5 ways to personalise your corporate website

3 okt 2006

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Personalising a corporate website, what is it and what are the options? Personalisation is the extent to which visitors can exert influence on the content and its presentation at any moment they want to. How can you please the modern and demanding stakeholders? In this article Jungle Rating provides you with inspiration for a more personalised website.

E-mail alerts have been one of the first attempts to enable stakeholders to personalise information. Imagine a financial stakeholder, who only wants to be notified of a specific financial press release, or a certain upcoming event. Enabling stakeholders to subscribe themselves to an e-mail alert service contributes to the level of personalisation of the information, but it also creates a lasting relationship between a company and its stakeholders.
SMS-alerts resemble e-mail alerts, with the only difference that visitors do not receive notifications in their e-mail, but on their mobile phones. Corporate websites frequently offer SMS-alerts for corporate events, as a reminder, but also for the closing-price of the share, or large changes in the share price.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) makes finding new information much easier and saves your visitors valuable search time. Using an RSS reader, visitors can quickly and easily read news on various websites without actually having to visit them.
A feed reader looks like an e-mail browser (Microsoft Outlook). If your corporate website offers an RSS-feed and visitors subscribe to it, they will receive updates in their feed reader. Many corporate websites nowadays offer RSS-feeds. For example, RSS feeds per webpage, so that visitors will receive an alert only when a specific page is being modified. RSS contributes to the personalisation of corporate information. Visitors will not visit your website unnecessarily, but they will be invited pro-actively in case of relevant news or updates.
Personalised HTML reports: companies increasingly publish their financial and sustainability reports in HTML. Hardly any stakeholder will read the entire report from beginning to end, they all prefer specific sections or topics. Mobile services provider O2 enables stakeholders to create their own sustainability report.
A visitor, who is only interested in information on environmental performance and environmental management can select these parts in the online report. Another visitor, interested in the social performance of O2 can skip the environmental topics and select only the relevant social chapters. When visitors have selected their preferred topics, O2 presents their own report, which visitors can read online in HTML, print or save in PDF (see screenshot below).
Corporate shopping cart: Webshops all have a shopping cart, in which visitors can put their products, while surfing on the website. Heineken has adopted this idea on its corporate website. Visitors can add all information they find during their website visit in a section called ‘my documents’. After having visited the website visitors can download all the selected files as a ZIP-file or send them to their e-mail account. This feature enhances the possibilities to personalise information. It helps the visitor to surf effectively through the website while being able to set apart interesting material.