In an increasingly uncertain economic climate, marketers and merchandisers continuously have to do more with less because, even though companies are slowly investing in marketing again, budgets remain <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-marketing-budgets-look-like-in-2022">below prepandemic levels</a>. Nonetheless, marketers are still expected to deliver high-performing digital experiences that keep up with consumer demand and that help brands compete in crowded marketplaces. To keep meeting their KPIs, marketers turn to personalizing digital experiences, but doing that has traditionally been challenging to deliver without a major investment. How can businesses capitalize on personalization without busting the budget or overtaxing their marketers? By embracing a lightweight, cost-effective approach called tactical personalization. <h2>Why not stick with traditional personalization?</h2>As promising as personalization is, it poses real concerns. At the outset, it is a cumbersome process because personalized content is often inserted with JavaScript into your site while it’s loading, resulting in slow page loads and poor Core Web Vitals (CWV). Plus, to serve that content, the personalization vendor sends it from the vendor’s server back to your page, hampering the loading speed even more.Slow loading sites frustrate visitors, resulting in cart abandonment and negatively impacting key metrics like conversion rates and SEO rankings. That’s because performance (page-load time) is now a ranking factor in Google search. Fast loads lead to higher SEO; slow loads can boot you to the dreaded zone of page two or beyond. Hence, poorly implemented personalization might not only waste money, but also actively undermine your investments in SEO and the commerce experience.Personalization can easily get expensive. Many brands implement it with costly software suites, locking themselves into having to build experiences according to the vendor’s paradigms and roadmaps, which impacts their choices and ability to innovate in the future. Specifically, the following costs are involved:<ul><li>Systems and infrastructure to support personalization, which necessitate a host of custom code.</li><li>Custom integrations for data lakes.</li><li>Advanced tools and manpower that can segment audiences, analyze large data sets, and create huge amounts of content.</li><li>The expense of tanking performance.</li></ul>Nonetheless, the potential return on investment from personalizing experiences is huge: Deloitte reports that <a href="http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ca/Documents/deloitte-analytics/ca-en-omnia-ai-marketing-pov-fin-jun24-aoda.pdf">80 percent of customers</a> prefer to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences. That’s why the smart choice is to implement tactical personalization.<h2>What is tactical personalization?</h2>Tactical personalization means delivering compelling content fast with fewer resources and no loss in speed or scalability. As a result, you understand your customers better and propel them to conversion—without lowering your experience’s performance or other marketing investments.Moreover, tactical personalization is an economical technique that fits into existing workflows. You can then forget about the complex scenarios you’ve heard about others building and simply personalize at the scale that makes sense for your organization or team. With a small investment, you quickly see the ROI of delivering the most relevant products, content, or offers. You can then keep those benefits or scale even further.Uniform brings tactical personalization to your digital experiences without using render-blocking scripts or expensive origin calls, delivering personalization at your edge of choice in milliseconds. We also offer simple-to-deploy tests that deepen your customer knowledge quickly. And, since tactical personalization does not affect page-load times or SEO rankings, your investments won’t impact other projects. <h2>What are the benefits of tactical personalization?</h2>Brands that adopt tactical personalization streamline their process and boost conversions without a complex workflow or sky-high budget—while keeping page performance and scalability intact. Specifically, with tactical personalization, you can—<ul><li>Iterate messages to customers with content from different sources.</li><li>Deliver targeted content with A/B testing tools.</li><li>Reduce spending and technical overhead on integration.</li><li>Avoid complicated adaptations to workflows.</li><li>Place marketers back in control of the experience-creation process.</li></ul><h2>How do you implement and deploy tactical personalization?</h2>Implementing tactical personalization with Uniform is simple due to the following:<ul><li>Uniform integrates seamlessly with market-leading <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">headless CMSes</a>. We offer quick integrations with popular vendors, including Contentful, Contentstack, Kontent.ai, and Sanity. </li><li>Uniform can connect other headless CMSes or commerce platforms through its own interface so that you can easily combine personalized content sources to maximize their benefits.</li><li>By connecting Uniform personalization to your Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can create personalization rules based on your knowledge of your customers. For example, ensure that customers who have only viewed and bought formal menswear before are shown content that highlights ties instead of, for example, bikinis.  </li><li>With Uniform, you deliver <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/personalization/personalizing-webpages-with-akamai-edgeworkers">personalized content from the edge side</a> of leading CDNs, such as Akamai, Cloudflare, Netlify, and Vercel. Consequently, your personalized content loads quickly, avoiding the flickering of slow pages and content in traditional personalization. That’s because Uniform does not depend on third-party scripts, delivering high performance, a better user experience, and happier visitors.</li></ul>Privacy is always a key consideration for personalization. In the past, the default was to harvest all possible data about visitors. Now brands must comply with legislation like GDPR and CPA, which restricts what data to collect and how to use it. Therefore, you must adopt a privacy-first personalization strategy, whereby data stays in your visitor’s device, and focus more on the visitor’s in-the-moment intent. With Uniform’s signal and intent tools, you can readily adopt such an approach with UTM links and on-site behavior to quickly build personalized content without breaching privacy regulations.<h2>How do you start tactical personalization?</h2>Tactical personalization offers a fast, lightweight way of delivering highly relevant content while giving brands an edge in today&#39;s fiercely competitive market. With Uniform, personalization is a fast-to-implement and high-ROI tool that helps marketing and merchandising teams deliver results and conversions without adding staff or processes, or incurring heavy license fees.

For more details, download the whitepaper <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/understanding-mastering-personalization-web">Understanding and Mastering Personalization of Websites</a> and <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">contact us</a> for a demo.

Tactical personalization: the right content to the right consumers

Brands often report that performance is one of the main obstacles to <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/understanding-mastering-personalization-web">widespread adoption of personalization</a>, which slows down websites and adds to the server load. With Akamai EdgeWorkers, you can run custom logic—from processing to decision making, such as personalization—at the edge. This article focuses on personalization. What is “the edge”?As you well know, people visit a website on a browser that connects to the site. For content delivered through a CDN like Akamai Ion, instead of connecting directly to your site, the browser links to a copy of it created by the CDN. Such a setup yields two advantages:<ul><li>The greater the physical distance between a visitor and a site, the more slowly the site loads. Since your site likely resides in a data center, it’s close by some visitors but far away from others. Gratifyingly, a CDN hosts your site in numerous locations (called points of presence) worldwide, minimizing the distance for all visitors.</li><li>CDN vendors have spent years—or, in the case of Akamai, decades—optimizing their networks for speed. More likely than not, therefore, CDNs can handle visitor requests faster than your site.</li></ul>The edge refers to the fact that visitors connect to the part of Akamai’s global network that’s closest to them geographically—literally the network’s edge.What are the limitations of the edge?Since visitors connect to a copy of your site, your CDN only delivers copies of your webpages and cannot dynamically generate pages as a regular web server can. EdgeWorkers effectively resolve that issue. What is an EdgeWorker?An EdgeWorker is a lightweight application that you deploy to Akamai’s network after configuring Akamai to leverage EdgeWorkers for certain webpages.How do you personalize experiences with an EdgeWorker?Personalization involves two activities:<ul><li>Configuration, which can be a manual process, an automated one, or a combination of the two. EdgeWorkers cannot handle this task, but <a href="https://docs.uniform.app/docs">tools like Uniform</a> can. </li><li>Implementation, which an EdgeWorker can tackle. When a visitor requests a webpage after you’ve embedded the configurations for personalizing your webpages, the following process takes place:<ol><li>Akamai determines that an EdgeWorker should handle the request and runs an EdgeWorker.</li><li>The EdgeWorker determines which page the visitor requested and retrieves it from the Akamai cache.</li><li>The EdgeWorker personalizes the page according to the configurations you specified.</li><li>The EdgeWorker serves the visitor the personalized page.</li></ol></li></ul>What is Uniform’s role in edge-side personalization?Uniform performs two important tasks for personalizing webpages on the edge on Akamai:<ul><li>Enables brands to specify the details of personalization with other stack components, e.g., a CMS, commerce, or a CDP.</li><li>Offers an EdgeWorker for applying those configurations. </li></ul>Subsequently, personalized pages emerge—lighting fast. Interested in learning more? <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">Contact us</a> for a demo.

Personalizing webpages with Akamai EdgeWorkers

More than just a popular buzzword, personalization is an important component of digital commerce. Businesses that deliver digital experiences replete with meaningful, engaging, and timely personalization reap great rewards. Research has shown that <a href="https://us.epsilon.com/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences">80 percent of consumers</a> are more likely to make a purchase from a site that offers personalized experiences while <a href="https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics">74 percent of them</a> feel frustrated if the content lacks personalization.All too often, however, brands fast-track personalization and end up getting it wrong. Our recent <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/understanding-mastering-personalization-web">whitepaper</a> describes the best practices. Below are the highlights.[![Understanding and Mastering Personalization of Websites](https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/w_700,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2.0/marketing/blog/Blog_BannerAd_Personalization.png)](https://uniform.dev/resources/understanding-mastering-personalization-web)<h2>Understanding the challenges of personalization</h2>Personalization involves much more than merely adding a consumer’s name to a promotional email. <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ca/Documents/deloitte-analytics/ca-en-omnia-ai-marketing-pov-fin-jun24-aoda.pdf">According to Deloitte</a>, hyper-relevant personalization is what counts to shoppers. Unfortunately, challenges abound in delivering relevancy, including the following:<ul><li>Brands often underestimate how much content they must create to personalize webpages.</li><li>Companies need a customer-oriented mindset to figure out the nuances of personalization.</li><li>Organizations without a long-term personalization plan often adopt short-lived strategies, which might score some quick wins but are likely to fail in the long run. </li><li>Marketing and IT teams, frequently bogged down with other digital-experience tasks, lack the bandwidth for and commitment to personalization.</li></ul><h2>Using the personalization engine</h2>Before implementing personalization, companies must identify the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in their readiness by holistically examining their needs and strategies. A helpful framework is the personalization engine, which maps out the key categories and components. At the center is the customer as the focus of all activities. See the diagram below.<ul><li>Customer-focused investments. To stay ahead of the competition, go beyond the basics and continually raise the bar with value-adds like customized rewards and enhanced offerings.</li><li>Customer first. Always focus on customers. Pay attention to their shopping journey and preferences, offering them incentives as appropriate.</li><li>Resources. Teaming up the right professionals for personalization is crucial, including creatives who craft experiences, operations specialists who handle the processes, and technologists who build the designs.</li><li>Full commitment. Successful personalization requires executive buy-in, metrics that delineate what’s working and what isn’t, and a clear structure of the organization’s “owners” for the feature.</li><li>Knowledge. Of paramount importance are the related expertise and data for building and optimizing the processes.</li><li>Logic. An automated, real-time personalization system powered by an integrated tech stack is invaluable for targeting the right customers with the right message at the right time in the right channel.</li><li>Content. A high volume of customer-targeted content at a high velocity is king.</li><li>Insights. With relevant, real-time insights, you can better serve customers. Of particular value is data that clues you in your customers’ concerns for quality, privacy, and integration.</li></ul><h2>Leveraging the power of personalization</h2>If done right, personalization is an extremely powerful tool for growing your business by making customers feel heard, understood, valued, and catered to, hence <a href="https://www.epsilon.com/us/about-us/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences">far more likely to make purchases</a>. Understanding the requirements and overcoming the inherent challenges is well worth the effort.For further insights on how to make personalization work for your brand, download our <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/understanding-mastering-personalization-web">whitepaper</a>.

The personalization engine: a blueprint for success

To maintain an engaging relationship with your audience and increase conversions to your site, you need personalization. However, creating personalized experiences is technically challenging. Most personalization techniques involve dynamic rendering and an origin server that holds personalization rules for end-users—a slow approach that often negates the conversions gained through personalization.Among the many moving parts to consider, performance and scalability are tough nuts to crack. Fortunately, companies like Vercel, which recently released <a href="https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/functions/edge-middleware">Edge Middleware</a>, make those problems readily solvable for developers. With Vercel in place, you only need to choose the right tech to personalize at the CDN edge without having to grapple with the one thing that slows things down: the origin server.<h2>The benefits of edge</h2>Vercel offers familiar tech to developers: it’s all JavaScript based. With Edge Middleware, developers have the tools to make great things happen that they could not before. All the dynamic tasks that typically occur on an origin server can now happen near end-users, leading to faster page loads and automatic scaling out of the box. Not only that, Edge Middleware have user data that’s handy for personalization: country, region, and the device in use.<h2>The personalization process at the edge</h2>By eliminating the origin server that is typically far away from end-users and bringing the dynamic rendering closer with Edge Middleware, you can personalize with high performance and in a decentralized manner. The only way to personalize without a central brain that knows all the personalization rules is to bring that brain into the software as a first-party tool. This is how that works:<ol><li>Create and store the configuration rules, i.e., all the <a href="https://docs.uniform.app/capabilities/personalization">criteria for personalization</a>, in the codebase as a manifest JSON file at build time.</li><li>Store variations of the personalized content in the codebase at build time. Since a <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">headless CMS</a> is generally in use, those variations are tiny JSON models in the form of components.</li><li>The Edge Middleware has a tracker that monitors user behaviors, which are signals that users give off by doing something on the site. The Edge Middleware awards a score to the personalization criteria configured in step 1. </li><li>The tracker automatically creates a profile of user actions and, based on the scores awarded against the various criteria, displays the right content.</li><li>You can render the content via the Edge Middleware or in the front end at hydration time.</li></ol>The above approach to personalization is how Uniform Context works. Combining Edge Middleware rendering of personalized content with JavaScript hydration for subsequent page loads renders highly dynamic pages within ~50 milliseconds only. The approach is to initially render all the pages statically (SSG/Jamstack) and ensure that the Edge Middleware knows which parts it can personalize. While serving a page, the Edge Middleware checks if personalization is needed and, if so, fills the identified components with the correct personalized content.Another benefit of the Vercel edge is that at the edge level, the CDN knows a lot about the end-users: their location, city, device, browser version, etc. Thus, Uniform Context can prepersonalize pages with Edge Middleware according to the location or device information from the Vercel CDN.Want to try that out for yourself? You’ll find all the details in Uniform’s <a href="https://docs.uniform.app/integrations/cdn/vercel/personalization">documentation on Vercel’s edge-side personalization</a>.<h2>Conclusion</h2>To recap, by combining Uniform Context on Edge Middleware with statically rendered pages (SSG/Jamstack), you can create highly dynamic, personalized pages that load in less than a minute. In the past, Uniform offered dynamic personalization features through Vercel ESI. Edge Middleware now gives you a much more flexible and intuitive model for implementing personalization at scale. For further reference, see Uniform’s <a href="https://docs.uniform.app">documentation</a> or join our <a href="https://uniform.to/discord">Discord Server</a> to discuss topics of interest with the Uniform community.

Uniform Context

A bit more Context

Personalization and performance

Learn fast, win faster

Do more with your data

Smooth workflows

Don’t choose between personalization and performance again

Personalization meets performance