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Now that we understand the points in the funnel where personalization can be successful — let’s take a deep dive into practical instances of personalization on your site.
Personalization has so many applications that it can be overwhelming at first as you think of all the places where you can implement the tactic into your funnel. You can deploy personalization at many different parts of your site. These include on:
That’s a lot of points to personalize. While most guides don’t cover the actual places where you can implement personalization on your site — we think that’s wrong. It’s hard to see the beauty of personalization without any context.
So, we’ve rounded up a list of our favorite places for a B2B marketer to run personalization experiments — and links on how to deploy them in Proof Experiences. While these website personalization ideas are from across the Web, all of these experiments merely take a few clicks to deploy within the Experiences platform.
One effective way that you can use personalization to create extra delight for your customers is to change the homepage for an existing customer when they visit your site. Since that visitor already signed up for your service — should you show them a page that pushes them to signup for a free trial or to schedule a demo?
The answer is no. It’s irrelevant information for them since they already pay you to use your service. You should use that moment and a user’s decision to visit the homepage to create a hyper-relevant touchpoint for your company.
A brand that does a great job of this tactic is Gusto. When you visit their site (as an unidentified visitor) for the first time, you see a page with a headline touting, “It’s time to tame the chaos of payroll, benefits, and HR.”
But once you visit as a customer, you see quite a different Experience. The page adjusts to say “Welcome back” — and swaps the form fields from “Try 1 month free” to a “Sign in” button.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
An easy way to adjust for a visitor’s unique property — such as their name or industry — is to adjust a headline or subheadline on a page. Rather than having one static headline speak to all visitors, you can use several unique headlines to talk to unique audiences.
Our beta customer, Digital Marketer, uses this tactic to build a hyper-personalized Experience for agency owners.
Rather than showing their generic headline “Tools and Trainings for Digital Marketers,” they use Proof Experiences to identify when an incoming visitor is an agency owner.
Then they deploy a headline, subheadline, and CTA personalization to directly speak to their agency audience saying “DigitalMarketer LOVES Agencies.”
Their hypothesis was that the relevant language would increase conversion rates for that cohort — and so far it has!
Implement this tactic using Experiences
What’s the most compelling story to tell a visitor? One from a brand they know and respect. Swapping out testimonials is an easy tactic to tailor content to match the exact use case your prospect is seeking out.
If you can identify your visitor as a member of a specific audience — then you probably want to reorder your elements to more prominently display a testimonial from a certain industry or you want to modify the page to display only relevant industry-specific testimonials.
On our Sign Up page, we feature one customer testimonial and based on our identification of a customer in a certain audience, we can swap out that quote for something more relevant.
For our identified SaaS customers, we display a quote from Gustaf Alstromer, Former Growth at AirBnb.
And for our E-commerce customers, we swap out that quote for one from Dave Williams, an E-commerce Marketer at WhitakerBrothers.com.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
Rather than launching a plethora of different landing pages to match headlines for all your Adwords or Facebook campaigns, wouldn’t it be awesome to launch one page & have it adjust in real-time based on the ad source?
You can use Proof Experiences to adjust your page’s headlines, subheadlines, CTAs, and more with ads that you are running off-site. This greatly increases conversion from your paid traffic, and can help you lower your CPAs.
A great example of this tactic comes from Freshworks. They use personalization to adjust their homepage based on a user's traffic source. In the search query below, we're looking for searching "crm software."
And once we click on the Adwords link — we're taken to a page that adjusts the headline to immediately address the query we just searched for. You can do this to prevent having to build out specific landing pages for every ad that you're running.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
What one visitor may see as a value-add, another visitor may simply see as filler text on a page. As B2B marketers, we want to offer value that directly speaks to each individual visitor. You can do that by personalizing the benefits section to only displaying the benefits that directly relate to a visitor’s unique needs.
This eliminates unnecessary fluff and makes a product or service seem even more relevant to a prospective buyer. Amplitude does a great job of this. Look at their highlighting of two value props with their landing page: set product strategy and improve customer engagement.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
Instead of showing your repeat customers the same product over and over again, you are now able to personalize an up-sell or cross sell to show them a recommendation for another product on your site.
In the e-commerce space, J. Crew does this incredibly well. When you buy an item, they immediately take the role of stylist and suggest a list of other clothing articles that pair well with your purchase history.
In the B2B software world, you can piggyback this same technique by offering content upgrades, software up-sells, or cross-sells at check out or during a login.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
As marketers, we know the classic adage “images speak louder than words.” With personalization, this plays true as well.
When you’re able to dynamically swap out elements on a page with something hyper-relevant for a visitor, you can truly wow your prospect.
A brand that does a really creative application of this tactic is hull.io. On their homepage, they personalize the logo in their integration infographic to feature your company’s logo.
When I first visited this page, I was so wowed by the feature that I stopped and asked a coworker, “did we sign up to be a case study for Hull.io?”
He looked at me and smirked, “that’s the power of personalization.”
Implement this tactic using Experiences
While many sites these days have white, minimalist backgrounds — that’s not the case for every site. Many landing pages you’ll visit online will have a background image as part of the design.
Since it takes up a large percentage of a page’s real estate, why not try swapping out the background image to make your audience feel personally catered to?
Optimizely does an incredible job of this — creating custom landing pages to send to high-value leads (such as Adidas). The extra time and effort to create this type of experience can wow and delight a prospect and move them a step closer to closing.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
According to Gustaf Alstromer, former Head of Growth for AirBNB and Y Combinator partner, “Adding live social proof was the #1 driver of increased revenue in all my experiments.” You’ve likely seen this personalization tactic as you’ve shopped for hotel rooms as flights as well — it’s quite common in the hospitality sector.
And we’ve seen this play true as we’ve deployed our social proof software on over 18,000 websites. For B2B SaaS, these visualizations of micro commitments from other visits can incentivize action from your visitors.
Putting in-line social proof right under a CTA can help push a guest that’s on the fence about taking an action to the next step.
On our homepage, we’ve embedded social Proof under the Watch an instant demo button, and we’ve seen a higher click-through. Our hypothesis was that guests that saw that hundreds of other companies had already taken some previous action would have fewer objections of their own.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
The days of actively having your customers fill in form fields are over. With personalization, you can automatically populate form fields with information from a 3rd party data solution using an IP or email address.
For instance, when I sign up for Mention using my Proof email address, other form fields throughout the process automatically populate based on my known information. It’s painless path for me as a user, and it provides an easy way to take action out of a visitor’s hands.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
Sales and support costs are the often forgotten, yet expensive expenses of running a business. In a given day, you only have limited hours to converse with your prospects and customers. Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a system to engage or service only high value clients?
With personalization, you can conditionally choose when to display Intercom, Drift, or another live chat tool on a page. By doing that, you can offer live chat only to your highest value visitors and customers. The result?
More personal conversations, higher conversation ratings, and happier sales and success teams.
In the example below, look at how Nicolas (a high-tier Enterprise grade account) sees Intercom when he logs into his account.
And Mike (a low-value self-service customer) does not have live chat in his account. It’s never apparent to the visitor that they aren’t seeing something, but it can make your life as a brand a whole lot easier.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
Have you ever noticed those popup bars that descend from the top of the browser announcing a special offer or encouraging you to signup for a mailing list? With a tool like Proof Experiences, you can fire a message bar to display only to certain audiences.
This is a great way to push a certain plan (for instance your Pro plan) to the right customer — or it’s great for a special day of the year on your site (perhaps Cyber Monday).
HelloBar uses this offering across their whole domain. The bar quickly catches your attention, but isn’t an obtrusive experience on your screen. It can remain at the top of the page or it can be sticky as you scroll down.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
If you’re a B2B marketer and it’s a visitor's first-time on your site, you likely want to push them towards them a signup or a demo registration — two opportunities where you can collect their email address.
But each subsequent time a visitor returns to your site, it doesn’t make sense to push them in the same exact spot. They’ve already seen those pages and decided not to take an action for some reason. Once you identify a visitor is at a different point in the buying cycle, you should pay special attention to his or her unique position.
If the visitor has already started a trial, push them to “Log back in” or “Launch a campaign” — getting them closer to an Aha moment. If a visitor has already purchased, but you see an indicator that they are a good candidate for an upgraded plan, push them with a CTA to “Upgrade for more features.”
At Proof, when a first-time visitor comes to the site, we push them to the CTA, “Watch an instant demo.”
When they’ve watched the demo, we update the CTA to push them to “Start my free trial.”
And finally, when they are a Proof customer, we push them to “Login.”
Implement this tactic using Experiences
Another way to personalize is to have a real-time survey popup while a visitor is on-site. You can use it to gather first-party demographic or firmographic points, and then deploy real-time changes to the site.
On our site, we use our surveying tool to collect industry data from a visitor when we can’t get a match via our API integration to Clearbit. This provides us with customer data that we can then turn around quickly to personalize the next page a visitor goes to.
Implement this tactic using Experiences
And there you have it — 14 personalization examples you can start implementing today!
Stay tuned for the next chapter! We'll cover how to measure the success of your personalization program. From deciding on when to personalize to who you need on your team to do it with ease.
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