- Marketing
- August 8, 2023
5 Reasons Why Website Personalization is a Must for B2B Brands
The intense competition across industries has increased the need to grab the attention of website visitors before they move to another website. A simple way to meet this need is to implement website personalization. Personalization is about the application of data, customer information, and technology, to create tailor-made customer experiences. Although most marketers recognize the worth of personalization, they often stray from implementing smart, efficient personalization strategies and miss opportunities to grow their brands.
However, the reality is that personalization is proving effective today. Even a little personalization can create a great impact in creating more satisfying customer experiences. Customers expect businesses to present information that meets their needs and applies to all channels online and offline.
Across the B2B industry, there is no denying that personalization is now a hygiene factor in marketing, and in 2023 it is not just about relevance and recognition– it’s more about being helpful, adding value, and meeting the expectations of each and every customer (existing and future) with tailored-made experiences.
B2B website personalization aims to display the most relevant content to each visitor. It is the process of tailoring the design and content of a B2B website to the preferences, interests, and behaviors of individual visitors. Personalization helps to increase past purchases in a way that meets multiple business objectives, including increased customer satisfaction, longer visit times, increased website traffic, lower bounce rates, improved conversions, retention, referrals, and brand reputation.
The more personalized your website is, the greater the opportunities to better serve your customers and prospects.
Top 5 Benefits of Website Personalization
1. Improve lead generation
Most website customizations in B2B marketing are aimed at conversion rate optimization. Website personalization can generate close to about 50-300% more leads than generic website content while increasing engagement rates. While most marketers aspire to increase leads with website personalization, it has a series of other benefits including increased customer satisfaction, website traffic, lower bounce rates, improved conversions, retention, referrals, and brand credibility.
2. Create Engaging Experiences
By providing personalized content and design, brands can create more engaging user experiences. By ensuring an engaging web design experience, businesses can increase the time users spend on their websites, as well as the number of pages they visit. Personalization can lead to increased customer satisfaction, and translate into long-term loyalty by ensuring that the user experience is more relevant and enjoyable.
3. Optimize Lead Nurturingation
Personalization is a great way for brands to nurture leads more effectively. With personalization, leads will be able to see different types of content depending on what stage of the process they are in. And most potential customers do this over and over again to learn more about your services, and there’s no better way to do this than your website. When you share relevant content with your leads and add value, they’re more likely to show interest in your future communication.
4. Increase SEO Results
Increased engagement rates through personalization can also contribute positively to SEO. Google measures whether visitors bounce off a site and how long they stay on the page when it ranks the page based on how helpful the results are.
5. Amplify Brand Awareness
Personalization can also have a positive effect on your brand image. 68% of B2B customers say they’re willing to consider switching brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize their communication with customers. Personalization is increasingly becoming a necessity for most businesses or they might be at the risk of losing customers. By personalizing the user experience, brands can differentiate themselves and garner a greater competitive advantage.
How to use personalization in B2B marketing?
1. Identify Top Visitors
To personalize your website for business visitors and prospects, you need to first identify your visitors to provide relevant insights and information. In B2B personalization, an IP reverse lookup can reveal a visitor’s company. Other information such as the visitor’s country and the pages they visited is also relevant information.
2. Visitor Segmentation
Unless you’re focused on account-based marketing (ABM), you need to categorize visitors into a specific niche. Most B2B brands today serve multiple customer segments from various industries and company sizes. You can also segment customers basis the technology they use.
A good customer segment is a combination of criteria that results in an innovative and differentiated value proposition for that segment. For example, governments and SaaS companies care about very different things about your product. If you want to create one-to-one personalization for each identified business visitor, be sure to research them thoroughly to understand specifically what they will need from your service and why.
3. Create Personalized Content
To create effective personalized content, it is mission-critical to understand the different customer segments for which you want to create personalized content. To craft personalized content for each customer segment, you need to go through your website elements thoroughly and identify how it suits a specific customer type. To create the most efficient-personalized web experience, you need to tweak the elements that customers are most likely to interact with, such as images, text, calls to action, and use cases.
A call to action is a good and simple goal to personalize. To begin with, you can change the button text to encourage easy service, such as “Start”. For businesses, button texts like “Request a Demo” or “Chat with our Expert” might work better.
Personalizing calls to action is a great way to inspire different types of buyers to take action. Startups want to get started with freemium and companies want to talk directly to sales.
4. Serve Personalized Content in Real-Time
To be successful with real-time website personalization, you must identify users, segment them based on company data and other relevant data, and share personalized content in real-time faster. Without real-time personalization, users would see out-of-context information, but brands need to explore ways to focus on building the fastest possible content delivery system.
5. Measure Results and Repeat the Process
Successful personalized activities are created from measuring results and iterating like generic A/B testing. By conducting basic research, you need to be certain about what might be suitable for a particular customer segment and keep repeating the successful processes.
Let’s look at some of the website personalization best practices that can help you scale your growth and elevate your brand presence and reach.
Obtain User Consent:
It is important to obtain user consent before collecting and using their personal data for personalization purposes. To ensure this, brands need to have a clear and transparent privacy policy and consent forms in place. That being said not all personalization tactics require user consent or tracking.
Transparency about Data Collection and Use:
Users should be aware of how their personal data is being collected and used for personalization purposes. This can be accomplished by having clear and transparent privacy policies and notices.
Use User Data Ethically:
User data must be collected and used ethically, in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. This includes ensuring that personalization algorithms do not discriminate or exclude any user group and also protecting user data from unauthorized access or misuse.
Provide Relevant and Useful Content:
Personalization should aim to provide users with content and recommendations that are relevant and useful to them, which can help to boost user engagement and satisfaction.
Regularly Review and Update the Personalization Algorithms:
Personalization algorithms must be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure brands can continuously deliver relevant and personalized content. This can help maintain the effectiveness of customization over time.
Avoid Over-Personalization:
It is also important to strike a fine balance between providing personalized content and avoiding over-personalization, as too much-personalized content can tire users out and reduce engagement in the long run.
Dynamic website personalization for B2B businesses is now more possible than ever. It no longer requires engineers to make code changes, but marketers are free to edit any content on a website using a modern visual editor. Website personalization presents a host of challenges, including data security and safety, lack of sufficient information and insights, lack of customization skills that require the use of advanced technologies and data analysis techniques, the cost of technology implementation, and measuring the effectiveness of personalization. However, businesses need to be aware of these and look at ways to address them for the host of benefits that personalization offers businesses across industries.
