Long gone are the days when prospects interested in your product contacted your sales department to inquire about how your product can do the job for them. Buyers just go online to your website and, lo and behold, bump into a generic one-size-fits-all pompous message.
Here’s the challenge – visitors are new and you don’t know anything about them (yet), but you want to target a special segment of business prospects with a unique set of messages, and you want them to ultimately complete the call-to-action that turns them from a visitor to a lead.
So how do you create this notion of a personalized conversation with your most important prospects right from the first click? The combination of Sitefinity built-in personalization capabilities, Sitefinity Insight tracking of key interactions and conversions, and Sitefinity extensibility options that enable integration with best-of-breed marketing solutions comes to the rescue.
And here’s the real story coming from our experience. Sitefinity.com is the product’s online portal, rich in resources and information about Sitefinity CMS. As company we embraced the B2B Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, aiming at attracting more customers from two key industries: healthcare and financial services. We want to personalize Sitefinity.com landing page content from its ad campaign promoting success stories with the product. The target audience is first-time visitors from these two industries, so the messages and case studies directly address the peculiarities of the industries.
So, what is the solution to this challenge? You accomplish this by:
- Leveraging Sitefinity out-of-the-box personalization capabilities and audience segmentation
- Implementing custom personalization criteria for deeper segmentation
- Integrating with Demandbase business companies’ database
- Personalizing website content in Sitefinity, based on the audience segmentation
- Defining what is a successful conversion and measuring visits and conversions in Sitefinity Insight
Attract the right audience
With the help of Demandbase and its business database, Sitefinity can identify in detail the business characteristics of otherwise anonymous website visitors and thus segment them in real time. This user intelligence foundation works without the use of cookies and data about previous visitor interaction on the site, so that Sitefinity can attract, target, and convert the desired first-time visit business audiences. Demandbase provides real-time information about the key attribute that Sitefinity ABM strategy requires – “industry”:
For more information, see the Demandbase ABM platform.
Segment the target audience
You now need to employ various criteria for the personalization of content. You do this by segmenting the audience, based on user characteristics in the Sitefinity Personalization module.
Segments are based on:
- Location user characteristic
- Custom characteristic that segments the audience based on whether they are using a mobile device
- Custom characteristic Demandbase attribute that needs to contain the “Financial Services” or “Healthcare” values to make personalization work.
For details how to create the custom user segments, see Tutorial: Create custom personalization criteria. You can find the custom implementations for extending the personalization criteria in the GitHub repository.
Personalize the experience
It is now time to personalize the landing page content in the Sitefinity admin panel.
First, personalize the widget that lists and displays success stories content, based on the industry user segment. For details, see Personalize a widget.
As a result, when a business visitor that Demandbase identifies as coming from the Financial Services industry lands on the Sitefinity.com page for success stories, the website showcases relevant case studies and messages for their industry only and thus increases the likelihood of conversion.
Next, personalize the Card widget, based on the device on which the visitor is viewing the site. The Card widget displays the call-to-action button, along with any other relevant information. For details, see Feather: Card widget.
Thus, if a visitor is browsing on a desktop, they see a Try Sitefinity CTA button that redirects them to the downloading a trial page. If the visitor is on their mobile device, they see a Schedule a demo CTA button.
Finally, personalize the widget that displays contact information, based on visitors’ location. As a result, visitors from specific region see only the contact number of the Sales team that is responsible for their respective area.
Engage and convert
All done! Except for getting some feedback whether it was all worth it. After you segmented your audiences and personalized their experience, you want to measure the results of your work and whether your audience segments do what you want them to do. Enter Sitefinity Insight, which helps you understand your audience and their customer journey, so that you create impactful personalized content to achieve your desired business outcomes. To read more about Sitefinity Insight capabilities, see the documentation.
You first set the conversion report that will track and provide you with statistics and insights on how many and which visitors convert. You can also compare results from before and after the campaign started. For details, see Define conversions.
Next, you connect the dots of the relationship between conversions per user segment and the personalized version of the page in the report that is automatically generated by Sitefinity Insight when you personalize pages in Sitefinity. For details, see Personalization reports.
The key findings in the report are how many visitors hit your page versions that ultimately confirm or reject your hypothesis of being from a specific industry sector:
Since the sitefinity.com ABM campaign was so well-thought out and seamlessly executed with the help of Sitefinity in combination with Sitefinity Insight, the bottom line turned out just as we hoped:
As you can see in the report snippet above, personalizing the Case Studies landing page resulted in an average of 5 times more conversions from the targeted audience segments. This probably means that the Sitefinity sales team is quite busy these days.
Et voila! By combining the strengths of Sitefinity and Sitefinity Insight, you targeted and segmented audiences by capturing visitor data, personalized the site to help accelerate prospects through the sales funnel, and ultimately optimized conversion rates.