Personalization in the B2B World

You are a B2B marketer and wondering how to possibly engage your customer and offer them a comfortable experience online so that they like your brand, spread the word, return, and even become an ambassador? Don’t think further and start personalizing!

As you have probably heard in every CX (customer experience) event or read in any conversion optimization article, personalization is a must nowadays and you need to start implementing if you don’t want to be left behind. In fact, Walker Information says that by 2020, CX will overtake price as the key brand differentiator. And it’s impossible to talk about CX without talking about personalization.

So, what do you think of when I say personalization?

You would probably answer “it’s like Amazon’s product recommendation, but I don’t have an Ecommerce site”. Well, that’s true, but personalization possibilities don’t only apply to retail products. 

You can personalize content and offering based on many different criteria. Here is a list of the most common ones: 

• Buyer persona
• Source (search, email, social, paid ad, referring site, campaign, etc.)
• Firmographic (industry, revenue, employee count, etc.)
• Demographics (gender, age, marital status, education, etc.)
• Geography (IP range, location, coordinates, season, weather, selected language, time)
• Historical interaction (call request, newsletter subscription, e-book downloaded)
• User profile (name, address, title)
• CRM data and forms filled
• Type of device, OS and browser
• Landing url
• Segment membership or exclusion
• Buyer status (prospect or existing client)
• Number of site visits, logged in/out
• Page visited, category visited, video viewed
• Time spent on site
• Time since last visit
• Navigation behavior
• Mouse movement (scrolling, exit intend, hovering, inactivity)
• Email opens but not clicked
• Push notification request accepted or refused
• Specific event

Where should you start?

You shouldn’t wait to start using personalization, the earlier the better. You can already start using the tools you have available to answer your immediate needs if it helps you to solve a specific long-lasting issue. For example, if you know your users have been complaining a lot about a NPS survey which pops up while they already answered it, you can remove frustration by adding those visitors to a visitor group “already answered the survey” and stop showing the survey to this group. For instance, Episerver has a built-in rule-based personalization tool that you can use.

However, if you want to grow your business and improve your CX, you need to have a plan. Do things in order and to avoid getting lost on the way do get in touch with our experts. 

Here is a list of examples you could apply to improve visitor engagement:

• Personalize the homepage main banner based on the visitor industry, company, revenue, employee count, technology stack, the traffic source (users coming via different campaigns and emails).
• Personalize navigation depending on company size (focus on services vs. price)
• Promote events on site via geotargeting to avoid frustrating those who are too far away from the event and attract those who are closer.
• Personalize content on the site based on users' clicks or their interest towards certain products or product lines

Eventually you might want to serve your users even better. For this, you need to consider moving to eCommerce. B2B eCommerce gets you globally close to your customers 24/7 and it gives you valuable insights about your customers´ behavior. Click below button for our recent blog on B2B eCommerce approaches.