“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” - Don Draper, Mad Men
A website is a great marketing resource for any number of reasons, but one of the more invisible benefits it provides is the data that it gathers. Through our websites, our customers and prospects can tell us a lot about themselves, like what pages they visit (or don’t visit), how long they stay (or bounce) on our site, what problems they might need to solve based on what content they download, or what products they purchase (or just look at and abandon in their cart). As a marketer, the question that we need to ask is: what do we do with all of this data? There are plenty of beneficial uses for this information, but the one we want to look at today is personalization.
Marketers can compile a great deal of data about their site’s visitors through Marketing Automation software such as HubSpot, or by tracking website activity with Google Analytics. By using this data to create a personalized site experience, we are not just saying to our visitors, “Hey, we are creepy and we know your name,” we can say, “Hey, we care enough about you to give you content that we know will help you solve that work problem, or help you find the perfect product.” Personalizing your site’s content creates a more relevant web experience for your visitors, which can lead to happier clients, more conversions (leads), and ultimately more revenue for your business.
If you haven’t considered how personalizing your content can impact your business, take these stats into consideration:
- Nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (e.g. offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests. (Source: Janrain & Harris Interactive)
- In-house marketers who are personalizing their web experiences and who are able to quantify the improvement see, on average, a 19% uplift in sales. (Source: Monetate/eConsultancy)
- 46% of B2B customers consider tailored offers as extremely significant activities in terms of maintaining or growing the relationship with the business provider (Source: Why Companies Need to Market – and Not Just Sell – to Existing Customers, by Gartner)
- In a study of more than 93,000 calls-to-action created using HubSpot, and hundreds of millions of views over a 12-month period, HubSpot found that calls-to-action targeted to the user had a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than calls-to-action that were the same for all visitors (Source: HubSpot)
- 40% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience across channels (Source: Monetate)
- 81% of marketers perceive increase in customer engagement as the main benefit of real-time marketing. (Source: Real-Time for the Rest of Us, by Evergage)
Effective ≠ Easy
If your company hasn’t yet implemented a content personalization strategy, you’re not alone. Only 29% of marketers today invest in website personalization and use of behavior-based data (Source: 2014 State of Marketing, by ExactTarget), even though 94% of in-house marketers agree that website personalization is critical to current and future success (Source: The Realities of Online Personalization, by Econsultancy).
So if content personalization works, why aren’t more companies focusing on it? Common barriers to carrying out website personalization include an inability to translate data into action (i.e.
strategy) or lack of technology, according to EConsultancy’s report. In fact, technology could be the reason holding back a marketing team from success with content personalization. In a report published by Adobe and Econsultancy, only 32% of the respondents indicated that their CMS (Content Management System) enables web personalization.
Challenge Accepted!
For our clients, we wanted to solve the problem of siloed data and help their marketing teams to be able to develop a better strategy around content personalization, including the effective execution of that strategy. This was the driving goal behind the development of our recently launched HubSpot-EPiServer
Connector. This powerful tool removes the barrier between the data that you collect in your Marketing Automation Platform (HubSpot) and being able to deliver content that is specifically targeted to your contacts in your CMS (EPiServer).
Do you want to identify specific users when they access your site and deliver them exactly the content they are looking for? Do you want to tightly integrate the messages that different groups of visitors see in your email and social media campaigns with what they experience on your website? The HubSpot-EPiServer Connector can help you do all this automatically, allowing you to streamline your online marketing efforts like never before. If you want to learn more about how it works, what other options are available, or how you can begin revolutionizing your online strategy right away, please contact us today to schedule a demo. Do you have any other questions? Please share them in the comments below.
