Whether the marketing materials you are leveraging to attract, engage, and keep your customers moving along are part of an email, social media campaign, or landing page, one thing always rings true: clear and attractive calls to action (CTAs) are crucial for generating conversions. However, crafting a CTA that convinces your customer to fill out a form or schedule a demo can be way more difficult than it sounds. Everything from wording, placement, and relevance can influence whether your customer decides to take that action. And, unfortunately, finding a recipe that works often involves a lot of trial and error. 

While we definitely recommend you A/B test your CTAs and other elements of your marketing efforts, the process of refining and enhancing your marketing campaigns is easier when you already have a good foundation to work with. And while there are a variety of factors that can influence whether your target customer clicks on a CTA, there are definitely a few best practices you can follow to improve your chances of piquing your audience’s interest. To help you on your way toward marketing success, we’ve compiled the following tips to help you craft CTAs that are sure to convert more leads.

Be Clear About What You Want Your Customers to Do

The worst mistake that you can make with your calls to action is to not be direct about what you want customers to do and what they will get if they do. If your call to action is not clear from the beginning, you risk having your email recipients or web visitors ignore your plea and navigate elsewhere. Or, even worse, if your prospect does decide to click through, they might be disappointed if they aren’t met with the offer or asset they were expecting to find. This is a surefire way to set the wrong tone and might lead to lack of engagement or unsubscribes and spam complaints down the line. 

Setting clear expectations about what you want your customers to do and what you will deliver when they complete that action allows you to prevent any confusion and improves your chance of success. So, if your goal is to get your prospects to fill out a form to download an eBook, place a button below the form that says “Download the eBook!” instead of “Submit.” This format indicates to your prospects that the eBook will be their reward for filling out the form.

Emphasize the Value Your Offer Provides Your Customers

Whether you’re asking your target audience to download an eBook or make an appointment to talk to an expert, you have to offer some sort of incentive to complete the action that you’re asking them to do. That doesn’t mean that you need to start handing out Amazon gift cards or sending personalized gifts. Instead, you need to ensure that whatever they get when they click a button or fill out a form provides some sort of value.

For example, if you’re offering your audience an eBook, you should use your blog or email copy to clearly explain the type of valuable information they’ll gain if they choose to download and read it. Chances are there’s plenty of easily accessible content on the same topic available online, so your users and recipients will be more inclined to check out what you have to offer if they know what makes it unique. Or, if you’re asking them to schedule a demo with one of your salespeople, make sure to highlight the value of your product or service so they’ll be enticed to clear some time on their calendar to learn more about what you do.

Make Sure Your CTAs Stand Out and Are Easy to Find

It should be common sense by now that a customer cannot complete an action if they can’t find your CTA to begin with. Yet, we’ve all received that confusing email or come across a landing page where we learn about an incredible offer but have no way of knowing where to click in order to access it. In these instances, both the marketer and the prospect end up losing out on a good opportunity.

To avoid this fiasco, design the layout of your email or page so that your CTAs stand out and are easy to find. Don’t hide them on other pages, tuck them beside small-text telephone numbers, or make them available only after multiple clicks or searching.

Where you place your CTAs on a page or email can also influence whether your audience decides to click. Placing your CTAs in the following locations will make them more visible and increase the chance of having your prospect follow through.

• Above the fold: Putting a CTA “above the fold” on your site or email means placing it where it can be seen immediately without scrolling. Include a CTA above the fold on the first page of your site, landing page, email, or other digital property. For emails, we recommend using a responsive template to ensure all recipients can see your CTA regardless of their device.
• In the navigation bars: A “Get Started” or “Learn More” button in the navigation bars at the top or bottom of your page can encourage visitors to take action.
• To the side: You could include a signup button or offer along the side column of your content where readers will see it as they scroll. (This is an especially good tactic for blogs.)
• At the end: The end-of-page CTA can be a good anchor for your page, providing a reason for site visitors to take an action while the information they’ve just read is still fresh in their minds. If they’ve read all the way to the end of your page or email, they are likely interested, so you should take advantage of this opportunity by providing them with a way to further engage with your brand.

Provide More Than One Opportunity for Prospects to Respond to Your CTA

If your CTA is located within the body copy of an email, for example, you can improve the chances of getting your recipient to convert by providing more than one way for them to respond. In this case, you can insert a link to your offer in the header of your email, the body copy, and in a button at the end of the body copy. The reason this works is because some recipients will be immediately ready to learn more while others might want to read your email through to get more context before making a decision. 

If the opportunity calls for it, you can also have more than one CTA. We recommend this tactic with middle-of-funnel customers who may either be at the stage where they want to talk to a sales rep or keep learning more before committing to a real discussion. Providing them options offers them the opportunity to keep engaging regardless of the path they choose. In these instances, however, prioritize your CTAs so that your audience doesn’t choose the option that would be least beneficial for you. 

Provide Personalized Recommendations

Even if your calls to action are clear and you do a great job of describing the value of what you’re offering, prospects will not complete an action if neither of these are relevant to them. Your CTAs should coincide with your customers’ stage in the sales funnel, their industry, and overall pain points or interests. 

For example, your prospects are more likely to schedule a time to talk to an expert as they’re entering the decision-making stage than they will be if they’re just starting to become acquainted with your brand. Similarly, you have a better chance of getting a professional who works in manufacturing to download an eBook about supply chain technology than someone who works in the insurance industry. 

Providing every single customer with a targeted experience might seem like a handful, but it doesn’t have to be if you have the proper tools. A marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) can help you segment your audience based on where they’re at in the buyer journey, their product interests, pain points, and more, so you can improve your ability to target them with relevant information via email. Better yet, tools such as adaptive forms and lead scoring can help you uncover the insights you need to provide a more targeted experience. 

Keep the Momentum Going With Adaptive Web

Speaking of personalized recommendations, you can improve your ability to drive conversions if you continuously provide your audience with multiple opportunities to engage as they browse (instead of relying on a single CTA). Act-On’s Adaptive Web allows you provide each prospect with a personalized web experience by delivering the right content at the right time. This not only allows you to keep your customers moving through the sales funnel and present them with multiple CTAs, but it also provides you an opportunity to keep collecting valuable insights so that both marketing and sales can nurture (and eventually convert) better leads into loyal customers.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage your website to generate demand and drive conversions? Download our eBook, Personalizing the Web Experience (also linked below).

It’s true. Website personalization is all the rage these days — and with good reason. There’s no better way to get great content, product, and service recommendations in front of your target audience segments. 

Naturally, though, there’s a bit of a catch. Not all personalization solutions are created equal. 

Some are more expensive than others. 

Some are more labor-intensive than others. 

And some are more effective than others.

But even the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization solutions can’t achieve their full potential without a thoughtful and thorough website personalization strategy.

Let’s dig a little deeper to gain a shared understanding of what we mean when we say “website personalization,” how you and your marketing team can implement and use website personalization successfully, and also a few of the main benefits of website personalization.

What Is Website Personalization?

Website personalization uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to track user behavior data and deliver tailored experiences based on those behaviors. As a result, you’re able to better target and engage your website visitors as they navigate your site. Better yet, as you review your key performance indicators (pages visited, time on page and site, and conversions), you’re able to then build and update your content strategy around what’s working — and also improve what’s not. 

The idea behind website personalization is that it’s a win-win for everyone. Your consumers don’t have to go on a wild goose chase scouring your website for the information they need. And you’re able to deliver a more comfortable and rewarding experience for your website visitors while also getting awesome insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your content and your content strategy.

For example, let’s say your regional insurance agency sells a ton of great offerings that cover a variety of different policy types (home, auto, life, etc.). Your customers can either purchase individual policies or bundle their coverage. Your software notices that certain website visitors are interested in just one type of coverage, but there’s also another subset of users who seem to be viewing and engaging with content across two or more policy types. A good website personalization solution will begin serving up quotes and content related to bundled insurance offerings to this unique audience segment since they clearly have a need for (or at least an interest in) multiple insurance products.

Website personalization helps you streamline the attraction phase of your holistic marketing strategy, gather useful data for further outreach, and create stronger, more trusting relationships between you and your prospects and customers. What’s more, it gives your sales team crystal clear visibility into your visitors’ preferences and interests — empowering them to have more informed and impactful conversations with new leads and current clients. 

It shortens the sales cycle, improves conversion rates, and leads to more and better closed deals.

How to Use Website Personalization Successfully

So now that we know what website personalization is, let’s examine the steps involved in learning how to use website personalization successfully. 

1) Optimize Your Existing Content Strategy for a Website Personalization Solution

Since website personalization technology leverages machine learning to do its job, the heavy lift required for it to work actually occurs prior to turning it on. Before considering potential solutions and vendors, you should have a firm grasp of your current content strategy. 

Here are just a few questions you should be asking:

• When was the last time you performed a content audit? 
• Do you have any existing content gaps? 
• Is your content up to date?
• Do you have the right assets for your target personas along each stage of the sales cycle? 
• Do you have a nice mix of high-level thought leadership content and more solution-based content?
• Are you tracking content performance? If so, how? 
• Are you emphasizing productive content, updating lagging content, and sunsetting irrelevant or outdated content?

Another pivotal question you need to ask yourself is if you have the right team in place to meet and exceed your goals. Great content marketing requires more than just great writers. Of course, writing skill is paramount, but your content team should also understand SEO best practices, how content impacts demand generation, and, of course, the details and benefits of your products and services — as well as a concrete and comprehensive understanding of your industry.

If even one of these questions isn’t covered to your satisfaction, you might not be able to get the most out of your website personalization solution. So make sure your content strategy is strong across the board, that you have (or are producing) the right types of content, and that you have an awesome content team in place to help you reach your goals.

Most importantly, you need to have your content properly organized and labeled. This means you’ve created and are using a strict taxonomy in which all of your content is broken down by category, sub-category, and tags, and that all of those classifications are consistent across your website. This will impact how your website personalization tool is able to make sense of your content, so it’s imperative that this is in good shape from jump street. 

2) Choosing the Right Website Personalization Vendor

If you’re serious about adopting an effective website personalization vendor, and you’re confident that your existing content strategy is in tip-top shape, the next step in the process is to begin researching and vetting potential vendors. There are a lot of helpful solutions out there, but every organization will have different needs, so your company’s industry, size, and mission should heavily influence your selection process.

Here are a few questions you’ll want to ask as you begin interacting with potential website personalization solutions:

1) How Does This Website Personalization Solution Fit in with Our Current MarTech Stack?

The different tools and technologies your sales and marketing teams use should complement and enhance one another, and the same is true of a website personalization solution. Before deciding on a platform, you should speak with vendors about how their solution fits in with your existing MarTech stack. Specifically, the tool should play nicely with your marketing automation, CRM, and CMS systems, as well as any third-party APIs you’re using. If the proposed solution doesn’t integrate seamlessly with your existing technologies, you should move on — or at least ask if they’re working on building out new integrations.

2) What Are the Capabilities of This Website Personalization Solution?

As I mentioned earlier, not all website personalization solutions are created equal, and some are better suited for specific use cases. So, depending on what you and your key stakeholders have identified as your principal needs, you’ll want to look only at those solutions that are able to meet those needs. Whoever you choose should provide flexible, outcome-based solutions and be willing to work with you to align your content marketing strategy with their platform. Most importantly, the solution should allow you to turn anonymous visitors into known users so that you can continue to market to those individuals on separate marketing channels, such as social media and paid digital advertising.

3) What Are the Limitations of This Website Personalization Solution?

Does the solution work sitewide? Can you tailor it to work in different ways on different pages? Does it work with your CMS? How much work does it require on your end? These are pivotal questions that you should be asking, and the answers will inform your decision. The best website personalization tools are dynamic and can be formatted to any site or page to provide the best content or product recommendations at the perfect time to influence buyer intent. Furthermore, the tool you choose should be simple to use and operate on rules-based logic that make sense given how you’re housing and categorizing your content.

4) What Are the Costs Involved in This Website Personalization Solution?

Website personalization solutions vary greatly by cost, so you’ll want to understand your budget limitations and make that figure clear to the vendor before getting too far in the weeds. There’s no sense wasting your time speaking with a company out of your price range. Once you’ve established a mutual understanding, you’ll need to look closely at several line items in the quoted price — including ongoing management and strategy, onboarding and training, data connections, and platform access. You’ll also want to consider contract length and potential fees for choosing to opt-out prior to completing the engagement.

5) What Is the Time to Value with This Website Personalization Solution?

The most commonly used misnomer in marketing and sales technology applications is “out-of-the-box.” I hear this phrase constantly, and the truth of the matter almost never matches the promise. And when dealing with website personalization, it’s often more misused than with other software tools. Regardless of what a vendor tells you, you need to understand for yourself what goes into getting up and running with your website personalization solution, and the best way to do that is by speaking with current and former users of each solution. You should ask them how long it took to develop their strategy, how long it took to start seeing results, and how long it took to start optimizing their content strategy based on the performance of their website personalization solution.

3) Implementing Your Website Personalization Solution and Tracking Results

Strategy… Check.

Solution… Check.

Implementation… Pending.

At this point, you’re almost there. Now it’s time to open up your new toy, align it with your MarTech stack, and let it absorb the data before turning it on. If you’ve chosen an easy and effective website personalization solution, you’ll be able to install a basic plugin to enable:

• Automated content exports
• Automated code placement
• Admin control for recommendation display options

This should drastically reduce the workload for you and your team and get you started on the right path toward successful implementation and deployment. It might take a week or two to collect enough data for the system to start working properly, so you’ll want to install the plugin as soon as you’re able. After about 10 days, you should have enough data to turn on your solution with the confidence that it will deliver the right content to the right visitors and yield immediate results.

This is where the fun begins because it’s the point at which you’ll begin seeing some initial success. Whatever platform you choose should have its own portal with access to a reporting interface. From your dashboard, you should be able to view aggregate time on site, pages per session, and conversions. 

You should also be able to drill down further to see which content categories are performing the best and even view performance by individual content assets. Best of all, these metrics are unique to those sessions where visitors are engaging with personalized content, so you’re able to see a breakdown of “participating” vs. “non-participating” traffic, which will help you measure the effectiveness of your website personalization software in isolation.

Serve Intelligent Content Recommendations with Act-On Adaptive Web

This blog was a little long, so I don’t blame you if you skimmed. Actually, that’s perfect because you’ve now arrived at the best part!

Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization on the market today. It’s designed to make personalized content recommendations simple, easy, and attainable for every marketer and organization. It’s easy to implement, requires no extra work for marketers, and produces serious results within weeks of installation. It also gives you the ability to manually manipulate your content recommendations to promote new and especially relevant content.

Download our eBook to learn more about website personalization and how Adaptive Web can help you “Personalize the Web Experience.”

In the middle of all this digital disruption sits the insurance industry. Insurers have access to more data than most professionals in other industries could ever dream of, which places them in a unique position within the digital marketing landscape. 

Not only do insurers have more data at their disposal, they also have more incentive to use that information, as insurance consumers are looking for more customized solutions and more personalized messaging and offerings to stand out from competitors. In fact, according to Accenture, 80% of insurance consumers and policyholders want more personalized offers, messaging, and recommendations from their providers (1).

This access to useful data, coupled with a customer base hungry for personalized solutions and marketing, makes the insurance industry an extremely competitive vertical — but there’s still a golden opportunity to differentiate your company from your competitors. Insurance marketers can capitalize on this era of digital transformation by using adaptive personalization strategies across three critical marketing channels: website, email, and landing pages and forms.

Consumers Want Personalized Content — Here’s Proof!

According to Accenture’s study, while nearly 80% of insurance consumers are willing to part with user and behavior data in exchange for insurance coverage recommendations, 20% of insurance customers say their providers aren’t delivering any sort of personalized experience. Worse yet, only 22% of insurers are delivering digital personalization to consumers in the form of offers, pricing, messaging, and recommendations and incentives. 

All of this despite the fact that personalized marketing has been proven effective in the insurance industry. A recent study by Mindtree found that “77% of banking and insurance consumers say that customized promotions encourage them to buy products and services they have never purchased before.” Further, “68% of companies say that more targeted promotions are the key driver of improved online sales over the past 12 months.” Yet, only 38% of key stakeholders at insurance companies are investing in personalization (2). 

Again, this distinction between what your customers want and what your competitors are offering (or lack thereof) could put you at a significant advantage, but you have to act fast and act smart to make the most of this golden opportunity. 

Here are three proven strategies for implementing and optimizing effective personalization initiatives to help you do just that.

1) Boost the User Experience With Intelligent Content Recommendations

Leveraging user behavior data and demographics is a great way to serve up relevant content to interested consumers on your website. Historically, most of this work was done manually by pulling together data from Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and a company’s broker management system (BMS), but this required an enormous investment of time and resources and was difficult to execute properly. It’s just not feasible (or even possible) to accurately track hundreds of thousands of user behaviors manually — much less turn that information into an actionable, effective strategy

Today, however, emerging website personalization platforms are using automation to make this process easier than ever before with little to no additional work for the marketing team. Instead of providing a static experience for each website visitor, marketers can now use machine learning to deliver intelligent content recommendations from the existing content on their site for a more personalized (and personable) user experience. 

Having the ability to anticipate your consumers’ needs and interests while guiding them along a more predictable and natural customer journey will naturally produce better results. As visitors navigate your website, you can collect valuable information about each user and then customize specific areas of your website to increase content relevance for potential consumers, boosting traffic and conversions as a result. In some cases, the personalization algorithm can be optimized for your company to focus on your priorities. And if you’re dealing with known users, you can leverage omnichannel data for an even deeper level of personalization

Still not sure? In 2016, Infosys conducted a study that found that 74% of consumers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized. And a staggering 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who remember their preferences (3). Remember, this study is now nearly four years old, which means customer expectations have only increased, placing the onus on you and your marketing team to meet and exceed those expectations by delivering intelligent content recommendations. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how artificial intelligence and machine learning can help your organization serve up relevant content to your website visitors, you should check out Adaptive Web — Act-On’s intelligent content recommendation solution that’s proven to increase page views, time on page, and conversions. 

2) Target High-Intent Buyers With Email List Segmentation 

Most insurance companies offer numerous solutions within a variety of product lines. All these unique different solutions have just as many personas, which means you need to be delivering specific messaging to a significant number of unique target audiences. The best way to accomplish this is by segmenting your email lists and delivering personalized content to each of your personas in your automated programs (email drip campaigns). 

There are several different ways to segment your lists, but we recommend doing so according to topics of interest (product and services lines), engagement level (high intent, content downloads, etc.), and demographics such as industry, company size, etc. To accomplish this successfully, you’ll need a transparent view into each potential consumer and existing policyholder, which means creating intuitive and detailed client dashboards in your marketing automation platform and/or CRM. 

Regardless of how you choose to segment your lists, each email within your automated program should have a distinct call to action (CTA) that directly relates to the subject line, preview text, and body of your email. The copy should be specific to each user group and highlight your organization as a thought leader in your space. Your customers have a problem; you’re in a position to fix this problem; and here are some best practices and innovative techniques you’ll use to solve their issues if they choose to do business with you.

And by gating preferred resources, you can continue to gather more information about your target audiences and then enter these individuals into different campaigns once their original automated program has run its course.

3) Personalize Landing Pages (and Forms) for More and Better Conversions

Personalizing gated landing pages and forms is an especially important practice since these assets help fuel your demand gen engine — and more relevance means more conversions. If you’re using these pages as part of a pay-per-click campaign (Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.), personalization becomes even more important, as consistent messaging throughout the user experience is a critical part of achieving high quality scores. 

Here are just a few examples of fill-in-the-blank personalization characteristics you can use in building out dynamic landing pages:

• Name
• Company Name
• Industry
• Engagement History
• Previous Ad Copy
• Personal and Professional Interests

The list goes on and on, but before you can start delivering this personalized messaging on your landing pages, you have to learn more about who your prospects and policyholders are, their existing pain points, and what they’re interested in. And the way to capture this information is by offering them enticing content available through dynamic forms using progressive profiling.

Progressive profiling allows marketers and sales professionals to gather data gradually and more effectively. Instead of asking 5-10 *required questions, forms with progressive profiling only display a couple of required fields at a time, and those fields change each time a known user arrives at a form. Over time, you’re able to collect an enormous amount of data because users are more willing to complete one or two fields here and there than they are to complete a lengthy questionnaire just to sign up for a newsletter or download an infographic.

For instance, let’s say Jane clicks through a Google Ad and arrives at a static gated landing page — that journey might look something like this:

• First Touch: In exchange for an eBook, Jane has to enter only her name and email address. Jane thinks this is super easy and super awesome, so she’s happy to oblige. You also think it’s super awesome because now you have a known lead with a name and email address that you can use to personalize content for Jane on subsequent landing or webpage visits.
• Second Touch: She’s back! This time Jane’s on your website getting ready to view an on-demand webinar. The video runs for two minutes and then pauses, replaced by another brief form — this one reads, “Welcome Back, Jane!” and asks for her company name and her position with the organization.
• Third Touch: At this point, Jane is seriously on board with your marketing content. She’s been enrolled in an automated program and is receiving personalized content that is tailored just for her specific needs. The third email in the program is centered around a case study of one of your products, but she has to complete an adaptive form to get the asset. This time, the form reads, “Hello Again, Jane” and asks for her phone number and her estimated time frame for purchase. Once she completes the form, she meets the sales lead qualification threshold based on your lead scoring model and is passed to sales for a personal email or phone call.

With all this useful information, your sales professional Jack is now able to have a more meaningful conversation with Jane — offering proven solutions to her existing and anticipated issues.

Act-On Is the Preferred Marketing Automation Vendor for Insurers

Act-On empowers small, medium, and enterprise insurance companies to create, execute, track, and optimize engaging and effective marketing initiatives in one easy-to-use platform. And our customizable approach to web content, email, and landing pages and forms helps insurance marketers create more personalized campaigns that resonate with their target audiences.

If you’re ready to deliver a more personalized experience for your prospects and existing customers, we’re ready to help! Download the free eBook below or schedule a 20-minute, hassle-free demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Before the digital age, getting good content in front of the right audience was more of a guessing game that was usually influenced by market research and the occasional snail mail survey to give us a few clues about what our prospects might be interested in. Then, as the internet became a staple in our lives, we were able to manually collect some meaningful user behavior data. But analyzing it required serious man hours and expertise — and even then, we couldn’t ever be sure it was 100% accurate. Adding to that challenge, we couldn’t be certain these insights were helping us deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time. 

Now it seems we’re entering a new digital era — one that is defined by the user experience and their interests. Suddenly, developing and distributing relevant content is more important than ever. Thankfully, this transitional period presents a great opportunity to deliver more personalized content to more interested consumers and also create some breathing room between you and your competitors. 

The idea of creating more personal websites tailored for distinct user groups isn’t a new concept, but it’s only recently become a reality for businesses of all shapes and sizes.  Most of us refer to this [not-so] new phenomenon as website personalization, but no matter what you call it, it’s revolutionizing the way we understand and use the internet. Today, even single-employee startups with a super basic website are just a CMS plug-in away from delivering sophisticated website personalization to all their site visitors.

What Is Website Personalization?

There are several different types of website personalization, which means there are also several different definitions. But in a broad sense, website personalization is exactly what it sounds like: creating intuitive web experiences tailored for each individual user. 

You know how Netflix has a knack for serving up your favorite movies? Or how about the way Spotify always plays the perfect song? This is website personalization in action, but it can also be used in retail, advertising, and topical content marketing. For example, Amazon is the gold standard of B2C personalization, serving up spot-on product recommendations on nearly every page you visit. And remarketing ads on Google and other search engines have been around for nearly a decade now, delivering relevant advertisements based on your previous online interactions and preferences. 

In fact, users are becoming so familiar with personalization that according to a 2016 Infosys study, 74% of customers are frustrated when their website content isn’t personalized to their unique needs and interests (1). Further, more than 90% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that deliver tailored recommendations — including both product and content recommendations. But aside from the fact that delivering personalized experiences meets evolving customer expectations, what are some of the direct benefits to you and your company? 

What Are the Benefits of Website Personalization?

We all know that creating compelling content that is informative and encourages engagement can be extremely difficult. And when we up the stakes to try to make that content more personalized for our target audiences, it’s not only challenging, but it can also eat up a lot of valuable resources. It’s hard to be all things to all people, but using software to personalize the user experience is a great way to increase efficiency, web traffic, time spent on your site, and conversions and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) while also conserving resources.

The level of personalization on a website can vary greatly depending on several factors (company size, website sophistication, industry — just to name a few), and certain aspects of website personalization work better with certain sites depending on the function of those sites. For example, are you running an e-commerce site? A marketing agency? Maybe you’re the webmaster or content manager for a local news outlet? Each would likely enable different types of personalization — and each of those could have significant upside if implemented properly and with a sound strategy. 

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on how personalizing content can benefit small, medium, and enterprise-level B2B organizations.

Deliver More Relevant Content Recommendations

Delivering content recommendations to users based on their demographics, behaviors, and interests is a practice that has been around for a while now, but traditionally, these content recommendations haven’t always been relevant or intuitive, which can actually have the unintended consequence of decreasing the user experience.

With new personalization technologies, however, you can leverage pertinent data to serve up fresh content that closely matches user intent and guides them through a wholly unique customer journey. This will help increase the amount of pages a user views, as well as the time they spend on these pages, ultimately increasing the number of conversions on your site and the amount of ROI directly attributable to these visits. 

The insights you gather will not only help you provide more targeted content recommendations on your website, but can also enable your team to focus their efforts where they matter most. As you begin to understand which content produces results, you can revisit your organization’s content strategy and create more pieces similar to those that are performing well.

Create Better Opportunities to Nurture Prospects and Customers

By personalizing the user experience and collecting accurate, useful data along the way, you can segment your target audiences more meaningfully and then continue messaging prime prospects at multiple digital touchpoints throughout the sales cycle. Most notably, you can deliver automated email programs to customers based on their browsing history on your site, which is a great way to continue delivering highly relevant content. You can even gate some or all of these content pieces to collect even more information that will help your marketing and sales teams hone in on prospects and close the deal. 

For example, if a prospect completes a form on your site to download an eBook on corporate retirement savings plans for employees, you can place them in a drip campaign to provide more information on the topic— such as a pre-recorded webinar, success story examples, infographics, or even a recent podcast your team recorded on the subject.

Generate Qualified Leads to Eliminate the Guesswork for Sales

Personalized content leads to more and better user interaction, which helps you gather tons of great data and continue nurturing these leads with creative and effective marketing strategies. Obviously, this is great news for your marketing team, but it also has a significant effect on your sales reps. Not only does website personalization lead to a faster sales cycle, it also helps narrow your sales team’s focus to interested consumers with a greater chance of buying. 

By delivering content that easily guides potential consumers through the buyer journey, you’re able to gather more data to help your sales team reach out to the right people at the right time and focus on the right message. For instance, you can gate relevant and valuable content with intuitive forms that use progressive profiling to gather valuable data like the user’s industry, company size, and position within the organization. By integrating a marketing automation platform with your CRM, you can seamlessly pass this information to your sales team so they can have more productive conversations with prospects and existing customers.

Personalize the User Experience with Adaptive Web from Act-On!

Organizations need to create more personalized experiences for their website visitors, but most of the tools on the market today are highly expensive and not especially accurate or effective. However, Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is designed to make personalized content recommendations simple, easy, and attainable for every marketer and organization. 

With Adaptive Web, marketers can leverage machine learning to deliver behavior-triggered content recommendations that better target and engage each website visitor as they navigate through the customer’s website. This engagement leads to more conversions and thus, more data collected, which you can then leverage as part of an omni-channel marketing experience for all of your target audience segments.

To learn more about how Adaptive Web can increase conversions, reduce manual effort, and help inform your company’s content strategy, please download the eBook below or reach out to us directly to talk to a website personalization expert!

While most marketers are aware of the benefits that come from delivering a unique and tailored customer experience, they’re often lacking the resources to make this a reality. They’re also often dealing with various customer personas, so adjusting their efforts accordingly is easier said than done. This becomes even more difficult when you consider that most of us have to manually manage the tasks required to provide a personalized marketing experience.

Thankfully, in today’s marketing world, there exists a tool or method for almost every marketing challenge. In the case of personalization, audience segmentation and marketing automation are every marketer’s best friend.

Marketing automation enables you to design, launch, and track your marketing efforts. When you add segmentation to the mix, you improve your ability to personalize your marketing and drive engagement and conversions. In this blog post, we will walk you through some of the ways you can leverage both to amp up your email marketing efforts and maximize results. 

Improve Your Ability to Appeal to Your Audience’s Specific Pain Points

Unless you’re a one-trick pony, chances are that your product or service is designed to solve for a variety of customer pain points. How each of these rank in the eyes of your consumer, however, will vary based on their priorities, business goals, industry, and everyday activities.

The power of segmentation is that it allows you to get very targeted and specific with your email content. One way that you can leverage segmentation to make your marketing even more personal is by segmenting customers based on their industry and tailoring your email messages and campaigns to speak that language. This segmentation tactic allows you to show leads and customers that you know exactly what pains them and that you have what it takes to help them thrive and exceed their business goals.

Segmenting your audience based on interest and pain points enhances your marketing because it allows you to tailor your messages to highlight the business differentiators that matter most to your customer. This degree of personalization will make your emails stand out in the eyes of your recipients, encourage them to engage with your brand, and help you differentiate yourself from your competitors at every stage of the customer journey. 

Deliver Content Relevant to Your Specific Stage in the Buyer Journey

Content marketing is so powerful that it can contribute 3x as much ROI as traditional outbound marketing at only a fraction of the cost (2). While content marketing can yield amazing results on its own, combining it with segmentation and email empowers you to play on a completely different level than your competitors.

The reason segmentation is so important when it comes to email content distribution is the latter can only help you get results if it appeals and provides value to your customers in the first place. It needs to highlight their interests but also be appropriate to their stage in the customer journey. Providing bottom-of-funnel content to top-of-funnel leads will likely overwhelm them and make them turn away. Similarly, providing top-of-funnel content to customers in the decision-making stage probably won’t help them get any closer to signing on the dotted line.

Sending customers specific content based on their needs, interests, and stage in the sales cycle improves the personalization of your marketing efforts and helps you more effectively guide customers from one phase in the customer journey to the next. 

Improve Inbox Placement and Ensure Your Messages Get Read

Deliverability is a hot topic in the marketing world and should be a high priority for any marketer who wants to see a high ROI from their email marketing efforts. While engagement isn’t the only determinant of inbox placement, it does play a significant role in determining your overall email deliverability. Segmenting your audience and providing them with tailored communications can help you keep engagement rates high, spam complaints low, and drive your conversion rates through the roof.

You can read more on how segmenting your audience for engagement can help you improve inbox placement in our eBook, Deliverability 101: Our Guide to Engagement Segmentation for Improved Deliverability. 

Segmentation and Marketing Automation Allow You to Attract and Engage the Best Leads

Segmenting your audience based on factors such as interests, industry, and geographic location, among others, can help you deliver a more personalized experience to your audience and engage with them on a deeper, more meaningful level. More importantly, taking this step to personalize your marketing allows you to target the best opportunities so your team can focus their efforts where they matter most.

While having to divide and group your contacts based on these characteristics and then deliver targeted messages seems like a tedious task, the right marketing automation platform can make this process seamless and effortless. Act-On equips you with the tools to segment your audience, launch campaigns, and drive the marketing and sales alignment you need to manage the customer journey from beginning to end — all in one simple platform. 

Correct, that is a trick question. Everyone predicts personalization, or 1-to-1 marketing, will be among the B2B marketing trends this year and probably the foreseeable future, too.  

So, why do 76 percent of North American marketers rate their personalization as either basic or absent? That was a finding in Dynamic Yield’s 2018 personalization assessment that surveyed more than 700 marketers worldwide about their personalization efforts.

Another key finding was that 30 percent of North American marketers claim to have no processes whatsoever for personalization and 26% have zero personalization technology. And according to Adweek, only 12 percent of advertisers feel their personalization strategies are performing well.

Making matters more challenging is just the sheer enormity of content being created. According to WordPress.com’s dashboard, more than 70 million new posts are created each month.

Well, if you have a website, a CRM and an adaptive marketing platform, like Act-On, you have plenty of marketing personalization opportunities you can take advantage of. Let’s review 7 of them to help you stand out from the noise.

Why adopt personalization into your B2B marketing?

Let’s begin with a definition of personalization.

A lot of sales people will tell you we’ve being doing personalization for decades. And that is true. When we interviewed Tom Hoffman, former CEO of RM Hoffman, to learn about their success using Act-On, he talked about how sales were done when his father started the company in 1959 (it has since been sold and is now a division of Motion Solutions).

“So in 1959, sales was tremendously different than it is today. In ‘59, the salesman would get in their car with a box of catalogs, a briefcase – always a briefcase – and knock on doors,” he said. “Now what is happening? I can find anything I want on the internet.”

Today, we live in a global economy where your customers can shop 24/7 on the internet. You can’t rely on a sales person walking door to door, handing out catalogs. You need to be always available. You need to scale.

Today, personalization in your marketing, either B2B or B2C, is when you leverage the data you have about your customers and targeted customers, whatever that may be, and combine it with technology to offer your products or services in a personally relevant way.

So, why do it.

According to McKinsey, personalization can reduce your acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5-15 percent and increase your marketing spend efficiency by 10-30 percent.

And the addition of machine learning and AI will enable “smart personalization engines” to increase revenues another 15 percent by 2020, according to Gartner.

Personalization begins with understanding your customer

I write about this in most of my posts, but I can’t stress the importance of really knowing who is your audience. Most successful marketers have a developed, documented buyer personas. To be able to sell to your audience, you need to be relevant to that audience. You need to know their pain points, fears and desires. You need to be able to speak their language.

If you’re doing that, and you’re making some sales and collecting the data from those engagements (via your marketing automation and integrated CRM), then you’re able to really get started with personalization.

That’s right, even with the hottest new AI-powered MarTech, you’re still going to need your data to deliver a personal experience to your buyers. No silver bullets. You’re going to have to roll up your pant legs and wade into your customer data.

Buddy up to your CRM guru and ask her to guide you on what are all the data points you collect from your customers and would-be customers. What other data sources do you have?

And don’t settle for looking at just the demographic data points. I think personalization also means delivering content to your customers and prospects before they even know they need it. This is what Amazon and Netflix do with their recommendation engines. Figure out a way to make your own recommendation engine with the data you already have.

Look for seasonality or other trends in your data. Is there a time in the year when they are downloading a particular eBook? What do they do next? Watch a webinar or download another specific eBook (look for correlation and trends). Is there particular video relating to your pricing or product comparison that is being watched around the third quarter?

There are a ton of questions you can uncover and apply to your personalization efforts by looking at your data. Here are a few more to explore:

• How successful were your previous offers? Why do you think that is?
• What offers did customers respond to most? Why do you think that is?
• Which offers had the highest conversion rates in previous years? Why?

And don’t stop at just the data you have in your CRM and marketing automation platform. Look elsewhere, such as the native analytics being tracked on your social media platforms, your Google Ads and Google Analytics data and so forth.

Regardless of the tools you are using, you need the data. Do you have enough?

Eliminate friction and use progressive forms

It is important to think about personalization in the beginning of any marketing initiative or campaign.

With the website beacon installed, your marketing automation platform is tracking and recording information about visitors to your website. But you’ll also want to convert those unknown leads into known leads at some point.

You get that information from forms (and a chat bot is essentially an interactive form). As I have written about in the past, it is important to only ask for what you need to know at that point in the engagement and based on the value of the content for which you are exchanging that information. But I have rarely met a marketer or sales person that didn’t want all the information they could get from a prospect, including next of kin.

You can eliminate form friction by using progressive forms. Consider it a happy compromise to getting all the information you want, but at a pace your prospect will be more comfortable in giving it.

So, an unknown visitor wants an eBook, they provide their first and last name and company email address. Next time, they want to attend a webinar, they have to give their company name, and industry. If they want to watch an on-demand webinar, they have to give the size of their company, and their annual budget for whatever good or service you’re selling.

This does a couple things to make a better personalized experience. First, I don’t know about you, but I hate it when a company I am engaging with asks me to fill out more than a few fields, and more so when they ask me to complete those same fields over and over again whenever I want more of their gated content. Note to everyone doing that: stop asking for the same information each time. Ask something different, even fun.

Second, progressive forms lets you get more robust data about your prospects that can later be used for better personalization.

Power your personalization with segmentation

Once you’ve collected what you need to know about your customers, let’s start using it to create marketing segments. This is where you can separate your company from all those still emailing to one master marketing list. That approach just results in tone deaf messaging.

You can still keep the master list, but create segmented lists under it that you can leverage in your marketing campaigns. At Act-On, we sell into the finance industry, manufacturing, and insurance to name a few. The credit union marketer doesn’t want to watch a customer success story video about a manufacturing company.

Segmenting allows you to slice and dice your lists based on the data you’ve collected so that each group gets messaging that is relevant to them.

Personalized triggered messaging in the moment

Personalized triggered messaging, such as emails, are “triggered” when a visitor takes a specific action on your website or other content. They are personalized, using the information you’ve already collected about them. And they are sent in near real-time, so they are relevant when your visitor is already engaged.

At Act-On, we’ve seen email open rates 75% higher than business as usual marketing messaging, and click-thru rates 119% higher.

Some of these triggered messages are familiar to you and include:

• Confirmation emails
• Welcome emails
• Event reminder emails
• Transactional emails

But you can create triggers events if someone visits a specific landing page or key page on your website (say pricing).

If you’ve done your homework in analyzing your data, you may know that most people who download a specific eBook have also watched a related on-demand webinar. You could create trigger events for each activity recommending the other.

You can create trigger events if a customer hasn’t been active with your business in a while. This works for B2B SaaS companies that have a technology platform, as well as for B2C gym memberships. They won’t renew those contracts if they don’t feel they’re using the product or service.

In simple terms, if you are familiar with If This, Then That statements, then you’ll be a natural at creating personalized trigger emails.

Nurture your prospects with personalized email campaigns

On first appearance, automated nurture email campaigns may not be the most personal of messaging. But when you pull all the levers and ring all the bells, they can be a dynamic personalization tool.

Begin by creating campaigns for specific segments of your audience. That’s what Marc Wilensky’s team did at Tower Federal Credit Union, a $3 billion organization based in the Baltimore area. Wilensky, vice president of Communications & Brand Marketing, said they created an automated nurture program targeted to their members that may be considering purchasing a new car. They launched the campaign during the fall 2017 holiday season, a time when most new cars are purchased (and thereby most vehicle loans issued).

What amazed Marc and his team wasn’t just the initial open rates of the campaign’s first email, but the engagement with the second and subsequent emails that were the most impressive. The success led Tower to create segmented nurture campaigns for mortgage loans, and wealth management, too.

I haven’t mentioned this already, but you should be utilizing dynamic fields in your emails, including in subject lines. Too many companies have screwed this up, so make sure you have more than just one person create, review, and test your emails before you send them out. You don’t want you brand ridiculed on social with [insert first name] gaffes.

Besides testing those nurture emails to make sure you have the dynamic fields correctly set up. You’ll also want to confirm your data is good, too. A misspelled name can happen when you customer originally completes fills a form. One way to proof what they’ve provided is to send them a confirmation email that repeats back what you have, asking if everything is correct. You can also include a link or links for them to manage their profiles and subscriptions.

Dynamic content can also be pulled into landing pages associated with an email campaign and its call to action. I know I pay more attention when I see my name on a splash page telling me, “Hey Nathan! Here’s an on-demand webinar that we think you’ll love.” And you can write that confidently because the data tells you that. 

Personalizing Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Tapping into your data again and Act-On’s ABM tools,  you can create trigger events or nurture programs that personalize your messaging to the people within an account or targeted account. For example, I watch attend your monthly webinar. That triggers an email follow up that recommends an on-demand webinar that others at my company have also watched, or it recommends an eBook or datasheet that others in my company have also downloaded.

Buying decisions, especially B2B buying considerations, are involving 5+ people. How much better will that conversation go when everyone in the room as seen the same data sheet, on-demand webinar or other content. Or put another way, how much easier will that sales demo go when you know they’ve all watched or downloaded the same material. 

Other marketing personalization favorites

This post would be too long if I wrote about all the different personalization tactics you can employ relatively quickly. But I did want to plant a seed for a couple more options that we can discuss in the future.

You can build in subtle personalization into your website, whether on your home page or other top traffic pages. This can include adding in some code that reveal different imagery or other content based on different specific factors. For example, I’ve tried this with the iconic Portland Oregon neon sign. Depending on the time of day, you would see the sign with blue skies in daytime and lit up in a dark sky at night.

Personalized videos are another great personalization tactic with which we’ve had success. Partnering with Vidyard, we’ve created personalized videos for our customers, mid-funnel prospects, as well as prospects that had grown cold.

If you don’t have the resources to create a personalized video, but you do have a video library, you can create a “choose your own adventure” series of videos. This can be done in a fancy way with custom landing pages and scrolling videos. Or you can use call to actions at the end of the videos that give a viewer a choice of paths.

For example, you could watch our 60-second overall intro video about Act-On. And from there I could give you a choice of watching videos about our CRM integrations or watching videos about automated nurture programs. From there you could have more choices. This wins for a couple of reasons. First, the viewer gets to watch only the videos that interest her. Second, your sales team gets to see this engagement history via your marketing automation platform, your video hosting platform and your CRM. So when she becomes a Sales Qualified Lead, the rep knows specifically what benefits to talk about with your product or service. 

Summary

You already have a ton of resources — from data to technology — to already start implementing a successful marketing personalization strategy. I recommend creating an interdepartmental team to help develop and push back on different personalization tactics. You want to surround yourself with folks that say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do …” as well as folks that say “Just because we can, should we?”

And you want to review, test, and A/B test all aspects of your personalization. Does the dynamic content work in emails and landing pages? Does an email get better engagement when the trigger event is tweaked? According to McKinsey, “it typically takes four to five attempts to refine a personalized trigger to capture 80 percent of its potential value. For example, a leading apparel retailer we worked with went through four different iterations of a next-product-to-buy email until it found the winning formula, which ended up yielding twice the impact of the first iteration. Additional refinement after that usually yielded diminishing returns.”

When bisco Industries used Act-On to create custom product recommendations, the company increased conversion rates by 1,285% and created $100,000 in new opportunities. Implementing Act-On has also saved bisco $72K across the entire marketing department, and set them on track to generate $120,000 in annual revenue.

In this video, Adam Wong, bisco’s Director of Marketing, explains how Act-On helped his team reduce costs, increase sales, and pay off their investment in just 1.2 months.

Learn how Act-On can help your company experience the same incredible success as bisco. Schedule a demo now!