Website Personalisation — the next frontier in B2B Marketing

Personalisation is the act of tailoring a service or a product experience to meet the specific needs of individuals, cohort of smaller groups — segmented by Demographic, Geographic, Firmographic, Technographic, Psychographic, Behaviour patterns. Personalisation can be applied in customer service, sales conversion, marketing, branding, advertising, both in human:human & machine:human interactions.

So, what is web personalisation and why should one care? Website or Web Personalisation in the realm of Digital Marketing is a technique where a website visitor is served with highly relevant information that is specific to his informational needs rather than showing a generic content that is non-tailored.

One of the earliest implementation of personalisation is where digital advertising moved from displaying a static ad banners (think the blinking banner image) regardless of who visited a website to a dynamically changing ads, based on a long list of attributes such as time of visit, visitor location and more.

Before personalisation

The advancement in Ad technology enabled millions of website owners to dramatically increase their monetisation possibilities as the ads shown were targeted (read personalised) that led to increase in engagement (aka clicks)

After personalisation

The next shift in website personalisation came in content, specifically in eCommerce where websites like Amazon started suggesting products based on their visitor profile, browsing patterns and more — this change made website owners to keep their visitors on their site for a longer time that increased the likelihood of purchases — up-sell and cross-sell became a norm.

The B2C web is a clear leader in leveraging web personalisation to its fullest potential and have profited from an increased visitor engagement and conversions. B2B web on the other-hand has been a laggard and has a lot to catch up both in realisation and adoption. In the age of millennials making or influencing purchase decisions, B2B engagements and conversions is on a downward spiral due to the lack of expected personalisation. There is a loss in brand equity and lost in sales opportunity in today’s always-on marketplace when B2B website owners and their marketers fail to adopt personalisation as a differentiating factor.

A few years ago when personalisation technology was in its infancy those marketers who were savvy were grappled by the logistical challenges in implementing and scaling their personalisation strategies. Today, website personalisation for B2B isn’t hard — in-fact it has become so simple that they can self-service and reduce the time to market by order of magnitude. There’s no code to write, no developer to chase, no multiple versions to fight with!

Here are a few use cases where personalisation can be applied and implemented.

• Display website copy based on geography from where the visitor accesses the site from.
  
  
• Enable multilingual capability on existing webpages.
  
  
• Maintain multiple version of website copies and serve it based on copy performance through A/B testing.
  
  
• Show and hide sections based on certain parameters
  
  
• Create and serve hyper personalised landing pages for each customer or industry.
  
  
• Cut down on lengthy form and pre-fill forms intelligently

At Recotap we help B2B Marketers in optimising their web and landing pages for conversion (CRO) using personalisation as a key tool. Our customers have seen a consistent improvement in conversions (and consequently their marketing ROI) by more than 2X.

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