Using Website Personalization to Engage With ABM Accounts

We spend a lot of time and money driving visitors to our websites. But the game is far from over once they arrive. You need to turn visits into engagement — and nothing beats a personalized experience to make that happen.

However, more than 98 percent of visitors to your website are anonymous when they arrive and still unknown when they click away.

That hurts.

But it doesn’t mean you can’t use your website account-based marketing (ABM) program. The best way to do it is by using account intelligence to personalize the web and chat experience for your chosen accounts.

Using web personalization technology, you can identify the company and industry that a visitor belongs to, then serve up images, case studies, and offers targeted to that account or industry. If you’re targeting healthcare, retail, and financial services, you can create three different home pages and website paths that are optimized for each.

Or you can customize the offers and messages based on where the account is in its journey — one set of messages for early-stage prospects, one for in-market accounts and open opportunities, one for existing customers. Or customize based on the intent the account is showing or the specific technologies it has in place. The possibilities go on and on.

And if you’ve created account-specific content (such as an account content hub), you’ll want to feature that when a member of that account hits your site.

Think big, start small

Based on our experience with thousands of B2B companies, keeping web personalization simple often gives the best outcomes. You may want to begin with small changes, like an adjustment to the home page banner to make it industry specific.

The most successful Demandbase customers focus on just four to five key segments at a time. Operationally, it’s tough to serve up personalized experiences to more segments than that.

• Are your segments truly different in a meaningful way? Are they mutually exclusive?
• Do you have marketing assets/content to cover each segment?
• Do each of your target accounts fall clearly into one segment or another? (It’s OK if non-target accounts don’t fall into any specific segment.)

Call them by their (company) name.

Many Demandbase clients ask about talking to prospects from a targeted account by using their company name. There’s no definitive answer that’s right for all situations. Some customers see a lift in engagement when using customer names as part of their personalization strategy, especially in advertising. Others consider it to be creepy, especially if a visitor has not identified themselves by completing a form.

Regardless, this is where accurate account identification is critical. A high match rate with lower accuracy is useless if you want to personalize website experiences. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t match the small accounts you won’t ever sell to… but getting it wrong for a big account is a big deal.

A few areas where you might consider testing using the company name include:

• A personalized welcome to customer login
• A thank you page after a form completion
• A homepage welcome for your best customers
• Personalized advertising

A rule of thumb: If it triggers a “How did they know that?” response, you might be better off not doing it since it might seem creepy.

You should always use your insights to shape your messages to known prospects — but you don’t always have to flaunt those insights!

Reduce form friction

A subset of web personalization is using your ability to identify the account to remove or simplify your forms.

As we know, buyers simply don’t want to fill them out, and when they do, the information is often false.

Use your ability to identify the account to bypass forms when you don’t need them. And when you do need to use a form (say an event registration), keep it short with a few basic questions, such as name and email address. Then, use your Account ID to append firmographic data such as the visitor’s company affiliation, mailing address, revenue and other data points.

The benefits of this approach include more form fills, triple-verified company identification, and a more manageable database with standardized and normalized data.

Personalized chat

Chat allows businesses to have conversations with their website visitors and customers, often using automated chatbots. It originated as a customer support tool but it is also used to qualify leads and then book a meeting or pass the best ones over to live sales reps to continue the conversation.

Live chat can help build trust with buyers by providing subject matter expertise at the point of engagement. Buyers like the real-time response and ability to start the sales conversation on their terms, when it’s right for them.

Chat personalization can be as simple as acknowledging a client by name, or a bit more advanced, aligning the chat experience to the account’s intent keywords and where the company falls in the account journey. And if a high-value account wants to chat, perhaps you route them directly to the appropriate sales rep to provide the best experience possible.

Fortunately, all the major chat providers integrate with common account-based platforms, including Demandbase, for account identification.

Get your copy of my book, The Definitive Guide to Smarter GTM™ with Account Intelligence and ABM/ABX. You can download it here.