People want to be recognized.
If I’ve visited a website before, I want to be greeted like a friend, not a stranger. And if I’ve given a business my information in the past, I want them to recognize my preferences every time I visit their site going forward.
Why?
Well, it not only feels good to be recognized — it also makes the buying process a lot easier.
Just look at how Amazon has personalized the shopping experience in the last twenty years. Instead of having to search for products that may be of interest to you, they’re already there when you visit their site. Your previous shopping experiences inform precisely what suggestions you’re served up next. In this context, buying feels effortless.
It’s the same kind of experience you might have when you visit your favorite restaurant: The waiter likely knows you by name and asks if you want your ‘regular’ option. Because they know you, they may even suggest a special that they know you’d like as well.
But in the world of B2B, this is vastly more challenging. We not only need to keep track of thousands of website visitors and their related information, we also need to keep track of their preferences and provide them with a unique experience tailored to those preferences and desires.
To do this, businesses use website personalization tactics, which means using data to create experiences that are unique to each user.
Think about industry leaders like Netflix, Spotify, and, of course, Amazon. They’re industry leaders because they’ve created the best of the best personalization strategies. In fact, they’ve baked personalization into their products. This allows them to provide experiences like this:
They send you targeted offers based on your browsing behavior. When you visit Amazon’s website, they provide you with a list of recommended products based on ones that you were recently looking at.
They recommend products that are similar to those you’ve consumed in the past. Think about Netflix and their top picks category. They’re able to look at what shows and movies you’ve consumed and provide you with a list of recommended shows to watch next.
They create new products just for you. Spotify automatically transforms your listening data into playlists that they’ve created just for you. You don’t even have to think about what you want to listen to, they already know.
Website Personalization Should Be The Rule, Not an Exception in B2B
So, why does this matter? Because our expectations have shifted. Personalization has become so widely used by consumer companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Nordstrom that we’ve come to expect these “have it your way” experiences in B2B, too.
Here’s the catch: Less than 10% of brands think that they’re effectively using personalization.
So, why do the majority of businesses feel like they’re falling short of customers’ increasing demands for a more personalized digital experience?
For many companies, website personalization feels like a vast and challenging process. They wonder, How does personalization work? How does a business implement it? How sophisticated can you get with targeting? Businesses have a ton of questions, making it difficult to figure out how to get started — so many, unfortunately, don’t get started at all.
But it doesn’t have to be this hard.
With the help of conversational marketing, businesses can start to leverage the benefits of personalization without having to invest a ton of time or resources to get it off the ground.
Why It’s Time to Use Conversational Marketing to Drive Website Personalization
Conversational marketing makes it possible for businesses to create personalized experiences with the help of real-time messaging and chat. Rather than requiring a major investment of time and resources, you can scale conversational marketing efforts as you scale your business.
Here’s how you can implement a conversational marketing platform to personalize the experience leads have on your website:
▶Leverage chat as a real-time tool to engage the visitors that land on your website. Many B2B companies aren’t making the most of the traffic to their websites. And that’s surprising given that in 2018, they’ll spend $4.6 billion to drive people to their respective websites and landing pages. In fact, when we tested the response time of 512 companies, a massive 58% never responded at all to inquiries from leads.
So, why does this matter?
If B2B companies are spending billions on sending traffic to websites, they should be very concerned about how fast they’re responding to the leads that reach out for more information. High intent buyers are the ones who are on your website right now, so it makes sense that businesses engage them while they’re there. What’s more, if businesses are spending on campaigns to drive new leads to a website, more ROI is realized when you get the most out of each of those site visitors.Fortunately, with the help of chat, businesses have the ability to engage with these potential leads in real-time, answering their questions and booking sales meetings faster. This is one of the easiest ways to deliver a personalized experience while leads are on your website.
▶Meet buyers where they are. Website personalization isn’t just about providing personalized content, it’s also about understanding where and how they want to be reached during the buying process. Conversational marketing platforms like Drift allow you to send sales emails that are smart enough to know when a prospect bypasses a reply, and heads straight to your website. This allows you to reach out where and when they demonstrate intent.
▶Answer questions wherever and whenever your buyers and customers have them. Helping is the new selling. That’s why you should leverage conversations to answer people’s questions whenever they have them. That’s why we built Drift Help: It gives businesses the ability to automatically answer common questions with the help of a 24/7 bot that lives on your website.
So, how can businesses deliver more personalized experiences with the help of conversational marketing?
- Put intelligent chatbots on high-intent website pages. High-intent, high-traffic pages are a gold mine for businesses that want to engage website traffic. These are the pages where your best prospects live (and are often the pages that will spark the most questions for them). To consistently engage with these prospects and personalize their experience, add chat functionality to pricing pages, product pages, and demo pages. Make sure your chatbots feature a custom greeting that is connected to the reason why the person might be on the page.
- Go real-time and be human. At the core of the push for personalization is the need for a more human connection between brands and consumers. Second to talking to someone in real life, what’s more human than live video? This is why at Drift our mantra is to always show your face, whether that’s in sales outreach, or on your website.Our two favorite ways to do this: encourage your sales team to turn on their cameras during sales calls and create quick video demos to show — not tell — customers how to use your product.
- Use account-based targeting to start real-time conversations. Keeping track of high-value prospects can be hard. How do you follow thousands of leads and give them the personalized experience they’re looking for when they want it? On the surface, this may seem impossible.But, with account-based targeting you can.Simply put, account-based targeting allows you to engage with targeted accounts in real time by letting you know when they’re on your website. From that point forward, you can choose how you engage with those prospects via chat, and create a stickier, more personalized experience for them.
Conversational Marketing Is The Next Personalization Lever Marketers Need to Pull
In today’s world, personalization is a rule not an exception. People won’t buy or engage with a business unless their unique needs and preferences are being catered to. And while traditional personalization tools have helped marketers create the one-to-one experiences that customers demand, these tools have fallen short on the pricing, usability, and reporting fronts.
To fix this, conversational marketing is becoming one of the primary ways marketers create a personalized experience for customers while making execution easier for businesses. Top marketers realize this shift and are taking advantage of this new way to engage with customers, to enhance their personalization and ultimately drive revenue.