In a recent blog post, we covered the basics of account-based content personalization and explained why it’s so important. (TL;DR: ABM delivers impressive results because it helps revenue teams convey the right message to the right business audience at the right time through the right channel.)
In this post, we’ll zoom in on one specific channel — your organization’s website — and reveal not just how to personalize it, but why you need it to drive revenue and improve the customer experience. Let’s dive in.
Personalizing Web Content: Why It Matters
Website personalization involves creating dynamic experiences in which a site’s images, content, or links are customized to an individual site visitor’s interests or needs. For instance, you might:
- Present different homepage or landing-page “welcome” messages for different audiences
- Swap images that might resonate better with specific industries or personas
- Display a collection of content that’s highly relevant for a particular stage in the buyer’s journey
To a website visitor, this bespoke experience — delivered at the right time in a buyer’s journey — illustrates that your organization understands their industry, has fluency in their business concerns, and can solve their problems.
Time and again, research reveals that these tactics positively influence buyers, especially when it comes time to make a buying decision. They’re also more likely to adopt new features or solutions if they’re already a customer.
Other benefits of personalizing your website content include:
- Providing an additional channel for an end-to-end campaign
- Enhancing the buying and brand experience (according to Dun & Bradstreet, personalized web experiences increase time on-site, which influences the buying decision)
- Amplifying relevance to existing customers (according to Salesforce, 65% of buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize their communications)
- Improving conversion rates and lead quality
- Increasing revenue team impact and efficiency (according to McKinsey, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by up to 50% and boost marketing-spend efficiency by up to 30%)
These reasons — and many more — make a compelling business argument for implementing personalization on your website. Now, let’s dive deeper into the best ways to personalize your site.
Personalization Methods, Use Cases, and Advice
Generally speaking, there are three ways to customize your website experience:
- You can personalize website elements (such as headers, welcome messages, images, customer quotes, menus, and other elements)
- And you can offer personalized, curated selections of content (such as landing pages that present curated videos, blog posts, case studies, and more based on persona, industry, etc.)
- Or you can do both
Here are a few examples of what this might look like, based on use case:
- Targeting Accounts Within a Specific Industry: Use imagery that corresponds to that vertical, so readers can imagine your solution applied to their needs
- Segmenting by Job Title: Display customer quotes from people in the same role, and link to case studies that show how you helped make their jobs easier
- Targeting Accounts Based on Buyer Journey Stage: Dynamically serve on-site messaging and content that educates and helps them take next steps
- Inbound Visits Based on Keyword Search: Show them a page of curated content that links to keyword-relevant blog posts, videos, ebooks and other resources
Some Words of Advice
Those are just a few great examples; the use cases are practically limitless. But before you get overwhelmed or go overboard, heed this advice from our recent personalization crash course:
- Keep your customization scalable
- Start small
- Test and prove your personalization efforts before expanding them
And also understand that web personalization requires resources, a clear-minded strategy and a wide spectrum content to be truly effective. Most importantly, it requires great data.
Within our industry, 6sense is renowned for its data. And while we don’t provide native web personalization capabilities at this time, the world’s best web personalization platforms leverage 6sense’s data — either as 6sense customers themselves or as technology partners — to deliver robust, highly effective customized customer experiences.
Indeed, without super-accurate data and predictive buying stages (which 6sense uniquely offers), a web customization platform can’t precisely determine where an account might be in the funnel … which means it can’t deliver the most effective customized content experience.
Embracing Web Personalization
So let’s move on to the good stuff: setting up web personalization for your site. Not long ago, persona-based and industry-based custom web experiences required a lot of homegrown programming logic, multiple website instances, and manual resource management.
These days, most customers expect bespoke B2C and B2B online experiences, and technology companies have risen to meet the need. Current platforms can help you easily implement as many personalized elements of your website as suits your strategy.
Here are some tools to consider:
- PathFactory: This platform uses AI to analyze content and session engagement data to display content and connect buyers with the most relevant information on-demand. It also delivers analytics for customization performance and allows real-time campaign, channel, and content optimization.
- Folloze: Folloze harnesses deep buyer insights, sales orchestration and AI, and can help create personalized experiences and micro-targeted campaigns in minutes.
- Uberflip: This content marketing platform lets users quickly launch campaigns and target audiences by leveraging existing content. Blog articles, social media, videos, and ebooks are turned into bespoke content hubs with responsive interfaces and CTAs.
- Mutiny: Mutiny offers scalable website personalization by making it easy to personalize anything on any website … without code. With data integration, it helps you identify audience segments and give AI-powered guidance on which content to serve up.
- Reactful: This is another customization tool that allows companies to personalize web experiences with zero coding or website changes involved. Real-time analytics make it easy to see the impact of personalization and make changes on the fly.
- Optimizely: Optimizely is a digital experience platform that lets users personalize website content, as well as run A/B or multivariate tests. They have customization features for both content and media management, allowing for rich, dynamic website experiences.
Most of these tools are designed to play nicely with your existing ABM tech stack. Setup and use are generally straightforward. Many of the features are automated and offer user-friendly interfaces.
Thanks to these tools, the hard part isn’t the personalization. It’s determining which audiences to serve up personalized journeys to, and what those experiences should look like. This shouldn’t be something your digital marketers decide on their own. Ideally, the whole revenue team gets involved:
- Leadership sets the business priorities for what kind of audiences to target
- Sales helps segment audiences into groups based on which accounts they’re likely to win over
- Marketing aligns with sales on value propositions and determines what kind of content and messaging will resonate best for each audience
- At every step, word-class data is needed to make the most informed and impactful decisions
Once the different segments are decided and a personalization strategy is created, the digital marketing team can then implement website-element and content customization for each audience.
Conclusion
Armed with the right tools and the best intent data, a personalized website gives your revenue team another powerful, persuasive platform to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Prospects and customers will likely soon see you as an expert in understanding and addressing their specific needs — which can result in higher conversion rates, and higher customer satisfaction and retention.
