Major media companies and publishers are starting to see the benefits of personalization for their marketing and services. They see how it attracts customers and keeps them. In a world of stiff competition, it is a necessity to survive. Retail companies like Amazon have been doing this for years, by looking at their customers’ history and suggesting new products to purchase. However, the media business is a bit different. They do sell services and products, but they also are sending media to consumers for free in order to boost engagement and create advertising revenue. The following reasons are why these businesses are investing more time and money into personalization and the impact it has on them.

Conversion Rates

One of main goals of any online media company is to increase their conversion rates in order to gain more paying subscribers and users. This is very important because it is the main way many serious publishers and media outlets monetize their work. The way many companies convert users is through personalization efforts.

Hubspot uses an aggressive personalized Call-To-Action campaign to achieve higher conversion rates. On just about every blog page you visit, there will be a CTA to sign up for more content. They do this through offering something easy to read but also helpful, such as a simple white paper. This converts new users and lets them warm up to the company as they learn what is offered to them. Hubspot studied 93,000 CTAs on their site, and found out that personalized call to actions had a 42% higher conversion rate than un-targeted CTAs.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is crucial to media sites because it increases the amount of time on the site, the amount of interaction, and how often customers visit. This is important because it increases the ad revenue for companies and increases the probability that customers will use premium features and share with their social networks.

The Huffington Post is a great example. In a case study, they use tools offered by Internet Explorer to reach readers though personalized content. They wanted to offer their readers important news that was also relevant and translated to high share rates and so created pinned features on their website. The result was that users who pinned the site

- Spent 49% more time on the site;
- Were 14% more likely to stay on the site;
- Viewed 11% more pages.

This worked out really well for Huffington Post because it was quick to do, and has increased their engagement greatly. This also is great for users because there is more perceived value in the company and it causes people to consider using premium features and to rely on the site for their needs.

Pageviews and Clickrate

The goal of having more pageviews and a higher Clickrate are universal for media companies. They are so important because it shows companies that they are reaching a larger audience and engaging more people.This can translate into higher ad revenue, shares, and use of premium features. It also means that they can save money on traditional advertising because the cost to attract users to the site will decrease.

The New York Times, and many publishers, increase pageviews by offering a recommended story section. The great thing about the NYT’s version is that you don’t even have to be logged in to use it, it detects your browser history and knows what would be interesting for each user. It lists the recommendations in your Google search results so you can see your recommended stories without having to first visit the NYT’s website. This does a lot for pageviews and clickrate because potential and existing readers can see stories that will matter from them within search results and will be a lot more likely to click on the story and visit the website.

User Retention

User retention is very important to companies because it is the best way to make and save money. The cost of acquiring a new customer is 6-7 times more costly than retaining an existing one. Businesses that just increased customer retention rates by 5% saw profits increase from 5%-95% and this is why customer retention is the main focus of many companies. Personalization helps this because it adds value to media companies that are in a highly competitive market. If consumers see the company as valuable by showing them what is most important, then they are much more likely to return.

The New York Daily News recently added personalization features to their news app which increased retention among subscribers. They have tied their content to the location of each user to bring them more relevant information. They did this to add value to their paper by making the experience highly personalized, instead of solely relying on content. In addition to stories that happen nearby, they offer users to view traffic cameras nearby, a location based city guide, and a QR reader that is used in tandem with the app. The personalization features caught the eye of advertisers as well, and saw that they could target certain readers through location based advertising which greatly increased The New York Daily New’s revenue. Geotargetting is becoming more mainstream for advertisers that can pick users in a certain location with specific interests, and send them custom ads that are more likely to be viewed by readers. These new personalization features give users hundreds of reason to refer to the app each day and this increases user retention because it can be a solution to many problems.

The internet is the biggest universal marketplace. It can feel very impersonal at times and people are missing connection. Personalization is helping the internet feel smaller by catering to every user and making the experience more personal and helpful. If media companies want to survive in the coming years, they need to start taking personalization seriously to make sure they retain customers and continue to grow.