Personalization Guide
The 2020 Edition

The Marketer's Guide to Website Personalization

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Introduction

How website experiences have evolved in 2020

Why do most websites show the same thing to every visitor? It's ineffective communication. That's why average conversion rates are between 2-7%.

Your homepage is probably the highest traffic page on your website. If you were to segment your visitors, you'd discover they all have very different reasons for visiting your site at that very moment.

It's likely they are are a mix of cold visitors, warm leads, and customers with different interests. Their job title, industry, company size, and other traits make them unique.

Yet, your website shows the same thing to them all. Why?

Because website personalization has been really hard to do until we came along. Before Proof's product Experiences, only enterprise companies with massive budgets and skilled engineers and data scientists could do personalization well.

Then we built Experiences, which makes it easy for marketers to personalize their website without coding. Over the past 3 years, Proof has been been creating products that dramatically increase website conversions.

We're data-driven marketers. We A/B test everything. We are obsessed with crafting a delightful, high-converting customer journey. If you're like us, then you're going to love this guide.

Who is this personalization guide for?

Keep reading if you are a marketer (or non-technical person) who desires to increase leads, demos, and sales for your company.

If your website has more than 10,000 visitors per month, then personalization is well worth your time. If you're not there yet, I would recommend focusing on traffic more than conversion strategies.

The strategies revealed in this guide are going to help you no matter if you sell to business (B2B) or directly to consumers (D2C).

Whether or not you already do personalization in your advertising, email marketing, or on your website you will learn a lot from this guide.

Read this if you want to increase your website conversions to get more leads, demos, and sales.

Whether most of your traffic is from paid advertising, organic search, or partners personalization is your best chance at increasing leads and sales.

This guide shares the exact strategies & tactics that resulted in:

  • ProfitWell increasing blog leads 162%
  • Appcues increasing trials 39%
  • Textedly increasing new accounts 15%
  • KlientBoost increasing proposales 11%
  • Tithely increasing blog leads 82%
  • Shipbob increasing content downloads 123%
  • Bench increasing content downloads 41%

... along with so many more examples of good website personalization.

Table of Contents

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about personalization and how to apply the concept to your B2B marketing campaigns — in a cost effective way, at scale.

We’ll start with a rudimentary explanation of personalization — from its roots at the birth of the Internet to its role as a powerful omnichannel solution for B2B marketers in 2019.

Next, we’ll dig deep into the data side of personalization, exploring the different types of data types available to marketers and how to think through the collection of these many touchpoints in your interactions with visitors and customers.  We’ll show you the tools you need to use, how to collect data, where to store data, a method for tracking data, and proper conventions for naming your data.

After that, we’ll talk through a practical approach to personalization — citing where exactly you can personalize your site and 14 use cases of how exactly we’ve successfully deployed personalization campaigns at scale and with ease. These examples will give you great inspiration of how to deploy delightful experiences on your own site and start increasing your demo registrations, trial signups, conversion rates, and most importantly, revenue.

Finally, we’ll touch on how to measure your efforts and to build a team to execute on your plan. This guide is truly everything you need to know before implementing personalization on your site.  

By the end of this guide, you’ll be well versed in everything you need to know to deploy personalized experiences on your site without the help of engineers.

And more importantly, your leads, demos, and sales will skyrocket.

Chapter 1:
What is personalization?
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