Hyper-personalize the Customer Experience with Intent Data

The best salespeople outperform all other salespeople because they ask the right questions. Even when handed a bunch of “random leads,” a great salesperson succeeds because they try to understand the customer and obtain information that can improve the customer’s journey. In other words, they personalize it. The more personalized the customer journey is, the greater chance you have of closing the deal. And with intent data, you can hyper-personalize the customer experience to unprecedented levels.

In a presentation for B2B SaaS marketers, Guillaume Cabane, VP of Growth at Drift, said a data dearth is largely responsible for the poor levels of personalization throughout many customer journeys. This lack of personalization is responsible for low conversion rates of website visitors. And that’s a problem, because this is the very place you’d expect to gather data for personalization. That’s why he revolutionized the hyper-personalization of the customer experience. And it’s how he ended up with 4.5 billion variations of his organization’s dynamic homepage.

The Brief Version: A Personalization Timeline

To hyper-personalize the customer experience, Cabane revamped his sales funnel, starting with third-party APIs that pre-filled homepage sign-up forms for new users. He used that same rich data for streamlining and personalizing activation emails. From there, he predicted users’ value by using lead-scoring models. (Depending on your lead-scoring model, you can map out 120 traits of each user. This means you have a lot of information with which to personalize automated “Welcome!” emails to activated users.)

Cabane soon injected his treasure trove of user data (lead-scoring output, third-party APIs) into the live chatbots on his homepage. Per his example, if this user (me) were to land on a website with such a chatbot, I would be greeted with UX copy personalized for me. It might say, “We have advice for Aberdeen. Our scoring model shows Aberdeen would be a good fit to talk to our Sales team. Want to schedule a Marketing Playbook demo?”

Even though the UX copy of the live chat bot can be personalized to each visitor to enhance their interaction with the website, the fact remains that pageviews outweigh live chat engagement by profound proportions. Where does that leave us?

Billions of Variations

The homepage is a channel, just like email, so Cabane personalized it, too. By creating a Live Enrichment Infrastructure, he enabled the dynamic injection of rich data from third-party APIs and his lead-scoring model into his homepage(s).

Per visitor, Cabane personalizes: Relevant and supported technologies, company logos, hero messages, sign-up Calls-to-Action, pricing schema, and industry-based success stories. And, according to Cabane, his company’s dynamic homepage has 4.5 billion possible variations. And the best part? he said,

“We don’t need to create them. Because it actually pulls the data dynamically from the source, those are then automatic. So there’s very little effort from us.”

If rich data, courtesy of third-party APIs and lead-scoring mechanisms, can revolutionize the B2B homepage, then using buyer intent data, replete with qualified contextual information, means your 4.5 billion hyper-personalized dynamic homepages are waiting to be churned out of your Live Enrichment Infrastructure and presented to your in-market prospects when they hit your organization’s webpage.

Hyper-personalization with Buyer Intent Data

Buyer intent data captures the online research behavior of actual buyers on actual purchasing journeys. It a determines a purchase intent signal through the hubbub of normal internet activity. It is the most accurate way to predict who is currently in-market, and what technologies they’re considering. It’s used to improve the performance of so many critical operations, from ABM, to targeted ads, to demand generation campaigns, to content marketing. Let’s add “homepage hyper-personalization” to the list.

Aberdeen’s buyer intent data has been proven to be up to 91% accurate in blind tests by clients, and it is highly targeted. It can determine which content is consumed by targeted accounts, verifies target title contact information and company location, and can deliver ads in the moment of active research. Injecting buyer intent data into a personalization infrastructure would not only enhance any personalization efforts, but minimize the odds of false positives, which waste time, energy, and money.

Marketing’s perennial pain point is low conversion rates. If your website isn’t giving your visitors what they seek, they have no reason to remain on the page. They likely won’t give your organization a second thought. Why wouldn’t you inform your dynamic, personalized homepage with performance-enhancing, qualified buyer intent data? Provide your in-market visitors conducting legitimate purchasing research with the personalized experience, information, and solutions they seek.