Content personalization has been recommended for the top of most marketer’s to-do lists for several years. In fact, some estimates state that businesses can increase revenue by as much as 40% with personalization.
While personalized content seems to have been especially championed by e-commerce and retail brands, it’s a tactic that B2B companies can benefit from. This article covers a few advanced personalization techniques for B2B marketers.
Content personalization is an important tactic for all marketers. But it is especially important for B2B marketers for several reasons.
By tailoring your content more closely to what your subscribers want, you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. According to Monetate, 95% of companies that saw 3x ROI from their personalization efforts increased profitability in the year after their personalization efforts.
This shows that once marketers are able to start personalizing content and do some testing, their efforts are almost immediately rewarded. It is worth the time and energy to develop a content personalization strategy for your marketing initiatives.
For most B2B marketers, there is a finite number of potential customers—only so many businesses that can use your product or service. Despite the fact that new businesses emerge daily, it may be a few years before they are eligible to use your product or service and help you move past your growth plateau.
During this time, you’ll also be battling your competitors for the customers that do exist.
All of this creates an environment where list degradation and unsubscribes are even more important than they might be for retail brands.
If you aren’t personalizing your content and making it as valuable as it can be for your subscribers, you’re likely losing a higher number of subscribers and potential buyers than you should be.
According to Snov.io, companies that employ content personalization tactics retain 10% more of their subscribers than those who don’t over 1 year.
Email personalization is another way to gain a competitive advantage with your marketing and build a preference for your brand over others. That can be huge when you consider that employees receive an average of 120 emails to his or her inbox every day, according to TechJury.
There are many ways to personalize content for B2B audiences, whether you look at sales flows, email content, or webpage and onboarding content.
For the sake of brevity, we’re going to specifically focus on a B2B personalization concept called topic personalization, and how to achieve it. (The information here isn’t intended to be comprehensive, but rather to serve as a starting point.)
When we talk about topic personalization, what we mean is allowing your subscribers to select or receive content that aligns closely with their interests or needs. Instead of sending generic content to all subscribers, B2B companies use data-driven insights to understand what topics or types of information each subscriber prefers. This approach enhances relevance, engagement, and ultimately, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
There are two basic steps to achieve this:
As mentioned, there are a few different ways you can segment your audience. You can either segment them based on their self-selected interests, their interactions with your brand, or based on an attribute their company has.
If you want to allow your audience to self-select, you’ll need to develop an email preferences page that allows them to opt-in and out of the different content types or topics that your company develops content around.
For example, if your company produces content about integrating your product with both Pardot and Marketo, then you may want to allow subscribers to identify whether they want your Pardot information, your Marketo information, or both.
The most important thing to remember with this method is that your preference center is law.
If subscribers sign up for Pardot-specific content, you need to serve them Pardot-specific content. Don’t fall into the temptation of going broad with content topics when you have the opportunity to dive deep and speak to your subscribers and leads where they indicated they want help.
Each company and lead funnel has a sweet spot when it comes to form length (I can’t be the only one who cringes when I’m interested in viewing a whitepaper, only to discover that I need to share my home address and my mother’s middle name to receive it.
With some thoughtful strategy, however, you can ensure that leads share the top 1 or 2 attributes that you need to deliver a relevant, personalized experience throughout their time as a lead and sales prospect.
Does your app require an integration? Are there certain industries or verticals that you target? Does the job title matter? Find out what really matters—and what will affect your content personalization—and collect that info.
Depending on your marketing automation system, you may be able to build lists of contacts based on pages they’ve looked at on your website.
For example: if a subscriber only looks at information about your Pardot integration, you might only send them Pardot-specific information.
(Since we’re talking Pardot: If you are a Pardot user, you would apply Page Actions to the pages or blog posts that discuss relevant topics to set up this strategy.)
This can feel like a very custom, personalized touch to a customer.
However, many potential customers may venture out of their area of true interest to examine your brand as a whole during the decision-making process. They may also click something accidentally. If you apply this strategy, it is worth keeping an eye on how many subscribers are receiving multiple content types and whether or not that makes sense for your business.
The last segmentation strategy you can use for personalization are company attributes. These are data points like company size or industry.
If these are key components to determining which companies fall into your target market, and your team produces different content for large/small companies, or companies in certain industries, then this may be a better way for you to segment your audience, rather than allowing them to self-select.
Once you have your audience segmented, you’ll need to build out emails so that each member of your audience gets the content he or she is most interested in.
Believe it or not, all emails are not created equal. Some email-building processes are time-consuming and manual, while others are completely automated. We’ll dive into different strategies for creating these personalized messages.
The simplest and most straightforward way to build out your personalized emails involves creating a separate email for each list. Back to our example: if you personalize based on CRM/ESP, this means that you create one email for your list of Pardot users, another for your Marketo users, and a third for anyone who’s on both lists.
When you only have 3 possible combinations, this manual method seems doable. But if your company requires more than a couple of choices for personalization, this won’t be sustainable.
Additionally, building out separate emails increases your margin of error. (Emails are especially error prone, for whatever reason.)
While there is nothing “wrong” with creating separate emails, some of the other content personalization email building methods will save you time.
Dynamic content, AKA adaptive content, refers to content blocks in your emails (or landing pages, etc.) that change based on an audience member’s attributes.
By using dynamic content, you would only build 1 email, but the content blocks would change depending on who was receiving it.
This method can save you some time, as you aren’t building separate emails for each audience type/member. However, you still need to format the content you are placing in each of the dynamic content blocks, so it isn’t a completely automated solution.
It’s also incredibly difficult to test the emails, since you have to make sure you have test addresses that correspond to each segment, and manually check each one.
Many B2B companies have more involved email newsletter needs that are extremely reliant on topic personalization. In these cases, the majority of your email content is different for each segment, which effectively rules out the “Dynamic Content” option.
(At this point, there’s a collective sigh of resignation: manual building, here we go.)
Fortunately, there are tools specifically designed to help you create your highly customized newsletters in a way that’s efficient and saves your team time and headaches.
FeedOtter is a tool that integrates with top ESPs, and helps you automate the process of building your emails based on tags or the type of content you need to send to your subscribers.
If you’re working primarily with RSS feeds, you can simply plug in your feed URLs, apply a template, and make sure that FeedOtter is connected with your ESP so it knows who to send the emails to. (The emails are compiled in FeedOtter, which then shoots the content to your ESP for automated sending. A clean, reliable workflow that allows you to keep the tools you need.)
If you want to incorporate additional content sources, like your TikTok videos, Instagram posts, content from Google sheets, or even webpages that you’ve saved for a curated newsletter, you can use the FeedOtter newsletter curation tools which will compile all your relevant content for that segment and allow you to add them to your email template with a single click.
Everything is pre-formatted, including the images, which FeedOtter automatically pulls and inserts along with the content.
A huge timesaver to boost your personalization without sacrificing efficiency.
