In part one of our three-part blog series, Dynamic Personalization in Healthcare Websites, we discussed why personalization is valuable to consider. In this blog we’ll offer some tips on the types of personalization tactics that can be deployed to actualize your plan.
If there was a one-size-fits-all solution to delivering dynamic personalization, everyone would already be doing it.
Your customer expects you to understand their needs, then deliver curated messages and content that helps them satisfy those needs. This starts with genuinely understanding their journey. Delivering a truly personalized and compliant digital experience for your customer takes a careful and strategic approach. Here’s ours:
Paragon’s Three-Part Framework for Deploying Personalization
- Gather Consumer Insights
To determine messaging that is most relevant and valuable, you must first understand your customer and their journey. Customer research strategies can help – such as contextual interviews, intercepts, surveys, focus groups, personas, and journey mapping.
- Build an Engagement Plan
Develop a plan that orchestrates what you will communicate to who, when, and through which channel. An Engagement Plan is a concrete blueprint for activating the personalization plan on your web platform. It assists in identifying the Moments that Matter during your customer’s journey, telling you where they need the most support. This information helps you to build a better personalization strategy and supported Information Architecture.
- Execute & Measure
Develop your personalization profiles and scoring, deploy tactics according to your Engagement Plan, measure the results, iterate, and optimize. Fostering an environment where experimentation is encouraged is invaluable. Doing so will ensure you are consistently improving how you deliver customer-centric experiences. Tactics such as AB testing will let you know your marketing is working as you intend it to, and help you hone-in on which messages or content are most effective.
While having a plan in place is critical, staying on the right side of HIPAA laws when it comes to delivering personalized content and keeping protected health information (PHI) and identity disconnected is paramount, we’ll go over those more in our next blog.
Three Types of Personalization Strategies
Understanding three of the main types of personalization will help you as you consider what works best for your health system, internal teams, and your customers.
- Static personalization
The simplest method to integrate. Personalization is based on known attributes of a user found in their profile. This type of personalization typically includes elements like a user’s name or address.
- Dynamic personalization
This method of personalization creates visitor groups based on certain criteria. These groups are typically determined by the actions that have been taken on the website.
- AI-driven personalization
The most complex method of personalization. This will create a unique profile for the visitor by consuming data from sources like cookies and the actions they take on the website through machine learning.
Modern web platforms and technologies will allow organizations to deliver more dynamic, AI-driven automated experiences that are personalized to the user.
Remember, the better you understand who your audience is and what they’re looking to achieve along their journey with your brand, the more likely you are to get the best results from these types of personalization strategies over time.
Implementation: Persona versus One-to-One Personalization
Two of our favorite tactics when implementing personalization via your web platform are “visitor groups” and “content recommendations”.
Visitor Groups (Persona-based segmentation)
A visitor group is a segment of your audience that is defined by certain “criteria” filters. This criteria can be based on different categories such as a visitor’s IP address or specific and designated categories they have viewed on your website.
With several different groups defined, you can create specific content to appeal to a particular visitor type. The prime value in this tactic is you get to share specific content with a certain kind of persona without having to manage too many personas.
| Type | Effort | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Low | Medium |
| Setup | Medium | Low |
| Maintain | High | Medium |
For this to work most effectively, you must be able to manage all your personas (learn more about finding value in personas for healthcare) into several different visitor groups. Developing these groups typically falls to your marketing team. You need access to the data that is gathered from a visitor’s browsing to help your marketing team develop accurate visitor groups.
Once these groups are identified you need to have a clear idea of what sort of content these visitors need to see to feel like they are getting content that is developed precisely for them.
As you use this tactic ask yourself if your personas will be too broad based on the data you can collect. Do an inventory of the data you do have before considering what content you can deliver to your audience. Your personas should align with acquisition and goals; often personas are not related to performance or measured in a way that helps your web segments.
Content Recommendations (1:1 personalization)
Machine learning makes recommendations for your audience. This is done by gathering anonymous browsing data from the user to create word clouds that properly represent their behavior.
Using this word cloud, many digital experience platforms such as Optimizely will present the most relevant content for that particular user.
| Type | Effort | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Low-Med | High |
| Setup | Low | High |
| Maintain | Low | High |
For this to work well it is ideal to have good metadata on your content. You need to do a good job describing your content with appropriate tags to help AI deliver the appropriate content after it has learned who the visitor is. The prime value in this tactic comes from the ability to be “hands off” once the content and audience are defined. Using content recommendations also compliments visitor groups well.
Getting Started: Quick Wins and Choosing the Right Use Case
Here are two common Q&A’s we often get from clients regarding dynamic personalization for healthcare websites that may be helpful:
- What are some quick wins to consider?
Geolocation is an easy win that many organizations can implement today. Providing relevant provider and location recommendations (as well as imagery) based on a user’s IP address is a nice way to “dip your toes” into personalization.
- Where’s a good place to start when choosing a use case?
Consider working in an area where all of your stakeholders are interested as well.
Picking a service line where the outcomes are fairly linear and predictable will also allow you to measure success and present it internally.
Experiment, gather results, and adjust as needed.
Want to learn more? Watch our 60-minute on-demand webinar “Dynamic Personalization in Healthcare Websites”.
Ready to get started?
We’re here to help you learn more about your audience, understand their journey, and implement the most effective, thoughtful systems to deliver a personalized message.