation extensions available such as Product Personalisation, Commerce Stack.

B2B, marketing automation, and publisher website personalisation tools

Evergage is recommended as a tool that fits best in this category that has a wide range of options for serving personalisation for content marketing in different placements on a site. Other alternatives for B2B personalisation or non-retail consumer personalisation are:

• BrightInfo (cost-effective)
• Ion Interactive (enterprise)
• Sitespect (intermediate)

In the same what that the content management systems now integrate personalisation, marketing automation systems have now started to include this option. These include:

• HubSpot – includes a ‘Smart Content’ feature to provide relevant content. They explain: ‘ With Smart Content you can deliver content specifically tailored to where a prospect is in the buying process, or content targeted to people the very first time they visit. Smart Content lets you target content based on anything you know about your contacts which are known as personalisation tokens’. It also offers personalisation of calls-to-action.
• Marketo – Marketo has rules to convert the majority of anonymous visitors to a site based on previous interactions with site content. It also offers account-based marketing targeting of key accounts.
• Salesforce – This service uses the ‘Einstein’ AI feature for personalisation to deliver the next-best product.

Email personalisation tool

In additional to direct site applications you should also personalise the product content for each email you send, by which we mean identify product-choice, personalised for each individual consumer. These are selected as the products that person is most likely to buy next. If you’re at that stage then then the ideal software to look at is SwiftERM, which is not only extremely accurate but 100% automatic.

There are many who use the term personalisation as a platitude merely “making sure you use your customer’s name”, or worse direct you to software that segments your audience into a groups to make it easier and more time-efficient for you to bulk-send offers to. The glaring obvious problem being they don’t highlight the negative impact of additional staff cost necessary to implement it.

While still better than not personalising at all, it still misses the huge opportunity, as illustrated above, to maximise the return from each individual – your customer lifetime value, smashing your rate of return (RoR), and growing your average order value (AOV) by a whopping 10-15%.