Why web personalization is a critically important marketing activity for B2B companies?

Today, web personalization is the most important marketing activity that creates a more meaningful experience for your customers and generates better business results. How? This article will explore that question and more. First, let’s start with an example that illustrates why web personalization is a critical component of your marketing activities:

As a marketer, you are not sending the same exact email to your entire database, even if it delivers results. Your database is comprised of multiple segments and different types of customers. Some people may be very new to your product or service, while others are long-standing customers, so sending the same communication, offer, or content piece to these folks is not effective. But most marketers are doing just that, daily, on their website. They offer the exact same experience to every visitor, every time, regardless of their behaviour or attributes. And each month, they do it tens of thousands of times (sometimes much more)—as active prospects and customers visit their site. So, while marketers understand how detrimental a repetitive experience is on email—often that thinking doesn’t extend to their websites. And that’s a mistake when you think about how much of their interested audience they alienate every day by skipping the chance to speak to them as individuals on their website.

For a marketer, whose marketing activities drive toward key metrics— conversion, engagement, and increased lead generation or order value—failing to utilize your website in the most effective way possible has a measurable impact. This is because your website is the hub of your marketing activities and web personalization is proven to make that hub much more effective. Today’s consumer expects instant gratification. Now, more than ever, they are better informed, more selective, and quicker to say no. Each day, they are bombarded with new marketing messages, so only the most targeted and relevant messages earn their attention. If your website doesn’t immediately address a buyer’s needs, they will bounce and seek products or information from somewhere else.

So how do you create a website that accelerates engagement, conversion, and retention for your prospects and customers, and creates a more relevant experience for your buyer?

Just like you would not send the same email to your entire database, you do not want one, generic message on your website. To be effective and relevant for every individual or segment in your audience, you need multiple, personalized messages. Web personalization is a critical component of your marketing—from creating a great customer experience to driving better conversions.

This article is for all marketers who use or are considering using, personalization on their website and across their web channels.  

Who can use web personalization?

Because of the complexity and traffic volume of some websites, marketers sometimes assume that personalization is complicated or time-consuming and therefore only for organizations with big teams or big budgets. But, with the right tools in place, personalization can be a simple process for all marketers that can drastically increase the efficacy of your website and cross-channel marketing programs, regardless of your organization’s size or business type. In many cases, the return on investment (ROI) for web personalization, even with limited resources, is higher than other, more traditional, marketing programs.

How web personalization helps marketing leaders?

Web personalization helps marketers move the needle by enabling them to deliver a continuous, personal experience to individual visitors or target audiences at scale. Personalized experiences result in higher engagement rates, increased brand preference and loyalty, improved conversion rates, and an uplift in sales.

Engage more people: Every day, your website handles a huge volume of visitors. These visitors may arrive at your website organically, but more likely they arrive because you drove them there through paid programs (pay-per-click, social advertising, etc.). Almost every company—from startups to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to enterprises—has thousands of visitors on their site every month & sometimes this number is in the tens or hundreds of thousands a month. This is a critical opportunity to engage visitors and convert them in a more efficient manner. But marketers are missing out on this huge potential by offering these visitors a website that lacks personalization.

According to data from Rocket Fuel, the average bounce rate for a website is 55%. That means more than half of the people that visit your site leave almost as soon as they enter. Capturing even a few more percentage points of your traffic with a personalized message translates into real dollars.

Stay ahead of the competition: If you do not personalize your website, your visitor will not see the best message you have for them and may not spend the time to find it. You then risk the chance of another company capturing the attention of your buyer and showing them what they were looking for.

According to a study by GE Capital Retail Bank, over 80% of consumers do their own research online before buying and only the most compelling message and offer will win. You invest a great deal to drive consumers to your website, so make sure that once they get there you offer them a relevant experience.

Is web personalization is only for building awareness?

Nope. Web personalization captures the entire buyer journey. But your efforts shouldn’t be focused on just the awareness-building stage of the customer lifecycle. Marketers need to be vigilant to engage their customers in a personal way throughout the entire customer journey. After all, your prospects and customers will continue to come back to your website over and over throughout their relationship with you. So, your messages need to evolve as your relationship grows and their needs change.

Whether you are marketing to businesses or consumers, web personalization enables you to create meaningful, real-time interactions with your audience by dynamically engaging them with the most relevant offer, content, and imagery that you have. Using tools, you can create tailored website experiences in real-time for each unique visitor that adapt and change over time. You can show your visitors what they want to see, in the way they want to see it, every time they visit your website.

What are the steps for implementing web personalization?

Start with defining your goals. Then determine: What do you want to say to them? What will you personalize for them? The possibilities are nearly endless, but there are good places to start. Think about the first messages or content each audience should see as they visit your website for the first time. Try a combination of calls-to-action, images, offers, and content, which can include promotions, offers, blog posts, testimonials, videos, and more. Marketers can personalize these assets based on the audiences they are targeting and their objectives.

 Finally, identify: Where can you personalize? Think about where on your website you can best connect with each segment or where the most value can be gained. The homepage is a good place to start. For example, you might want to show a financial services case study to someone from that industry who is visiting your site for the first time, but alternatively, show a 1-on- 1 live demo offer to someone who has been to your site multiple times and is highly engaged. Or if you know your visitor is a return visitor, maybe it’s time to offer them a coupon or free shipping, versus a first-time visitor where you may want to showcase the best-rated items from your site. It’s important to remember that your site visitors don’t always visit the homepage and may be directed by search engines to various inner pages. A good web personalization solution allows you to define campaigns that run across the site pages and will engage the visitor wherever they land or browse your site without requiring any page-specific configuration or definition.

What are the different types of web personalization?

There are six main types of personalization that you can use to engage your target audience.

1.Geo-Location: One of the most straightforward ways that marketers use web personalization to target their visitors is by location. Depending on the type of business you market to and your offer, the way you target based on location could differ. For example, if your business attends tradeshows and wants to encourage visitors within a certain geographic region (be it city, state, or specific countries) to attend the show, web personalization can help by displaying a registration discount code for visitors within that region. It’s not something you would promote to all visitors on your homepage, but the ability to be selective makes it feasible— and very effective. Alternatively, if you are an e-commerce retailer operating across the globe, you can use web personalization to target visitors based on their current location—showing summer clothing to an Australian visitor and winter clothing to a Canadian visitor or display different shipping terms to encourage more shoppers to buy. Regardless of the specific use case, creating specialized campaigns that identify users based on their location offers them an experience that feels unique and personal, and is more likely to resonate with them.

2.Behavioural: As you observe an anonymous website visitor, your web personalization tool can build a behavioural profile for them based on the way they navigate your website, engage with the material, and act. It can also leverage behavioural aspects, such as the referral site and the search term the visitor used to find you. With a web personalization tool that has real-time capabilities, you can act on these behavioural data points immediately, even as soon as they happen, and actively adapt your website for that visitor. If you already know the visitor and the contact exists in your database, behavioural targeting factors in not only their behaviour but also all the other data that you know about them. This is considered personalizing based on contact data—a type of personalization that we will cover next.

3. Contact Data: In many cases, a buyer visiting a site has had previous interactions with the brand and is known to them. To take behavioural personalization one step further, marketers can use a web personalization solution that connects to their marketing automation platform to listen and respond to their contacts and customers, over time and across channels—so activity on one channel, say an email opened or a call logged into the contact centre, helps inform the personalization that occurs on their website. The information you already have on a specific buyer, such as previous purchases or interests, score and profile, business role or customer type, can be used to further customize and optimize their buying experience on your website with more relevant offers. For example, a customer that has shown previous interest in a brand-new SUV will be presented with content and offers on your SUV models, their features, and lease terms, while a customer that already bought a specific car model can be offered a relevant upgrade or service package.

4.Vertical-Based: Visitors arriving at your site come from a variety of places, but some may need more specific messaging than others. One example of this that many B2B marketers find valuable is targeting your visitors based on their industry verticals— like healthcare, financial services, or government. Each visitor from those verticals has specific needs and requirements that a generic message may not address. Your company might be selling different products to serve each industry or at least messaging the same product differently to address the needs of the different audiences. Tailoring your website and its messages and offers to a visitor’s industry will make you more attractive and trustworthy and help you advance them further and quicker through the sales cycle.

5.Account-Based: Account-based web personalization focuses on the personalization of your website around a targeted and pre-defined list of accounts and individuals. Account-based web personalization enables a marketer to identify a visitor’s company, cross-checking them against a named account list in real-time. If your visitor is from a set list of accounts, you can show them a targeted and specific message, offer, asset, or call-to-action. Target accounts can be those most likely to generate revenue, existing customers, key strategic accounts, or any named list of accounts. With web personalization technology and marketing automation, you can make this experience even more granular and focused by targeting the individuals within an account with unique and specific messages.

Which industries can benefit more from web personalization?

Personalization spans many industries. Personalization is also effective in the considered purchase market ranging from luxury goods to travel, software, and healthcare. Here are several ways that personalization can be used in these markets: 

Luxury Goods: For jewellery sellers, if a consumer with a high-income profile performs a Google search for “gemstones” and clicks on a search result that links to your website, the homepage will be personalized, based on their profile and search term used, to a visual of a higher-priced gemstone offer.

Travel and Leisure: A tourism website can up-sell or cross-sell returning visitors by featuring banners with exclusive VIP packages for existing customers.

Software: Software marketers can identify web visitors by company name and type, allowing them to present relevant case studies and success stories from similar accounts.

Healthcare: Healthcare providers can identify web visitors by location to limit website info strictly to available policies for that specific location.

How to shape your web personalization goals (WHY? WHO? WHAT? WHERE?)

WHY: What are your marketing organization’s key objectives? For example, Customer retention, top-of-funnel acquisition, accelerated nurturing, focusing on targeted accounts, etc.

WHO: Who is your audience? For example Specific locations? Industries? People behaving in certain ways? Existing customers? Anonymous visitors from specific locations? How do you currently segment them and target them across other marketing channels?

WHAT: What will you personalize? What existing content do you have that fits your audience?

WHERE: Where can you personalize? On your website? Via retargeting advertisements? What areas specifically have room for growth?

What are the important metrics to measure success? After you established your goals and use cases, it’s important to think about what success will look like for your organization and then set up metrics so you can create a benchmark before you implement your web personalization campaigns.

Identify key analytics: By setting up analytics beforehand, you can create a benchmark for your status with target segments in terms of engagement and conversion. It will also help validate the audience choices you made by showing you how many prospects/ buyers exist in each segment. It’s important to set your measurements up quickly, even before creating any campaigns, so you can establish baseline metrics and begin testing and iterating. There are a lot of web personalization tools that not only deliver their own metrics but integrate with Google Analytics as well to give you visibility into how specific segments, such as industry, company size, buyer stage, or any other behavioural segments, interact with your website. Combined, web analytics and web personalization, as part of a marketing automation platform, deliver a full-lifecycle tracking experience.

Setting up segments: Once you set up analytics, take note of how your chosen groups currently perform. This information helps you further segment your audience for more effective nurturing to guide buyers toward a purchase over time with relevant messaging and content. Here is some of the information you might need:

1. Number of Visitors: How many visitors from each segment, audience, and vertical visit the site today? Be sure to benchmark before and after you begin web personalization to fully understand how other marketing efforts drive traffic to your site and identify potential areas for improvement. The number of visitors from a given segment is a strong indicator of brand awareness. If you have very few visitors from a target segment, it may mean few of them to know about you and you can’t expect much revenue from them unless you target them more effectively through other channels. Conversely, if you see a high volume or group of visitors outside your target audience, you may want to consider targeting them specifically.
2. Demographics and Behavior: Which types of people visit your site? What do they do once they arrive on your site? Is there specific content they consume? Is it the content you wanted them to see?
3. Engagement: Are people from your target segment browsing several pages per visit or bouncing right out? Do they engage with relevant content or never get to it? How many of them return to visit your site again?

Summary:

Web personalization is an expectation and not an exception. According to eMarketer, more than 85% of internet users specifically expect and accept personalization as a part of their online retail experience. And 83% of B2B buyers say company websites are the most popular channel for their online research. In fact, as a marketer, implementing web personalization is the single most impactful activity that you can start today. Your website is purpose-built to engage buyers and accelerate their movement through their buying journey. For example, if a person visits your website and you implemented web personalization, you could: Identify the visitor’s attributes (like buying intent, behaviour, persona, geo-location, firmographics, etc.) Based on those attributes, present them with the most relevant copy, imagery, offers, and calls-to-action, which create a uniquely customized experience for your visitor. Lastly, your customer’s expectation of personal experience is not limited to your website, so your web personalization efforts need to be attuned to your customer’s activities across every channel and throughout the customer lifecycle.

Conclusion: SPI Greatsands has the tools and expertise to help you develop & implement an effective & world-class web personalization strategy:

About the Author: Shantanu is the founder of SPI Greatsands a leading B2B Marketing & Sales Strategy Consulting firm. SPI Greatsands provides deep expertise, strategic insight, world-class frameworks & systems, that result in the transformation & gets extraordinary results while making every dollar count.

SPI Greatsands helps you propel your growth, achieve significant ROI & develop capabilities you need to expand & realize the full potential of today’s omnichannel opportunities. Visit www.spigreatsandsgroup.com to learn more.

6 Predictive:

While you can certainly target your audience with rules based on the different attributes. Predictive web personalization takes a different approach and complements the slightly more traditional rule-based ones. It often utilizes the real-time functionality of a web personalization tool, instantaneously adapting the content, offers, and invitations on a website or webpage; however, it is based on machine-learning algorithms that predict which content or offer is the best for a visitor and when to display it.

1.Automatic discovery of all the content on your site: videos, product offers, white papers, case studies, blog posts, etc.

2.Machine-learning processes analyze correlations between types of visitors and the content they consumed to formulate content predictions.

3.Dynamic content delivery serves content recommendations based on ongoing performance analysis

Machine learning typically utilizes statistical processing models to learn and then predict what content or offers would be most interesting to specific visitors based on previous content consumption or weighted visitor attributes and their correlation with consuming specific content pieces. This allows predictive web personalization to discover which combination of attributes (location, firmographic, behavior, etc.) is mostly likely to lead to a positive click-through or conversion for a given content asset or offer. Unlike rule-based web personalization—as covered in this article — machine learning and predictive analytics can dynamically cover broader ranges of correlation between visitor attributes and content assets, allowing you to run adaptive marketing campaigns.