Have you ever got the feeling you’re being followed? Well, you may want to get used to the term ‘personalisation’; an approach that tracks your habits online and provides appropriate content directed solely at you. While you may have already witnessed consumer-based personalisation, it is becoming increasingly common in B2B to ensure customer engagement.
Over 94% of senior-level employees in marketing believe that incorporating personalisation in a strategy is crucial to reaching and retaining customers. Personalisation can be difficult to get right – it takes time, the right audience and a bank of customer data to perfect. So, why are companies focusing on this marketing technique and how can it benefit B2B? Let’s break down exactly what personalisation is, and how B2B marketers are embracing it.
What is personalisation?
Personalisation is a strategy that combines customer information, demographics and behaviour, to determine the optimal opportunity for marketing. We are so overwhelmed with advertising daily, that we have become numb to its intended effects. This is why having control over who sees and interacts with your work is so important to increase customer engagement.
B2B companies are becoming increasingly more efficient when incorporating personalisation into marketing strategies. This approach has been shown in a variety of B2B campaigns to provide a customised digital experience. Here, we discuss two examples:
The Expert Institute
Companies like The Expert Institute have quickly learned the benefits of personalisation and how it can achieve a lot with limited resources. A legal service platform that connects leading experts from its database to law firms, The Expert Institute relies heavily on digital marketing to promote content. In a recent survey completed by Business 2 Community, it was found that over 49% of respondents receive irrelevant email content on a daily basis. If an email does not include the appropriate content specific to each reader, it may not experience the same engagement as personalised email content. To combat this, The Expert Institute developed a strategy that used both personalisation and lead nurturing to better target its audience.
The company cleaned its database and started over, allowing them to ensure each email was addressing the correct person with the correct name – an element of email marketing which is often overlooked. The content of each email appears to come from a member of the communications team, giving the reader an individual experience. This unique approach provided the grounds for developing a relationship between both the reader and company, and resulted in a 200% increase in conversion via the website and social media.
Brainshark
Brainshark is an educational website that provides robust cloud-based software for managing presentations. The company wanted to provide customised messages for its audience, to improve sales and drive more engagement across the website. Brainshark also offers a subscription service that provides free and paid-for plans to manage workloads. Early on, they realised that both these plans were not being used, and once signed up to the site, many did not engage further.
To encourage users to upgrade to the paid plan or sign up to the newsletter, Brainshark launched its personalised communications campaign. This campaign would instruct tailored messages to pop up on-screen, ushering users towards content that would best benefit them. Each message was specific to the user’s profile ID, making the content more relatable. The campaign resulted in 15% more users upgrading to paid plans, increased user activity, and significantly improved sign-up rates.
Final thoughts
There are many ways of incorporating personalisation into a campaign strategy. The Expert Institute and Brainshark are just two examples of how personalisation can create a successful marketing campaign for B2B companies. It provides marketers with control over content viewing, better-targeted outreach, higher levels of engagement, including click-through rates, and greater brand experience. While personalisation can take time and care to get right, the results are worthwhile in B2B marketing.
If you are looking for a B2B consultancy that can support you in personalisation, contact us at [email protected].