It comes as no surprise as to why more and more B2B marketers are moving towards personalization to strengthen their martech stack and reach their potential buyers. At a time where one-on-one communications are must-haves, it only makes more sense for marketers to crank it up a notch. By using both marketing automation platform and real-time personalization to enhance CX, down to the individual level, businesses can maximize the level of their website engagement and get a higher return on investment.
But how can modern marketers make their strategies better in a time where expectations are continuously rising and marketing to anonymous prospects is all the more complicated? Creating campaigns that are impactful and compelling is easier said than done, especially when there’s so much noise. Hence, knowing where to find your prospects and targeting them – at the right moment and time – will give you leverage over your competitors.
Emails With Relevant and Personalized Content
Having your marketing automation platform aligned with personalized data can help you improve on your open-time emails. While the send time of your emails is as just as important, your content must be at par.
Sifting through data from over 192 million of opens has shown that despite the drastic change in recipient behavior, including the open time between then and now, what matters most is to optimize what you send. For instance, you can segregate your personalized platform of visitors that have shown a certain level of engagement, move those segments to your MAP and then send the emails via the same platform.
While some email send times may be more optional than others, there’s no one set time or hour for when you should send them. However, Gary Elphick, mobile specialist at Tongue, recommends that marketers have to be thinking in the same “time windows” as their subscribers such as the different periods interacting with emails depending on the device. These windows are the:-
3-minute window: This is while you do a quick scan of new emails to forward on any urgent tasks and to take note of anything that needs to be revisited later when you have more time (on a mobile device).
5-minute window: This is when you’re most likely in a cab between meetings. You may have time for a couple of quick email responses, to action urgent items and respond to important people (on a mobile device).
10-minute window: This is for your not-so-urgent emails and previous emails that were scanned earlier while using a mobile or desktop.
As for before sending the emails, consider a few things such as:-
- What is the best time of day to send your email marketing messages?
- How much can someone read during the 3 minutes they have in the coffee line?
- Subject lines of your campaigns have to be incredibly relevant.
- Optimize your email marketing for a mobile-first approach by always testing your landing pages on mobile. Open rates with mobile are 42% and expected to grow further.
Personalizing Website and App Experience for Anonymous Visitors
To make the most of your website or app design, you need to keep in mind the prospects that you currently don’t have the contact details of in your MAP. This can be solved by linking your marketing automation and personalization platforms. Not only does it reduce your bounce rate, but it also improves your site engagement by encouraging visitors to stay with the relevant content.
Marketers have to determine what draws visitors to their website and use that to provide them with a planned content journey. For instance, if an anonymous visitor lands on your site, there’s no way to include them to your nurturing program once they leave, even if they’ve shown interest in your solution. To overcome this challenge, you can use conversion rate optimization along with personalization to tailor the site as they engage with it. This will also allow you to learn more about your potential prospect and as a result, help suggest the most appropriate gated content for them to download and get access to their email address.
For an even richer contextual experience, you can leverage referral sources – when someone clicks a link it directs them to your website. This can be anything from a tweet to links from a blog post or an article.
You may be underestimating the value of your acquisition campaigns if you can’t identify the source where your visitors come from. To understand this, we can take a look at Hubspot’s comparison between how a visitor sees your landing page from different sources – organic vs referral:-
When visitors land on your page organically, this is what they see (above)
However, if they land on your page after clicking a link from Twitter, having a variation of the second image displayed to them might make more sense.
For mobile phones, there’s a good chance that while clicking a link on mobile, the user experience may be broken. Hence, cross-channel and cross-platform digital user/consumer trails are the mobile industry’s new status quo.
Mobile apps are inherently different from websites, in that they are built without the notion of cookies and exist as siloed entities.
Apple and Google have developed their own solutions that are device-specific identifiers and can be accessed by all native apps to allow users to move from one app to another through ads, and identify them along the way. These are the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) for iOS and the GAID (Google Advertising ID) for Android; not only are they device-specific, but also much more reliable than web-specific cookies.
With the dramatic shift towards machine learning-driven decisions, it is crucial for marketers to save their time, resources and eliminate guesswork at all costs. In addition to CRM and MAP, you can also leverage other tools such as paid advertising, social media, SEO, analytics and A/B testing to ensure that prospect/customer experience is seamless.