Improving Marketing Automation Through Website Personalization

The writing is on the wall; email as we know it is dead! We hear this mantra over and over, as social media grows in popularity and the marketing landscape continues to change. But it’s not true. Meanwhile what is true, the $3.2 billion market driven by marketing automation is increasing 15% each year, challenging social media for the title of “next big thing.”

The power of marketing automation as a way to nurture leads can be maximized when combined with a system that allows a website to dynamically adapt to the specific needs of each site visitor, based on where that prospect is in the sales funnel. This ability to adapt and personalize the user experience improves the efficacy of any marketing effort and increases the ROI of any campaign. Let’s take a look of how this works.

Traditional Marketing Automation

If you use any of the traditional marketing automation tools (Infusionsoft, Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, LeadFormmix, Act-On, Manticore, ExactTarget, or Loopfuse) you already know the power of marketing automation to help move leads forward or backward in the lead funnel based on the prospect’s online activity, interaction with the site and other triggers. Everything the lead sees or does can have an impact on the lead nurturing stage that the lead is in. Every lead nurturing stage includes specific emails and landing pages targeted to leads that are included in that stage.

What’s Missing in Marketing Automation?

Most companies that have multiple websites have one goal for their marketing automation system — moving leads from stage-to-stage through the lead funnel. The missing link in lead nurturing is that a visitor can enter a website without that site recognizing the prospect and where the visitor is in the lead funnel, which prevents the site from treating that prospect any different than another user. This causes the site to miss out on a valuable opportunity to present that visitor with the appropriate landing page, messaging and sales positioning.

Adaptive Websites

The idea of a website adapting itself based on the stage of each lead in the marketing automation tool is an interesting idea that could work like an add-on to the traditional marketing automation tools by not only making landing pages that focus on getting leads to the next stage but making the entire website or websites adapt to the clients’ lead stage.

These sites would respond by personalizing the content, the calls-to-action and offers to appeal to the specific interests of each visitor. At Reedge Inc., we offer personalization tools that can integrate with existing marketing automation systems to leverage historical visitor data from email lists to optimize the lead flow across client websites and portals.

Experiments With Adaptive Sites

We are testing the following adaptation with our own Conversion Rate Optimizer a personalization and A/B testing tool with the aim of improving the ROI of our email funnel. Here are some of our experiments and the results:

• Removing email sign-up forms when users already signed-up in the past. This resulted in the reuse of that area (real-estate) with a banner. Increasing revenue of this blog by 3%.
• Showing specific whitepapers on a lead generation site based on the historical download stats of whitepapers. This change moved the leads 10% faster though that specific segment of the funnel.
• Adapting the homepage based on the segments the user was interested in, based on the clicks from a travel newsletter. By giving more focus to a specific location, sales for that segment grew by 4%

When to Use Web Personalization for Leads

Email marketing is improving the ROI of promotional campaigns every year. The last two years, the most positive changes were made in areas of list segmentation and event-driven triggers in marketing automation, according to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey by MarketingSherpa. Email content that moves to the website in adaptive blocks to stimulate revenue growth and optimize the funnel is an area where we can expect to see significant increases over the next few years.

Like all personalization technologies, these adaptive websites will need to be carefully developed to ensure that we do not over-personalize the content, since websites should always retain a sense of discovery, which can also help to advance a lead to the step of the decision process. Through the careful use of personalization, a website can add a sense of serendipity to this discovery process, helping to move prospects ahead in the funnel, proving that adaptive websites can give email marketers the ROI boost that they are looking for.

Author: Dennis van der Heijden | Website | Twitter

Dennis is one of the founders of Reedge.com and responsible for the marketing and product development of the business. Reedge was founded as a result of the lack of tools that help online businesses increase their sales and revenue by conversion optimization in an inexpensive and simple way.