Hey, it's Csaba, and welcome back! In this lesson, we're going to discuss how to choose the right moment to display your messages.
If you find a well-defined audience that has a shared problem, and then craft a great message for this particular segment, you're already halfway towards success. But with website personalization, you have the added luxury of choosing not only the audience and the message, but also the timing of your message. When you get all three right, you'll have the best results!
Visitors have limited attention that they can devote to your messages, and you can easily overwhelm them by displaying a lot of different messages. Even if they are the greatest, most personalized messages, they will ignore all or most of them. At best, they'll just pick up on the one that commands the most attention. Worst case scenario, they'll just leave. This psychological effect of too much choice is called analysis paralysis, and it's an outcome that marketers dread.
Having self-restraint and prioritizing your messaging is a good start. But you also have the option of delaying some of your messages instead of displaying all of them at the same time.
This approach is called layering. Overlays give you the opportunity to trigger some of your messages later (based on time spent on page, or user activity like exit-intent or like a 50% scroll down).
With layering, you can get visitors to focus on your most important messages first, and then use a secondary message as a backup plan if your primary messages aren't working.
In the next lesson, I'm going to share the best ecommerce personalization use cases. I'll see you there!
