Using Customer Data to Inform Your Personalization Strategy

Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing at Get Smart Content.

In today’s highly-competitive marketplace, it’s never been easier for buyers to be confused by generic company messaging, lose interest in a product, and move on to a competitor that better understands their needs. Savvy marketers realize that in order to gain a competitive advantage, it is critical to create meaningful connections with their buyers from the start and continue to grow this relationship throughout the buyer’s journey.

The foundation for any great relationship starts with insight and understanding — the same is true for building relationship with your clients and prospects. In fact, your buyers begin to share information about themselves, what they’re interested in, and what their pain points are well before they formally introduce themselves. These insights are often times stored in disparate systems like your CRM, marketing automation platform, website analytics, data management platform, and so on; however, as marketers shift focus to creating targeted campaigns across the buyer’s journey, the ability to integrate systems and unlock this customer data has never been more imperative.

Capturing client and prospect data and using this information to segment your audiences provides the insight needed to identify what your buyers care about and informs how you build relevant messaging, or in other words, a personalization strategy. Personalization involves understanding buyer intent and characteristics and dynamically delivering highly relevant content to them depending on their interests, profile or stage in the buyer’s journey. By providing your buyers with the information that meets their needs, we open the door to meaningful, engaging relationships with prospects and clients alike.

Most B2B marketers are very familiar with audience segmentation and personalization as it relates to marketing automation and email nurturing, but the reality is, very little is being done in early stages of the buyer’s journey to create relevant content experiences, especially as it relates to the experience on the website. Think about that — we’re spending a vast majority of our resources and efforts on creating targeted nurture campaigns for contacts in our marketing automation platform that have identified themselves through a form submission or email open; however, even the highest converting forms on our site typically only see a conversion rate of roughly 5%. Therefore, we’re neglecting to create a relevant experiences for the other 95% of visitors to the website, an audience that needs more attention and relevance to engage and take the next steps in the conversion path.

Many marketers when initially brainstorming their website personalization strategy, immediately envision overly complex models where content is hyper-targeted. While this level of personalization is attainable, you would be astonished to see how even the most basic of targeted messages can have a dramatic impact on your website conversion rates. We encourage our clients to take a “crawl, walk, run” approach and initially establish small goals with dramatic impact.

To learn more on how to use data to inform your website personalization strategy, join our upcoming webinar, “Driving The Ultimate Customer Experience With Predictive Marketing & Personalization,” Thursday April 9th at 10am PST.