All you need to know about B2B personalization

Do you know 79% of businesses who have exceeded their ROI goals shared that they have a “Documented personalization strategy”

Sadly, many marketers have not yet adopted this rewarding trend. B2B marketplace is not different when it comes to personalization. Ultimately we are speaking and creating offers for people who would like personalized recommendations.

B2B personalization:

Personalization is creating a specific offer, tailored to suit the requirements of one particular customer or segment.

Personalization is creating a specific offer, tailored to suit the requirements of one particular customer or segment.

Take a moment and think; your potential B2B client is already getting so many marketing emails and ads. What would they really like to read? A general advertisement or highly personalized content- understanding and speaking about their pain points? Obviously, they would love to read custom content.

Benefits of B2B personalization

1. Increase in Sales and conversion rate- When you know your customer, you can offer the product or service what exactly they want. Most of the time, customers buy from the suggestions which pop up on a website. Personalization’s job is to show the blind spot to the customer.
2. Enhances customer experience:- Personalization makes the customer feel awesome and take care of. If you are doing this, then the chances of customers buying your product or services are high.
3. Boost Brand Awareness: As a company, you are automatically improving your brand image if you care about your customer needs.

But, how do we create personalized content?

This blog will help you to plan and create B2B personalization for all aspects of your business marketing strategy!

Let us start with marketing B2B personalization:

While 90% of marketers agree that personalization will improve conversion rate, many are not able to offer a personalized experience to potential B2B consumers.

With 57% of research happening before your potential customer reaches your website, you need to switch to intent-based marketing.

B2B market is also people-driven. At the end of the day, you are selling something to people who want a customized experience. B2B sales include multiple decision-makers.

Lead personalization: Why would someone (even for B2B purpose) share their personal information with you? Based on your ideal customer profile, have you created personalized content for your potential customers?

1. Create a lead magnet, something that will have enough attraction to share their email address and personal information.
2. Give a tip that solves a small but recurring problem for your potential client. Your potential customer will be happy and more willing to get an opt-in email from you.

Digital marketing personalization is the essential ingredient here. Marketers already have more than 100 data points from which digital marketing can create personalized offers, change the lead magnet offered, and even create custom content on the fly. The key is to use all the outbound marketing techniques to ensure your content speaks to the audience.

Lead Nurturing – Email Customization

Now that your potential customer opted in for your email list, you must create segmented content to address different types of potential customers.

Let’s think another way around. Hundreds of emails come every day. Most of those come with a personalized name. As a customer, what kinds of emails will you open and read?

• An email with a catchy subject line?
• Content in the email based on your search history on their website?
• Consistent and relevant emails that interest me?
• Sending trigger-based emails- As soon as we take action on the website, an email is sent on our email id. For example- Recent searches, related searches, items in cart,sign-up email, welcome email.

All of the above, right? Even if companies send birthday messages with some special offers, that also most of the times we open.

Here is a way to write a personalized email:-

1. Start with a name – give a human touch, start your email with a personal touch. Pro tip – make sure you also sign it with a personal name. Don’t sign it like “this is an auto-generated email.” This ensures a higher opening rate for emails.
2. Communicate humanely: when someone is granting you their inbox right, it is a privilege. Treat your potential customers as people, not just numbers.
3. Create a personalized call to action: B2B customers do have personal preferences, and you must create a call to action using those preferences.

Email marketing is profounder than just the points mentioned above, and you can read all about successful email marketing here!

Pro Tip:-

-Optimize emails for mobile phones as well. Most of the emails are opened on mobile. Mobile optimized email has less text and images and light design that open quickly on mobiles

– Everything has a limit. Avoid too much saying customer’s name in the mails. After some time, these emails can even annoy them.

Website content personalization for B2B markets

Do you know, 70% of buyers consider “Vendor’s website” as the most influential resource in purchase decisions”

Website content personalization can create wonders for lead conversions. When someone is on your website after doing a lot of research, you should offer them meaningful and personalized content.  There are tools to create dynamic content based on user’s preferences. Customizing customer’s visits to the website based on the last purchases and search pattern work very well. The customer then stays on a website for a long duration, increases site visits, and decreases bounce rate.

“A customer is someone who visits your website most of the time and not just once or twice.”

Website personalization can sound tricky because how do you personalize a website for someone landing on it for the first time? Some tools can help you create a persona-based strategy. For example, suppose you have studied your buyer’s persona, and you know that Linkedin is a crucial channel. In that case, you can simply create two different types of content: one for people coming from Linkedin, other for people not coming from Linkedin. This example is too simple, and you have to add many such factors before making any decisions.

However, it does give you a direction and using marketing tools, and you can create dynamic – persona-based website content. You can also repurpose your existing content to cater to different segments.

Pro-tip 1: Identify the buying cycles for your potential customers.

Then create content on your website to address each of these cycles. Your potential customers will be able to make decisions faster.

Email marketing and website content personalization go hand-in-hand. Once someone browsed your website, your tools should alert you the pages that were clicked most of the time and how much time a person spent on those pages. This will be input into the email customization tool. You can now create personalized offers in the email, which reminds your potential buyers about the time they spent on your website.

Pro-tip 2: Send personalized activity report

Getting new customers is important but retaining existing customers is equally important. Right? It’s critical to have interaction with existing customers. Sending a personalized activity report is a  great option.

Example:- Grammarly, an AI-based grammar and plagiarism checker tool. It  sends a report every week- Grammarly Insights. It gives a summary of a weekly writing update. It includes( in percentage):- Productivity, Mastery of a user on grammar, vocabulary, kinds of tones used. This excites the user more to use Grammarly. More than that, this activity enables the customer to share with others about its features.

You can include some of these ideas:-

• Productivity Score
• How many hours they were logged
• Activities that are done on the website
• Recent Searches
• Most used applications

Breaking down the activities into percentages is effective.

Personalize your sales!

In general, and especially in the B2B segment, sales is a 1-2-1 process. Not a 1-to-many process. Unfortunately, less than 15% of businesses use personalization when it comes to sales.

Like we stated above, potential customers want to be treated as persons, not just numbers. However, sale representatives are often not equipped with enough context or personalization data to create a unique offer.

By having a tightly-knit marketing and sales team, you can give the sales team the exact details needed to create a long-lasting relationship with potential customers.

By leveraging lead personalization tools, your sales will have all details of previous interactions.

When you send an offer, be sure to check if the offer is suitably customized or not. If not, take some time to change the offer. The chances are high that a general proposition may be rejected outright.

Personalized Forms

When a visitor comes to a website and browse for products or services and reads the information given, it clearly indicates that the visitor is interested and maybe curious to know more. Personalized Sign up forms is also a great way to start interacting with the potential visitor. The sign-up form can be for creating an account on an e-commerce platform, free demos and webinars, free e-books, newsletters, and many more. Sign-up forms are the first step in business conversion. If the customer has filled the form, that means he is enrolled in what your business is about.

Pro Tip:- Sign up form must be just a simple pop-up and not a separate page.

Elements in a simple Sign up form:-

1. First name and last name
2. Email Id
3. Country
4. State
5. Pin Code
6. Phone Number(optional)
7. Address(if E-commerce website)

To summarize:

1. Research different decision-makers involved and create segments based on your potential customers.
2. Study the problems they are experiencing and use your industry knowledge to give small practical solutions as a lead magnet.
3. Create dynamic websites using tech tools and offer personalization at each step of the buying process.
4. Create personalized email campaigns and nurturing campaigns.
5. Integrate this info with sales tools.
6. Create customized offers.

Win your B2B clients and have a rewarding, long-lasting client base!

We hope that you were able to use some of the tips offered here. We would love to hear from you about your personalization journey! Leave a comment and let us know if there was any particular tip that you loved. Happy marketing!