The clear majority of visitors to your website — 98%, in fact — are anonymous when they arrive. That’s a lot of untapped sales potential.

These visitors aren’t proven leads yet, but somehow they found you. Maybe they searched, clicked a banner ad or were referred by a past customer. You’re forced to play it safe with generalized content since you don’t know anything about these visitors.

Or do you? Thanks to increasingly sophisticated personalization technology, marketers can identify anonymous visitors’ browsing behavior, location, referring URLs, search terms, buying history and more. Known as real-time personalization (RTP), these software tools identify a visitor’s attributes, then serve up relevant copy, images and offers.

When a visitor browses a site enabled with RTP software, that visitor’s browsing information is captured and matched to a pre-set marketing campaign. Your site then dynamically serves up pre-determined content to instantly create a personalized experience — all before you even ask for the visitor’s contact information.

For example, RTP can be used to display different calls to action depending on a visitor’s industry, point out a must-read blog post based on browsing history, or highlight products in a similar price range if a shopper hasn’t added something to his/her cart within a predetermined number of minutes.

The hard work
To make the most of an RTP investment, first you’ll need to identify the segments you most want to target (Female fitness enthusiasts? CFOs in the manufacturing sector? Parents of new drivers in the
Midwest? Current buyers or newbies?) Then, assess your current asset library. What can you serve up, and at what point in the browsing process? How can you modify general content to speak to the needs of a specific segment?

Finally, determine next steps for each segment. Will you direct them to additional resources? Offer a free trial? Entice them with free shipping? Base your decisions on the segment’s buyer persona and what actions they’re most likely to take at this stage of the buying process.

Give them what they want
You gain interest — and increased conversion rates — by presenting useful, relevant content. So find out who your visitors are, where they’re coming from and what they need. With RTP software in place, you’ll know your site is putting its best content forward — automatically.