Benefits of Personalization in B2B Marketing

Are you unsure about the benefits of B2B Personalization for your bottom line? The example below shows exactly how a few web changes in favor of personalization can increase dramatically increase revenue.

Personalization impact on Lead Value

In the case above, we’ve got an enterprise B2B SAS business with two defined two distinct groups: non-target accounts and target accounts.

Obviously, in an official account based marketing scenario you’re going to have multiple tiers, but for this example, we will use two.

What we’re assuming is that there’s a customer lifetime value of around $200,000 for your non-target accounts and $2 million for your target accounts. That’s roughly in line with enterprise SAAS businesses.

Let’s assume that both of those cohorts have a lead-to-close conversion rate of 1%.

That gives you a lead value on an LTV basis of $2,000 for your non-target accounts, and $20,000 for your target accounts. There is an obvious and significant difference there in lead value. Your target accounts are always going to represent a much higher lead value than non-target accounts.

If you’re not really focused on personalizing the experience of target accounts, you can assume that we have a higher percentage of leads that come in that are from those non-target accounts; let’s call that 80%, which means that the other 20% are from your target accounts.

From there, you can arrive at a weighted lead value, again at an LTV basis, around $5,600 for every lead that comes in.

Now if you are able to personalize the website experience for your most important accounts, you should be able to alter that mix and maybe even get it to 50/50, where 50% of the leads coming in are from your target accounts, and 50% are from your non-target accounts.

That’s obviously going to have a dramatic impact on the weighted lead value. As you can see here that’s $11,000, significantly more than when you’re not doing account based marketing and personalization.

Personalization impact on your Website

So what does that actually mean for your website? Well, again let’s assume some numbers here.

  • 200,000 monthly unique visitors and on average.
  • 1,000 of those are converting into leads
  • This gives you a conversion rate of half a percent.

As a marketing organization, you think, “Well we can do better than that. We want to invest in conversion rate improvements and we’re going to spend $200,000 to try and increase that conversion rate.” Let’s say with that investment, you’re successful.

You’ve invested in the team, in the tools, the technology to get you there, and as a result of that program, you see a 10% improvement in conversion rates.

Results of Not Personalizing

What does that actually mean for your business? In the scenario where you’re not doing personalization, you do see a pretty significant increase in new LTV that you generate. On a present value basis with some assumptions on a 3-year subscription length, you will add about $490,000 to the business. The ROI on that effort is 145%, which is great.

Results of Personalizing

In the case where you’re actually personalizing for target accounts, you can actually drive significantly more LTV into the business; almost well over 900,000 in this model with an ROI of 380%.

Investing in ABM increases ROI by 263%!

That’s because fundamentally you’re taking advantage of the fact that you’re able to drive more leads from those target accounts because you’re personalizing for them and you’re driving deeper engagement.

As you can see, that has more than double of your ROI that you can get through personalization. This is really the reason why companies that have significantly more potential in certain accounts, should be creating more personalized experiences on the website.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:42-07:00June 2nd, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments

Pricing Page Conversion Tips

If you are a B2B SAAS business you should be spending a lot of time on your pricing page focused on iterative testing.

Pricing pages are vital for your bottom line. Those who end up there are late in the conversion funnel, and likely gathering the information to make a purchase decision, or at least consider that purchase.

Given its importance, you should be constantly A/B testing pricing pages, taking every incremental improvement as a win for your marketing department.

At a high level, pricing pages should be clear in terms of quickly getting users information to make a purchase decision and also not introduce additional points of friction. While simple in theory to follow, we see many of these fundamental rules not being followed here at FunnelEnvy.

As such, we have created a simple list of best practices you should follow to maximize conversions with your pricing pages.

Clear and Simple Pricing Tier Design

The specific pricing tiers on a pricing page is often an acute area of focus for testing, and somewhere that you might want to spend lots of time on.

Here are 3 helpful steps to follow with your pricing page design.

  1. Focus on clarity and simplicity.
  2. Ensure the design conveys the most critical information about those pricing tiers in order for the user to make a purchase decision.
  3. Keep the calls to action clear and differentiated enough to stand out.  

I’m going to use two of the classic B2B examples for reference points here. The first one is from HubSpot, the second one is from Salesforce. They do a great job at high converting pricing tiers.

Hubspot Pricing Page

SalesForce pricing page

In both of the examples above, it’s very clear as to what you are getting with the different pricing tiers. The CTA’s are contrasting in color versus the rest of the page, and the prices are clearly stated.

If you’re looking for test ideas and you don’t think your design hits the mark there, you might want to test alternative designs.

Align your pricing with buyer personas.

The idea here is to articulate your pricing tiers in a way that resonates with the customer’s perception of their own business. For example, ‘professional’ and ‘enterprise’ are both terms that both HubSpot and Salesforce use, and it’s very infrequently that people arrive on either of these pricing pages and get confused between which one they have to pick.

The pricing tiers are articulated and match how the user perceives their business. This helps the user not get stuck trying to choose between options.

Use a single core value metric

I recommend scaling your pricing tiers to a ‘single core value metric’. This is a single metric the user understands and reflects the value they get from the platform as they scale.

To take a HubSpot example, the pricing is based on a number of contacts, and the user intuitively understands that as they have more contacts in HubSpot, the pricing increases because the value to them increases as well.

So if you’re looking at your pricing pages and want to improve conversion there and find that your pricing tiers aren’t necessarily consistent with the buyer persona or you’re not clearly articulating a single core value metric, you may want to test reframing some of that pricing, rearticulating it, and comparing that to your current baseline.

Eliminate multiple audiences for a single page

Let’s take a look at the example above. Can you spot the problem?

Right here we’re looking at actually two different audiences being targeted, and two completely different buyer journeys being crammed into a single pricing page; a single web experience.

The basic and premium options are targeted towards small or medium-sized businesses and organizations, and the signup flow is self-registration; it occurs completely through the website.

But as you can see, they’re also trying to target enterprise customers through ‘request a demo’, and speaking to someone on the inside sales team that has a completely different experience and audience.

That should set off some alarms. If you’re in the business of driving conversions, competing calls to action, audiences, and buyer journeys on a single page does have a really negative impact on your conversion rate.

Solution: Optimize through personalization

How can we improve the experience of a pricing page with multiple buyer personas?

If you are able to identify the nature of that account or traffic coming into the site, you can show a unique experience for that specific audience.

For example, target SMBs based on previous browsing behavior and highlight the self-signup flow. Alternatively, through firmographic third party integrations, identify if a visitor is coming from an Apple or Microsoft, and really highlight the enterprise plan and the benefits for that customer.

Through personalizing the experience, the decision-making process is simplified for the visitor, and you’ll see an increase in conversions.

Clear Calls to Action

It’s really important on pricing pages to set clear expectations on the call to action as to what happens when the user clicks a button. In the HubSpot example, somewhat non-traditionally, they use two calls to action.

But in this case, they are differentiated both in design as well as the expectations. One is about trying it, engaging in the free trial. One is about signing up.

Salesforce is very clear that when you click on that button, you start the free trial process.

So if the expectation isn’t clear in your call to action language, that might be something that you want to test.

Offer human help

Now even if you get all of this right, you’re going to run into times where the user is still stuck staring at the pricing page and can’t make a decision. If you do have that happening, again, that’s really high-value traffic that you don’t necessarily want to lose.

If it’s worth it to you, you might want to test intervening with human help.

Offer to intervene, give them whatever information they need to potentially get that conversion, get them across the line!

There are a couple of ways you can go about this. Salesforce, after a couple seconds, pops up a modal window offering to put you in front of a live agent.

Alternatively, if you have chat already on the site, certainly you could pop that chat window when the user’s stuck.

Try a chat window by Olark.

Keep things simple

The reality is that people don’t read content, at best they skim. Furthurmore, no one wants to read a complicated piece of content.

The same concept goes for your pricing page. Keep it as simple and easy to understand as possible. You should be always asking your self ‘what can we do to simplify this page’.

Help Scout has one of the most simple pricing pages - grow your SaaS revenue with Stimulead

Look at the HelpScout pricing page above. It’s a simple price and sign up box. There is no confusion for the customer, the action for them to take is right in front of them.

Some companies need tiered pricing given the complexity of their offerings. Yet, if some A/B tests support increased conversions and your bottom line is not affected, consider dropping the multiple price points.

Highlight your unique values

Many times users are comparing various vendors for a specific product across some specific criteria. Once you know that specific criteria for your product, make it very obvious. If you know

If you know price is a big factor, you should it as the first thing people see on the page. If you are a storage company like Box, make the storage limits one of the first things people see.

Box pricing page

In many instances people don’t even know what they want. In the classic marketing book ‘Predictably Irrational’ by Dan Ariely he states, “Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context”. For example, people don’t know what basketball shoe they should buy until they see it on a professional. 

Same goes for marketing a pricing page. Many people won’t know what are the important factors to consider. It’s up to you spell it out for your customers and make the most important features front and center.

Suggest Plans to Users

It can often times be beneficial to push users towards a certain plan. By doing so you are reducing purchase friction and making it easy for users to make a decision.

Spotify pricing page

Now the question becomes which plan to recommend. There is no clear cut answer to this question, but here are a few things to consider.

  • Consider data known data about a user. Using the FunnelEnvy platform, you can bring in Marketo or Salesforce data into your pricing page tests. This gives you the ability to personalize the pricing page depending on the user/accounts. As a basic test, try changing the recommendation based on company size!
  • Recommend the most expensive option. While it is unrealistic that the majority of people chose that option, you can expect people to choose the second most expensive. This is advantageous if people are often opting for your least expensive option, and you want to incentivise them to upgrade.
  • Free Trial. While the free trial isn’t going to bring you the most money up front, it does have the least amount of friction. If you can work out the numbers, pushing people to a free trial might be your best option.

Address Fears

In the world of sales there is the concept of FUD. This stands for fear, uncertainties, and doubts. These FUDs come out when a customer is making a purchase, the bigger the purchase the greater opportunity for it to arise.

The best way to address FUD is to address it up front on the pricing page. To get started, write down all the possible fears, uncertainties, and doubts that people might have. Then write down your response to how to handle the FUD.

Here are some examples.

  1. Customer: I won’t get the ROI from this software. Response: “Average customers increase revenue by 34% with the software.”
  2. Customer: The software will be difficult to implement. Response: “We offer free implementation support to guarentee you get up and running”.

See how the customer will feel much more at ease after their fears are addressed.

SumoLogic Pricing Table

See how SumoLogic offers a free trial to reduce fears that users won’t get any value back from signing up.

Show Validation

It’s important that customers know other companies use and have success with your software. This validation helps to reduce fear for the customer about spending their money.

The easiest way to show validation is through quotes. See below how SumoLogic reduces fear that users won’t be able to get the software into production by showing a quote.

Customer Quote from SumoLogic

If you want to have the most relevant quote for a particular visitor, we recommend using personalization to show a quote based on a user industry. For example, if you know a visitor works in the travel industry, you could show a quote from someone at AirBnB.

Incentives Longer Commitments

It’s always beneficial to have customers pay for year-long commitments up front. This keeps them locked in for longer, and make it impossible to stop after only a month. While there might be some conversion drop-off for those who don’t want to pay at once, the overall benefit to your business will be tremendous.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

In this example from Dropbox, you can see that the pricing defaults to annual billing.

Dropbox Annual Billing

However, you can also switch to monthly billing, although it costs more per month.

Dropbox Monthly Billing

The goal here is to push people into the yearly billing and longer commitment.

Below is a similar example from Sumo. In this pricing page, they subtly say “paid annually” under the monthly price. While it can be construed as a ‘dirty trick’ to make someone think they are paying a monthly rate, this practice is quite common with pricing pages.

AppSumo Pricing Page

 

Conclusion

I hope you can use some of these tips in your own pricing pages. If you have any questions about how to best optimize your pricing page, please let us know in the comments, and we’ll be sure to give you some tailored suggestions.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:42-07:00May 11th, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments

5 Strategies for Optimizing Your Customer Journey

Every business-to-business (B2B) company owner knows that digital marketing evolves rapidly. While client acquisition was once the most critical part of the funnel, the customer journey now takes top billing. A fully optimized customer journey does more than just generate a sale. It has the power to turn a B2B customer into a repeat client and an advocate for your company.

For B2B consumers in the digital age, the journey defines the experience. Discover five strategies for optimizing your customer journey and taking your B2B client experiences to the next level.

Create Customer Personas

No matter what type of business you run, you’re bound to have a variety of clients with different needs and objectives. To target the right types of B2B decision makers at critical points in the customer journey, understanding your customers’ goals is essential.

Most successful B2B business owners target key client types by developing customer personas. Start by thinking about what drives your customers and how your products and services can help them meet their goals. Ask yourself or your team a few questions about your customers as you divide both current and potential clients into segments:

  • What does success mean to them?

  • What drives them to purchase?

  • What is their price range?

  • What type of businesses do they run?

Use your answers to create a series of frameworks that will shape your B2B customer journeys. Focus on their goals, purchasing power, and decision-making potential to craft your marketing strategy.

Develop Customer Journey Maps

Image via Bigstock

With personas in hand, you can begin to map out customized customer journeys for each distinct group. Compile website analytics, social mentions, and testimonials to track customer journeys, and create a customer journey map to visualize the key points on the pathway.

Your customer journey can look like an infographic, a linear path, or even a circular cycle. Use the visualization method that best defines the customer journey for each persona. Since each persona’s journey will look different, you can begin to tailor your marketing messages for specific client types.

Continue to track social, web, and CRM analytics to ensure that you have an accurate picture of how the customer journey progresses in real time. When you have a better understanding of how much time it takes clients to complete the journey, you can fine-tune your marketing efforts to encourage customers to take the next leap.

Make the Most of Your Data

If your company is relatively new to the market, you may not have much historical data to build upon. However, if you’ve been selling related products for months or years, you should have plenty of numbers that can help you move your marketing initiatives forward.

Start by analyzing the actions that your past B2B customers have taken. Make note of a few important data points:

  • How long did they use your free products before becoming paying customers?

  • How long did they remain active customers before abandoning your product or service?

  • What types of clients tend to be repeat customers?

  • Which platform refers your most lucrative customers?

As you gain a better understanding of where your customers come from and why they take certain actions, put your data to work to lead clients along the customer journey. Target and retarget customers on platforms they frequent, improve your social strategy to retain customers, better your email marketing content, or even use your data to make crucial improvements to your products and services.

Know the Micro-Moments

Image via Screenshot on 5/5/17.

In its push to capture smartphone traffic, Google has begun to place increasing emphasis on what it terms micro-moments. These are key points when consumers search for in-the-moment purchasing information or seek out immediate solutions to business problems, and they’re the ideal time to draw in a new client and generate conversions.

As Google explains, consumers’ expectations are much higher than normal during these micro-moments. If you can connect with potential B2B customers during these moments, you’re more likely to satisfy clients.

To win a micro-moment, you have to anticipate your customers’ micro-moments and be there with SEO-driven content that delivers the products, services, or information your clients need. Ensure that your content is relevant to your consumers’ needs, and make their experience with your mobile platform simple and straightforward.

Analyze User Experience (UX)

Image via Bigstock

If you’ve been in business for long, you know that getting customers’ attention doesn’t always result in a conversion. In many cases, a lost conversion results from a poor user experience.

To improve UX, review your customer metrics and understand where you tend to lose both current and potential customers. If potential customers frequently click through from your social channels but rarely make a purchase, your landing page content and functionality may need some work, such as placing key decision-making content above the fold or making buttons more prominent.

If your initial conversion rate is good but your clients rarely renew subscriptions and frequently unsubscribe from your mailing list, you may not be delivering what your customers want. Improving calls to action and targeting content to key personas can improve UX.

Focus on Engagement

Whether you need to retain customers or attract new ones, engagement is a key part of the customer journey. You can keep the conversation going with clients at any part of the customer journey using a combination of social media strategy, blog posts, email marketing, and high-level content like white papers.

With each of these channels, you can continue to demonstrate how your company’s products and services help clients optimize their business and meet their objectives. When you keep clients engaged with targeted content, you can lead them along a rewarding and worthwhile customer journey.

If you’re new to developing an optimization strategy for your customer journey, rest assured that you don’t have to map it out on your own. With optimization services from FunnelEnvy, you can increase your conversion rates while improving your customer journey every step of the way.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 11th, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|1 Comment

Incorporating Account-Based Personalization Into Your Marketing Strategy

Casting a wide net in search of business-to-business (B2B) customers isn’t the right strategy for every company. Rather than spending resources on a larger market, find out why a personalized approach that targets specific accounts could better help your business achieve its sales goals.

If you’ve never used account-based marketing (ABM) before, there’s never been a better time to start. B2B companies with highly targeted audiences use ABM to create effective sales funnels that drive results. Find out how to take this marketing strategy to the next level with account-based personalization, and learn how it can help you meet high-reaching objectives.

Define Your Market

Image via Bigstock

One of the key differences between traditional digital marketing and digital ABM is that the former casts a wide net, while the latter considers individual accounts to be their own markets. To make the most of ABM, you’ll need to break your pool of both current and prospective clients into individual markets.

Doing this offers ample opportunity for personalization. Since you’ll work to build a marketing strategy for each client individually, you’ll customize digital campaigns, sales goals, and even relationship structures. Do the necessary research for each major account you want to win, and you can easily define and optimize your market.

For example, email marketing company Strongview used account-based personalization to define its target market and provide custom content with different greetings and unique images for each industry targeted.. As a result, the company experienced a 42 percent increase in web traffic, 29 percent increase in conversions from previously inactive accounts, and a 42 percent increase in engagement from target accounts.

Create a Personalized Experience for Each Account

With ABM software, you can even personalize website content for each account you’re targeting.

Easy-to-use personalization features track IP addresses for your target customers and enable your website to serve custom content to users from these select IP addresses. Doing this increases the chances that you’ll give representatives from each account exactly what they want to see, whether they’re searching for an answer to a question or they’re ready to make a purchase.

Integrate your ABM initiatives with marketing automation and sales platforms so you can easily follow up with the clients you want to land. Most ABM platforms offer seamless integrations with select platforms. Doing this automatically incorporates your target customers into each step of your marketing strategy, so you won’t miss the opportunity to follow up at key intervals.

Identify the Key Players

As you begin to develop an ABM strategy, it’s important to remember that each account or market consists of several key players. After all, most companies seek a consensus before reaching a decision, and not every person at the table will respond to marketing messages in the same way. That’s why it’s essential to identify the key decision-makers for each account and understand how best to get through to each one.

For instance, the marketing director, project manager, and CEO will each analyze your sales pitch from a different perspective. If you need all of these major players to sign off before greenlighting your project, then you need to tailor your messages to each one with headers, pictures, and white papers.

Find out who the key players are by doing basic research on the company’s website or on LinkedIn. As you shape each personalized account, review the key players with your team during internal meetings and redraft your list of target employees as necessary.

Use Retargeting

3D illustration of behavioral retargeting principle over white background.

Just because you don’t generate warm leads the first time you get the attention of prospective clients doesn’t mean you should cross them off your list. Instead of abandoning hard-to-get clients, retarget them instead.

Retargeting is a key component of ABM, as it identifies clients who have engaged with your content previously and then works to place your content in front of their eyes again. Many ABM platforms utilize ad-based retargeting strategies that serve ads to users who have previously visited your website or clicked on your content.

Some platforms even automatically provide personalized content that prompts conversions and drives sales after detecting buying signals. With this kind of personalized power, you can strike while the iron is hot and land the clients you’ve been pursuing at the precise moment they’re ready to buy.

Measure Your Results

When you use a marketing platform like Funnel Envy, Google Analytics, or a combination of both, you can easily measure the results of your ABM strategy. Social tracking tools like Kissmetrics also enable you to monitor engagement across platforms to ensure that you’ve targeted the right players.

In addition, you can quickly collect metrics that help you determine the return on investment (ROI) for each campaign. Since you’ve already done research to determine how much each account is worth to your business, you can easily do the math to calculate your return. As Alterra Group states, most executives look for revenue growth over any other measure of ROI.

By knowing campaign ROI, you’ll reduce risk and wasted resources. Don’t let a generic marketing strategy deliver results that are less than optimal. Take advantage of FunnelEnvy’s account-based personalization tool, and find out for yourself how this strategy can help you take your B2B sales to the next level.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 9th, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments

Webinar: Increase B2B Conversions with Personalization and Social Data

Dive deep into growth strategies used by leading B2B organizations.

B2B Marketers! Are leads coming to your site but not converting into paying customers? 

Your problem could be a lack of customer engagement across the marketing funnel. At the FunnelEnvy transformative webinar, learn the strategies we use to have explosive customer engagement for our customers like Optimizely, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Autodesk.

We will also be talking to Socedo’s Senior Marketing Manager, Adam Hutchinson, about how Socedo uses social data to create personalized emails that convert!

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 3rd, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments

4 Tips for an Effective B2B Social Media Campaign

B2B marketing is undergoing huge changes.

Thanks to the developments in marketing technology B2B strategies have had to adapt to evolving purchaser desires. The traditional approach to B2B marketing is, if we’re being honest, dry and dull. It’s always aimed at the professional, who apparently is a very boring person.

There seems to be an unwritten rule in traditional B2B that dictates the message to every person needs be delivered with professional courtesy that ultimately robs it of anything resembling personality.

But the times, they are a-changing. What you’ve got to remember is, while your primary B2B prospects are being approached in their professional capacity, they’re still a consumer. And thanks to the popularisation of channels including social media these B2B buyers expect a ‘consumer-like’ experience to the marketing materials they receive.

It’s something the B2B world is catching on to. If you take a look at the developing budgetary trends, you’ll see that while marketing campaign budgets are set to rise by 5% over the next year, those for digital marketing are projected to increase three times as fast.

That budget is largely going to be funneled into your content marketing strategy; the production of blog posts, white papers, eBooks, etc. However, the shift in buyer expectations has an increasing number of business recognizing the importance of social media content.

(more…)

By |2025-05-12T04:36:39-07:00March 1st, 2016|Full-Funnel Optimization|1 Comment
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