How to Skyrocket Your Lead Conversions by Personalizing Marketing
How to Skyrocket Your Lead Conversions by Personalizing Marketing
Your customers see hundreds of advertisements, texts and emails per week. This is why it's crucial to personalize every marketing interaction you have with them. Make them feel valued and watch the conversions skyrocket.
Today we have the ability to personalize every page and interaction with customers, yet most marketers and companies use this in the most cursory way. In a recent Evergage study, 85% of organizations admitted to implementing only basic email merge tags in their newsletters or websites, "Hi {{first_name}}.
Companies are worried about making mistakes rather than seeing the potential of using these techniques.
If you're not taking advantage of these methods you are missing out, so i round up a few reasons why you should personalize every stage of your customer interactions.
Your Customers Will Feel Valued
Personalization is about valuing your customer, not about adding value to the company. Personalization is "about understanding what drives a person’s decision making process, where they are in that process, and placing all of it within the context of their specific challenges." ~ John Bonini.
Everyone that comes to your product has their own specific challenges that need to be addressed. If these problems aren't solved by your product, the customer will not see the value and will churn. Each interaction you have with your customers is a potential point of personalization:
- First visit: Where are they coming from? Who referred them? A new visitor clicking through a PPC Facebook ad about a specific feature should receive a tailored experience around that feature.
- Onboarding: If all new users are bucketed in the same onboarding flow, then you can't be addressing their individual challenges. By personalizing your onboarding flows by the role of the customer, you can highlight features that will expressly help those individuals.
- Upgrades: If you are tracking customers throughout their lifecycle you can personalize the cadence of upgrade emails depending on their usage within your product. If you know they are hitting the limits of their current tier for one feature, then you can start to drip emails to them about an upgrade.
Behavioral email tools (we use and love Customer.io) allow us to do exactly that. We can reach out to certain groups of users and not only personalize according to their profile data, but also to their behavioral data. This allows us to get value to the right people at the right time.
It Increases Conversion Rates
Unfortunately clichéd personalized greetings don't work anymore. If you want to produce higher conversion and retention rates, provide higher personalized experiences catered to your users' individual interests.
The same study which taught us cliched personalization doesn't work also showed that consumers can have a positive response to more useful personalization, such as product preferences. This is true out in the field as well:
- Hubspot reported a 42% improvement in their conversion rate with personalized CTAs leading them to relevant content.
- Zumba personalized videos for instructors increased click through rates from 5.4% to 21%.
- Panaya increased content consumption by 113% by targeting different content depending on whether the site visitor was from a company using Oracle or not.
“Here is what Panaya’s homepage looked like when a prospect from an organization using Oracle came to the website. Notice the messaging, videos, and logos — all are personalized to target Oracle users:”
In all these cases the personalization worked because it allowed the companies involved to target more relevant information to their customers.
Relevance is motivating. If you can present CTAs that guide a visitor to information relevant to them (personalized for their role, for instance) then you provide more value and get more customers.
It Provides a Competitive Advantage
A personalized site is always going to have the advantage over a non-personalized site.
Take pricing. This might seem like one of the few elements of your site you can't personalize. However, almost every SaaS company does this as a matter of course. They segment pricing across tiers for each of their buyer personas.
But the personalization of pricing shouldn't stop there. As Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently says:
We’ve seen time and time again through our customers where those who localize their prices are often growing at a quicker rate overall, and definitely growing quicker in their localized regions - sometimes at levels of 30% or more than their counterparts.
This is personalization through localization. Not every customer is going to come from Silicon Valley. You can determine the locale of your visitors through IP address or geolocation, and knowing this gives you information specific to their location.
With pricing, this type of personalization can take two forms:
- Cosmetic personalization: This is a matter of changing currencies from dollar amounts to euros, sterling, or yuan depending on the location of the incoming visitor. It could also include changing certain elements of your page, including the actual language it's presented in. This reduces friction for the users.
- True localization: Pricing localization can go further than cosmetic currency changes. You could consider changing your actual price depending on the willingness to pay in different markets. Developers in Europe are willing to pay 20-30% more for a product than their US counterparts. By localizing pricing you could take advantage of this differential.
By personalizing your site like this, you have that advantage. Not only are you reducing friction for customers, therefore making it more convenient for them, but you are also potentially tapping into differences in price sensitivity depending on where your customers are from.
It's The Future
Currently, most customization is through segmentation. But segmentation is still only broad categorization, not true personalization. The future will see a shift towards tailor-made 1:1 personalization. Some companies are already doing this:
- Segment uses data to identify strong, high-value leads during the sign up process and then reaches out to them before they transition into onboarding. This means the team can uncover the specific challenges of these important customers and guide them through the value of Segment personally.
- Drift uses their own product, a real-time chat widget to chat with their customers and help them learn the tool. They can have in-depth conversations with customers when they are using Drift, finding pain points and personally guiding them through the setup process.
Adding these full-on personalized touches requires significant effort and a dedicated customer success team. The next step then is to automate this 1:1 personalization.
This is where algorithmic personalization may start to take over. As visitors with specific traits visit your site and interact, your site could “learn” what they like and start pushing that content forward. By using all the data points available on your customer you can dynamically serve content specific to them.
Your site could pull the right content for a 31-year old account executive at a microbrewery in Manitoba. A 56-year old solopreneur from the Seychelles. A 15-year old Wunderkind developer from München.
There are almost no limits to personalization. The data is available. By looking for every avenue of personalization, you not only increase your conversion rates, but you also give your customers a better experience. Their journey will be tailored to them, and fit them as well as a Savile Row suit.
Your customers see hundreds of advertisements, texts and emails per week. This is why it's crucial to personalize every marketing interaction you have with them. Make them feel valued and watch the conversions skyrocket.
Today we have the ability to personalize every page and interaction with customers, yet most marketers and companies use this in the most cursory way. In a recent Evergage study, 85% of organizations admitted to implementing only basic email merge tags in their newsletters or websites, "Hi {{first_name}}.
Companies are worried about making mistakes rather than seeing the potential of using these techniques.
If you're not taking advantage of these methods you are missing out, so i round up a few reasons why you should personalize every stage of your customer interactions.
Your Customers Will Feel Valued
Personalization is about valuing your customer, not about adding value to the company. Personalization is "about understanding what drives a person’s decision making process, where they are in that process, and placing all of it within the context of their specific challenges." ~ John Bonini.
Everyone that comes to your product has their own specific challenges that need to be addressed. If these problems aren't solved by your product, the customer will not see the value and will churn. Each interaction you have with your customers is a potential point of personalization:
- First visit: Where are they coming from? Who referred them? A new visitor clicking through a PPC Facebook ad about a specific feature should receive a tailored experience around that feature.
- Onboarding: If all new users are bucketed in the same onboarding flow, then you can't be addressing their individual challenges. By personalizing your onboarding flows by the role of the customer, you can highlight features that will expressly help those individuals.
- Upgrades: If you are tracking customers throughout their lifecycle you can personalize the cadence of upgrade emails depending on their usage within your product. If you know they are hitting the limits of their current tier for one feature, then you can start to drip emails to them about an upgrade.
Behavioral email tools (we use and love Customer.io) allow us to do exactly that. We can reach out to certain groups of users and not only personalize according to their profile data, but also to their behavioral data. This allows us to get value to the right people at the right time.
It Increases Conversion Rates
Unfortunately clichéd personalized greetings don't work anymore. If you want to produce higher conversion and retention rates, provide higher personalized experiences catered to your users' individual interests.
The same study which taught us cliched personalization doesn't work also showed that consumers can have a positive response to more useful personalization, such as product preferences. This is true out in the field as well:
- Hubspot reported a 42% improvement in their conversion rate with personalized CTAs leading them to relevant content.
- Zumba personalized videos for instructors increased click through rates from 5.4% to 21%.
- Panaya increased content consumption by 113% by targeting different content depending on whether the site visitor was from a company using Oracle or not.
“Here is what Panaya’s homepage looked like when a prospect from an organization using Oracle came to the website. Notice the messaging, videos, and logos — all are personalized to target Oracle users:”
In all these cases the personalization worked because it allowed the companies involved to target more relevant information to their customers.
Relevance is motivating. If you can present CTAs that guide a visitor to information relevant to them (personalized for their role, for instance) then you provide more value and get more customers.
It Provides a Competitive Advantage
A personalized site is always going to have the advantage over a non-personalized site.
Take pricing. This might seem like one of the few elements of your site you can't personalize. However, almost every SaaS company does this as a matter of course. They segment pricing across tiers for each of their buyer personas.
But the personalization of pricing shouldn't stop there. As Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently says:
We’ve seen time and time again through our customers where those who localize their prices are often growing at a quicker rate overall, and definitely growing quicker in their localized regions - sometimes at levels of 30% or more than their counterparts.
This is personalization through localization. Not every customer is going to come from Silicon Valley. You can determine the locale of your visitors through IP address or geolocation, and knowing this gives you information specific to their location.
With pricing, this type of personalization can take two forms:
- Cosmetic personalization: This is a matter of changing currencies from dollar amounts to euros, sterling, or yuan depending on the location of the incoming visitor. It could also include changing certain elements of your page, including the actual language it's presented in. This reduces friction for the users.
- True localization: Pricing localization can go further than cosmetic currency changes. You could consider changing your actual price depending on the willingness to pay in different markets. Developers in Europe are willing to pay 20-30% more for a product than their US counterparts. By localizing pricing you could take advantage of this differential.
By personalizing your site like this, you have that advantage. Not only are you reducing friction for customers, therefore making it more convenient for them, but you are also potentially tapping into differences in price sensitivity depending on where your customers are from.
It's The Future
Currently, most customization is through segmentation. But segmentation is still only broad categorization, not true personalization. The future will see a shift towards tailor-made 1:1 personalization. Some companies are already doing this:
- Segment uses data to identify strong, high-value leads during the sign up process and then reaches out to them before they transition into onboarding. This means the team can uncover the specific challenges of these important customers and guide them through the value of Segment personally.
- Drift uses their own product, a real-time chat widget to chat with their customers and help them learn the tool. They can have in-depth conversations with customers when they are using Drift, finding pain points and personally guiding them through the setup process.
Adding these full-on personalized touches requires significant effort and a dedicated customer success team. The next step then is to automate this 1:1 personalization.
This is where algorithmic personalization may start to take over. As visitors with specific traits visit your site and interact, your site could “learn” what they like and start pushing that content forward. By using all the data points available on your customer you can dynamically serve content specific to them.
Your site could pull the right content for a 31-year old account executive at a microbrewery in Manitoba. A 56-year old solopreneur from the Seychelles. A 15-year old Wunderkind developer from München.
There are almost no limits to personalization. The data is available. By looking for every avenue of personalization, you not only increase your conversion rates, but you also give your customers a better experience. Their journey will be tailored to them, and fit them as well as a Savile Row suit.
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