Category: Personalization

I think it’s fair to say that the past few weeks have been interesting and, in some cases, pretty difficult. Like so many of you, we’ve been keeping our global community in our hearts as we’ve seen the rapid spread and impact of COVID-19 in many places around the world. Whenever our collective community faces a hardship, especially with such uncertainty, I am more aware of and appreciative for how information is shared.  Working within the DMO space, I love helping our clients brainstorm ways to share their unique travel experiences, as well as recommend best practices for ethical content. But I also find a great deal of meaning in the content that isn’t always the most exciting but provides vital information to the people who need it most. 

As we’ve had a number of our customers recently use Bound content to share the latest updates about COVID-19, we wanted to take this opportunity to provide general information and best practice recommendations to all our customers about using Bound content for emergency or other notification alerts.

Recommendations for content type:

Banners remain some of our favorite pieces of content for their diverse ability to directly provide information to audiences.  This is especially true for emergency notifications, given that information can be provided in a calm, straightforward way when imagery may not be appropriate.  Banners are one of our least intrusive forms of content and work well on both Mobile and Desktop, which makes them a great form to use for any type of notification.

Recommendations for content placement:

While your Homepage is typically a great starting place for sharing information with your audiences, it’s worth taking a thoughtful look at where notification content could be most appropriately visible.  One factor may be which audiences will best benefit from this information. Recently, we’ve seen customers tailor their informational content to Trip Planning sections in addition to main landing pages, as this is especially relevant for out of market visitors.  Main landing pages could be a beneficial place to highlight this information. As with all content, you can always expand this content throughout the site as it becomes appropriate.

Recommendations for content limitations:

Similar to being thoughtful about where we serve our content, we want to be thoughtful about how often to show this content.  While we may initially want to show this information multiple times per session, we know it is a fine line between providing appropriate information and overwhelming visitors with content they are not interested in or engaging with.  We recommend setting a limit on your notification content so that a visitor can become aware of this notification but is not greeted with the same content multiple times in one visit.  One option would also be to exclude visitors who have already visited the destination URL to ensure your content is shown to the most relevant audience.

Recommendations for audiences:

Speaking of audiences, I love that emergency notifications highlight the absolute effectiveness and purpose of personalization: providing the best information to the right audience. We’ve seen this with our customer’s previous notification content for Hurricane recovery efforts in providing the in-market audience with relevant local resources, as well as the out-of-market audiences with guidance on how they can best support recovery efforts. Tailoring your content to your audiences is a sure way to increase engagement and connect your visitors with the best information possible. 

We encourage you to keep these recommendations in mind when planning notifications of any kind to your audiences, and know that your Bound CSMs are always here to answer questions or talk through what content is most appropriate for your destination.  

To those communities affected by COVID-19, tornadoes and other loss, please know that you are in our hearts, and we are with you in solidarity.  

The post Best Practices for Emergency Notification Content appeared first on Bound.

Let’s imagine you’re a personalization marketer and thanks to Bound you’ve really been flexing your marketing chops. You’ve successfully set up targeting for all your geographic markets. You’re speaking to your Fly Markets and Drive Markets. You’re even personalizing to that one city in Germany that keeps reading your blog posts (Hello, Frankfurt!). You know exactly who to speak to on your website and how to speak to them. 

And that’s fantastic! Geographic targeting is a great way to personalize to your website visitors because it’s relatively easy to enable and can be highly effective. But, geographic targeting is also like hanging out in the shallow end of an Olympic-size pool. You’re going to have a good time in that shallow end, but there’s an entire pool of other opportunities to explore! And that next deeper level of segmentation is Behavioral Targeting. 

Behavioral Targeting is essentially speaking to a visitor based on their interactions with your site. Instead of targeting broadly based on a visitor’s location in the world, you’re instead targeting based on what pages they are visiting or how many times they have visited the site. It’s an expansive way to categorize audiences so it may seem daunting at first. But, with the help of your trusty personalization expert, you can easily add behavioral targeting to your personalization toolbelt. 

So, get your swim caps and floaties on, we’re diving into our favorite ways to target your on-site visitors based on behavior!

Current URL

We’ll start with segmenting based on the page a visitor is on. Targeting based on a visitor’s current URL is a natural next step after personalizing based on Geographic location. This type of segmentation involves targeting a visitor when they are on a specific URL (i.e. the homepage) or when that visitor is on a page within a set of URLs (i.e. the visitor is currently on a page that contains /blog). Often times, this brand of behavioral segmentation is dismissed as being too simplistic, but in practice, it can be highly effective.

For Example:

Imagine you have an especially tantalizing blog written about a new outdoor park in town. This would be a perfect piece of content to get in front of everyone interested in the Adventure or Outdoors area of your website. Ah-Ha! Let’s set up a fly-in to serve to every person currently on your site’s ‘Outdoors’ page to make all visitors interested in that subject aware of this wonderful resource in your city! 

Previous URL

Similar to the above targeting strategy, you can also set up personalization based on pages that a visitor has been to in the past. If a visitor returns repeatedly to a specific page or set of pages, that’s a pretty clear indication that they are interested in content of a specific nature. The most strategic personalization would be to show them related content or to offer a conversion point related to their engagement with those interest based pages once they have left those pages.

For Example:

If a visitor has gone to the dining pages on your site 2+ times they are either A) hungry or B) a ‘foodie’ (or both!) . If you’d like them to digest (pun!) the food and drink content on site without interference, you may not want to target them on a food focused page. However, if they leave the food focused area of the site and you have more related content, like a restaurant deal or a special Dining Guide, it would be fantastic practice to target them on other pages with content you know they will find interesting. Bring on that creative cuisine content!

Number of Visits 

We’ve written a blog post or two on how to speak to your repeat visitors. That’s because speaking to repeat visitors is a super effective way to target people you know are interested in your destination. Repeat visitors have seen your site and virtually said, “I should visit this site again!” What a compliment- They like you, they really like you! The trick to getting those repeat visitors to come back for more is figuring out how to show new content to keep those visitors engaged.

For Example:

Within the realm of targeting repeat visitors, there’s a ton of strategic possibilities. One of my favorite ways to target repeat visitors is to set up a waterfall system of targeting based on what visit a person is on (i.e. first, second, third, fiftieth visit??). In practice, this could look as simple as targeting a ‘first-time visitor’ with a Fly-In that promotes the Visitor Guide conversion. Then on a visitor’s 2nd visit, serving a fly-in that promotes a eNewsletter conversion. On a 3rd visit, you could serve a fly-in asking for a survey completion. This gives a repeat visitor something new to do every time they engage with your site and will keep those visitors coming back for more. Of course, this is not limited to conversion centric fly-ins. You could similarly target a repeat visitor with new blog posts or perhaps send them straight to an events page. The strategy will be dependent on your visitors and dependent on your site. 

Goal Completions

A visitor comes to your site and after a few minutes browsing, decides to download a Visitor Guide. Woo-hoo! Start the Parade! Throw the confetti! But now what? Do you want that visitor to leave the site? Chances are you want to keep them around. And you may even have more conversions that you’d like them to complete. Targeting based on Goal Completions allows you to lead a visitor down a predetermined nurture path, consistently giving that visitor a new asset to download or a new form to fill out. This is when targeting based on goal completions truly enters your segmentation strategy. 

For Example:

If a person has downloaded your visitor guide, you may segment them into a group of visitors that has already converted on that specific goal. With this information you can assume that this visitor is highly engaged, after all, they just downloaded something from your site! In theory, that visitor would be a fantastic person to serve an eNewsletter prompt. Since they’ve already converted on the Visitor Guide, you want to push them further down your nurture path and personalize content to them which promotes the next step on their journey into your website. 

The 4 Behavioral Targeting strategies listed above skim the surface of potential ways to speak to your online audiences but in this Olympic pool of personalization, there’s even more you can do! If you want to keep swimming deeper and deeper, reach out to a member of the Bound team or your designated swim instructor (CSM) to learn more! 

The post A Deep Dive into Behavioral Targeting appeared first on Bound.

New, new, new. New year, new website, new goals… the focus on new never ends. T&T marketers know that the majority of their website visitors are new users and tend to focus their personalization strategies around engaging these new visitors. But what about your return visitors? Do you know how your return visitor traffic stacks up compared to other destinations?

Working in the DMO space gives us unique insight. Return visitors can make up anywhere from  6-30% of sessions for destination websites. While return visitors commonly have slightly higher performance on pages per session and visit duration, they tend to have a higher bounce rate than new visitors.

It makes sense to prioritize strategies for new visitors, but if almost a quarter of your website traffic is returning visitors, it’s also important to plan the best possible website experience for these repeat visitors. 

Here are 3 questions to keep in mind when thinking about your repeat visitor traffic and some best practices to keep this audience engaged.

How Frequently Are You Showing Overlay Content?

We’ve discussed the ethics of “pop-ups” before, but this is of utmost importance when considering your repeat traffic. If you are only setting daily or weekly limits on your pop-up content, your returning traffic is likely being repeatedly disrupted by that same old content. 

Best Practice: Serve unique content only once a month at minimum, and if possible, consider showing even less frequently, like every six months or once a year. If there is specific content repeat visitors should see multiple times, set up fresh versions of the content instead of short frequency limits. This prevents content fatigue and also helps the new content stand out from what they saw on their last visit.

Where Are Your Repeat Visitors Located?

Geo-targeting is always a solid strategy and shouldn’t be overlooked for repeat visitors. Because your repeat audience is smaller, breaking out individual markets creates very tiny visitor groups, but consider separating your local audience from drive or fly regions. The reasons a local visitor frequents your website are quite different from someone who would be potentially flying in. Additionally, while repeat visitors are prime candidates for hotel/places to stay offer content, someone already in the area likely isn’t interested in these deals.

Best Practice: Take advantage of geo-targeting to create in market, drive market, and fly market repeat visitor groups. You can then serve content to these visitors that’s more likely to be of interest, such as hotel deals for out of market visitors and activity deals or upcoming events to local visitors.

Where Are Your Repeat Visitors Entering the Site?

Identifying where repeat visitors are landing can help you determine if it’s a page that typically has fresh content, or if they’re potentially seeing the same thing over and over again. The homepage is still the most common landing page for repeat visitors, and having been there before these visitors are less likely to scroll down the page. 

Best Practice: If you aren’t currently updating your hero content on a regular basis, consider targeting repeat visitors with fresh content or at minimum, new imagery. To combat fatigue, plan to update repeat visitor content more frequently than your other visitors. Alternatively, consider setting up your hero based on exclusions so that repeat visitors who have already been to the destination page are served new content. 

By keeping these best practices in mind, you can use personalization to make your returning visitors feel like they’re getting a new experience not once, but every time they come to your website.

If you’re interested in discussing other ways to engage your returning visitor traffic, contact us today!

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