Personalized Marketing Matters! How to Deliver Customized Messaging to Target Accounts

How often does this happen to you: You’re scrolling through your messages when, about midway through, one strikes a chord. Maybe it’s an ad. Maybe it’s an email with a compelling subject line. And you decide to open it. Chances are, if you’re like me, you’re only going to open it if (A) it speaks to an interest of yours, or (B) it addresses a challenge you’ve faced in the past. And when you click on its CTA and land on the ultimate destination — the landing page — what then? Again if you’re like me, if the content on the landing page is compelling enough, there’s a good chance you’ll engage in even deeper content. (A marketer’s dream.)

Most likely, the type of marketing I will engage with the most is personalized — the kind that feels like it was written just to me, not to me and a thousand other people. Personalization is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time — it’s at the core of Account-Based Experience (ABX).

Harnessing intent for personalized messages that resonate

So how do we deliver personalization that captures our target accounts’ attention?

It comes down to knowing the right information about the account and the buying personas at the account.

Intent behavior — how consumers are engaging in first- and third-party content online — is essential to discerning what content is important to them. Intent data helps you understand what keywords the account or people at that account are researching. With this insight, you can find the accounts that are in-market for your product and prioritize your messaging based on where they are in their account journey.

Note: Finding accounts in-market for your product is a key part of a personalization strategy. Keep in mind, personalization is more than just the right message delivered at the right time. It’s also important to reach the right audience.

A screenshot of the Demandbase One Dashboard showing the top trending Intent keywords over 12 weeks. This information helps you understand what target accounts are researching on the web

The case for personalization

According to an article by Instapage, 79 percent of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy. The article showcases some eye-opening statistics regarding personalization, including that “lack of content relevancy generates 83 percent lower response rates in the average marketing campaign.” Breaking through the noise and differentiating your organization requires that you provide your audience with relevant content, and personalization is a tried and true way to do that.

Three tips for personalized site experiences

Demandbase is one of the only account-based platforms that has a native personalization feature. Based on feedback from customers and countless experiences created by our customers, we’ve identified a few best practices to optimize your website personalization experience.

First: Segment your accounts by demographics, intent, journey stage, and more.

It’s important to have the right data in place to segment your account list based on your business goals. You want to segment your accounts by demographic information as well as by their intent or journey stage. If you use an ABM platform with more robust segmentation capabilities, you could also further segment your account list based on other criteria, like the number of recent sales touches or high-value pages visited.

You’ll end up with a list that not only gives you a target account list based on your ICP (ideal customer profile) but also allows you to target accounts showing interest in your product. And that sounds like a win-win for you and your prospects.

Note: Having both first and third-party intent data are paramount to creating the right target account list. Why? Because first-party data gives you known account information, but marrying that with third-party intent and anonymous website data helps you find accounts showing interest as well as new accounts that may not already be in your CRM.

The snapshot of Demandbase One shows how you can segment your account list by account demographics, intent, and website activity to obtain a set of accounts in your ICP showing interest.

Second, once you’ve established your target account list using the right data, you should think through what type of experience you want to customize for your accounts.

Perhaps you want to personalize your product page to speak to that industry. (For example, the image below shows a landing page customized for a computer software company.) Also, think about where they are in their path to purchase. If they are in the Aware stage, perhaps you want to showcase existing customers by rotating the logos on your site to better match the industry you’re targeting. Or, if they are in the Engaged stage, you can change the call-to-action to point to a playbook with content specific to their industry.

The creative elements and the experience you want to give to your customer or prospect are up to you. One thing is for sure: Taking the time to think through the messaging from the consumer’s perspective will ensure you’re delivering the right message to the consumer at the right time.

Personalize the website experience with messages that are relevant to and delight your audience.

The third and final tip is to track the experiences in your analytics tool.

Since there are so many creative ways to customize the experience for your target audiences, tracking campaign performance helps you to continually optimize the account experience — and improve results. Perhaps you want to test a different piece of content to see if that drives conversion. Or maybe you want to try different calls-to-action. According to a Harvard Business Review Study (The Surprising Power of Online Experiments), “tiny changes can have a big impact.”

That’s not to say that you should go out and create hundreds of personalized experiences at one time. Tracking the performance of each personalized impression and making small incremental changes to messaging, images, or CTAs are steps in understanding what increases conversion on your site.

Personalization with Demandbase

An ABM platform should provide robust personalization, and it should also make personalization easy. We get it. And we’ve recently made some enhancements to Demandbase’s Personalization product to make it an easier and more powerful tool for your ABX arsenal.

Demandbase Personalization is easy to use in terms of creating new account experiences and robust in terms of creating an account list. With its launch with Demandbase One, Personalization leverages the power of Selectors to create robust account segmentation and dynamic lists. The recently enhanced UI enables customers to create new experiences in a few clicks, share a preview link with the right stakeholders and set up tracking in Google Analytics as part of the workflow. All modifications are tracked on the review page for easy reference as you optimize the experience for your target accounts. No other account-based personalization tool is more powerful or easier to use than that.

Go to the Demandbase Personalization page to learn more.