The Marketer’s Guide To Optimizing Website Conversions

There’s a saying that old trends become new trends. (Low-rise jeans, we’re looking at you.)

But it’s also true that, as we learn and innovate, some things are best left to the annals of history. Think corsets, crinolines, and arsenic dyes.

And now, with B2B companies, static websites are going irrevocably out of style.

With so much of B2B buying happening across digital channels, today’s buyers have high expectations for the website experience. Thanks to B2C personalization pioneers like Amazon and Netflix, buyers and customers alike expect companies to build streamlined experiences that meet them where they are. In fact, Salesforce found that 78% of B2B buyers expect companies to adapt their experiences to their changing needs and preferences.

But while buyers have clearly shown that they’ve moved on from the generic past, many companies are still stuck in their old ways. In the same Salesforce report, a whopping 85% of B2B buyers stated that customer experiences should be better given all the data that they know today’s companies collect on them.

This disconnect means that B2B companies are often disappointing their website visitors and leaving money on the table for their competitors to profit off of. According to a report by McKinsey, the fastest-growing companies drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.

All of this goes to show that if B2B companies don’t get with the times, then they’ll inevitably be left behind.

Fortunately, it’s never been easier to get started with website personalization. To show you what we mean, we partnered with Intellimize to create this guide on how to develop and implement a successful website personalization strategy that drives conversions and increases revenue.

Ready to throw out the old, and bring in the new? Let’s go.

The 3 golden rules of personalization

Whether it’s on your website, in your emails, or elsewhere, good personalization always requires data. But, as with all things data-related, there’s a fine line between effective and creepy.

Twilio Segment found that only 51% of consumers today trust brands to keep their personal data secure and use it responsibly. And consumers have proven that irresponsible use of data comes at a high price: A SmarterHQ report found that 63% of consumers said they would stop purchasing products and services from companies that take “creepy” marketing too far.

This is why the key to doing personalization successfully is to find the right balance between personalization and privacy. To help you find that equilibrium, we’ve come up with three rules to always keep in mind:

1. Don’t be creepy. If you were meeting someone for the first time in person, you wouldn’t blurt out their name and job title before they offered that information. The same applies to buyers on your website. You don’t need to flaunt all of the data you have — so don’t use names or personal details unless they add value to your messaging, especially on someone’s first visit.
2. Keep personalization relevant, useful, and helpful. With your messaging, focus on showing your understanding of the buyer and how you can solve their unique pain points. By providing value-driven messaging, you can ensure that your brand will resonate with the buyer instead of scaring them off.
3. Treat clients like humans and engage in conversations. Remember that, even with B2B buyers, you’re dealing with a human on the other side of the screen. And, as humans, we want to build authentic connections.

That’s why it’s important to have real conversations with your buyers. Instead of forcing one-sided conversations where you ask a long list of questions, act as a trusted advisor. This means you want to ask genuine questions, take into account the buyer’s inputs, and guide them to the information that will be most useful to them.

By keeping these three rules at the top of your mind, you’ll be able to create a personalized website experience that genuinely helps all your site visitors and keeps them engaged, no matter where they are in the buying journey.

How to segment your personalization strategy

Every visitor to your website has their own reason for being there. Website personalization is all about adapting your website to match those individual needs for a faster and more relevant browsing experience.

To serve each visitor effectively, you need to have the right data available in order to gain a deep understanding of your buyers.

Even with the right data in your pocket though, your website personalization strategy may still fall short if you don’t know how to use that data to personalize both efficiently and effectively. And that’s where segmentation comes in.

Segmentation refers to the practice of breaking your audience into specific groups of people who share similar needs and interests, which you can then use to build personalized website experiences at scale. Here are four of the most effective ways to segment your website audience:

Firmographic segmentation

It’s a fact that your conversations differ vastly based on who you are talking to. Think about the Slack messages you send to your boss compared to the texts you send to your best friend.

Similarly, if you want to be having the best conversations with your website visitors, you need to recognize who is on the other side of the screen. According to DemandGen, when B2B buyers are making a purchase decision, 63% lean towards companies that provide easy access to relevant content that speaks directly to their company.

Firmographic data, like a company’s industry, company size, and revenue, gives you valuable insight into who your website visitors are so that you can serve up these relevant experiences. By connecting your marketing automation, CRM, and/or ABM tools to your personalization tools, you can build these experiences based on any firmographic parameters you want to target.

For example, if your data shows that many successful customers are mid-sized manufacturing companies, you’ll want to make sure that you have personalized content and offers for that segment. You might even want to have a personalized home page with messaging that specifically acknowledges their industry’s goals and pain points.

Examples of firmographic personalization on your website:

• Personalize your home page messaging so that it speaks to industry needs
• Surface different resources for a marketing persona vs. a sales persona
• Show personalized offers that are targeted to a specific company size

Firmographic personalization in action:

Coupa, a spend management platform, wanted to take their website to the next level in order to land and expand more of their target accounts. To accomplish this, they worked with Intellimize to launch a firmographic personalization program that targeted four key verticals.

The team started by combining data from first- and third-party sources to ensure they had a robust set of firmographic information. Once they had their data sources, Coupa began creating industry-specific versions of their home page by personalizing the headline, subheadline, logos, images, and more. From there, they leveraged Intellimize to show multiple copy and image options within each vertical, which allowed them to run 590K versions of their home page simultaneously.

By using Intellimize to scale these uniquely personalized website experiences, Coupa saw a 32% lift in revenue from their home page, with some of their best experiments realizing an over 100% lift.

Behavioral segmentation

Unlike firmographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation empowers you to tailor your website experience based on what your site visitors are telling you. This is because behavioral data tells you what a visitor is interested in based on their website activity.

Using behavioral data, you can provide real-time personalization based on actions such as how much time was spent on your site, which links were clicked, and which blog posts were read. In doing this, you’re no longer guessing what your visitors want — instead, you’re responding to what they’re specifically looking for.

For example, if a visitor reads two blog posts that address the same pain point, you can use that information to trigger an offer that showcases your solution to that problem. And when that same visitor returns, you can highlight that pain point on your landing or product page or customize your chatbot hook so that it focuses on that pain point.

Research shows that many customers prefer personalized experiences like this. Just take it from McKinsey, who found that, for 66% of first-time buyers, it’s important to them that brands tailor their messaging to their unique needs.

Examples of behavioral personalization on your website:

• Start a chatbot conversation if a visitor has spent more than a minute on a landing page
• Customize your home page to highlight specific pain points if a visitor reads a certain amount of blog posts on the topic
• Show different headlines and calls to action (CTAs) to returning visitors vs. first-time visitors

Behavioral personalization in action:

When Zenefits, an HR and payroll management software company, set out to update their lead generation process, they turned to Drift’s chatbots to empower their visitors to tell them exactly what they needed.

The team did this by setting up a standardized playbook on their website that asked if visitors would like to learn more about a free payroll offer. If the answer was yes, the bot immediately sent the visitor to a sales development rep (SDR). If the answer was no, then the bot re-routed towards a more educational playbook.

By letting the visitor tell them their pain points upfront, Zenefits was able to immediately respond with a more dynamic and personalized buying conversation. Within six months of using this chat strategy, Zenefits booked 793 meetings, leading to $3.6 million in pipeline and $500K in closed business.

Geographic segmentation

While not as elaborate as firmographic or behavioral data, it’s hard to understate the importance of contextual data in personalization — and that’s especially true when it comes to where a site visitor is visiting from.

A person’s location can massively influence their needs and expectations on your website. For example, if you’re an insurance provider, you need to consider that a company in California will have vastly different insurance requirements than one in Michigan — and those differences are only amplified if you’re doing business on an international scale.

So, if you have offers that are location-specific, or you have a lot of visitors from a variety of regions and countries, then geographic personalization is critical.

By using geographic data to personalize your website, you can customize your site language, content, and offers to that person’s location. In doing so, you create a website experience that feels familiar to the visitor, speaks to their location-specific needs, and increases website conversion rate.

Examples of geographic personalization on your website:

• Personalize images and messaging on your home page to reflect your visitor’s location, language, climate, and culture
• Customize the offers displayed on your website based on your site visitor’s physical location
• Use chatbots to respond to customers in their native language

Geographic personalization in action:

Although cybersecurity company Proofpoint had used other chat solutions previously, they were limited in their ability to enable conversations across all of the regions they operated in. Without the ability to customize their chats across regions and time zones, the team found that many of their buyer’s messages were going unanswered.

So, in order to effectively scale their conversations across the globe, Proofpoint deployed Drift’s chatbots across their website to segment their experience based on geographic location. Using Drift, the team was able to customize their conversations by routing in the right regional teams, allowing them to give buyers what they wanted instantly instead of hours later.

Thanks in part to the geographic personalization enabled by Drift and conversion rate optimization, Proofpoint saw a 578% year-over-year (YoY) increase in opportunities and a 628% YoY increase in pipeline generated directly from chat.

Account-based marketing (ABM)

No book about personalization would be complete without mentioning ABM.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where you identify and engage your high-value accounts with dedicated marketing campaigns, be it one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many. Think of it as segmentation on steroids: By focusing your efforts on a specific company (or set of companies), you can deliver highly relevant messaging and content.

While, on paper, ABM sounds like it mostly involves VIP wine tastings and expensive gifts, your website also serves as an important extension of these campaigns. By using ABM personalization on your website, you can create an end-to-end experience that shows your accounts that you have a deep understanding of them and their pain points — which is what ABM is all about.

Though ABM takes up more time and resources than the other forms of segmentation we mentioned, it’s worth the effort. ITSMA reports that 72% of B2B marketers say ABM provides higher return on investment (ROI) than other marketing techniques.

Examples of ABM on your website:

• Create custom landing pages that mention the target company by name and highlight their goals
• Use chatbots to send highly customized messages when a visitor from a target company is on your site
• Recommend case studies that align with the target account’s pain points when they’re on your website

ABM in action:

With all the resources that go into an ABM campaign, it’s crucial that you consistently iterate in order to see the best results — and cloud-based storage company Snowflake knew this.

That’s why Snowflake used Intellimize to optimize their 2,000 one-to-one ABM campaigns. With Intellimize, Snowflake was able to quickly iterate on their personalized landing pages for their ABM program — each with custom imagery, messaging, and more.

After a year of using Intellimize, the Snowflake team saw a 49% lift in meetings booked through their ABM programming. Not to mention that they also experienced a 60% increase in engagement in just the second quarter of 2022 alone.

Don’t forget to look beyond the hard data

As all of these segmentation strategies show, data is indispensable to personalization. But that doesn’t mean that you should base your strategy on numbers alone.

When deciding what forms of segmentation to use, you need to take into account both the data and the actual experience buyers go through when buying your product. So, collect qualitative data in addition to quantitative data. Talk to your customers and internal reps to get feedback on the current website experience and figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

By gathering these insights, you’ll be better equipped to focus on the areas of personalization that will drive the most impact.

How do you prioritize your personalization?

Now that you know what you can personalize on your website, it’s time to decide where to start.

Here’s what you need to consider:

1. Consider your business goals

No two businesses are exactly the same — so, it stands to reason that every business’s goals will be a little different. That’s why, just as with everything you do, you should prioritize personalizing your website in a way that moves you towards your goals.

Here, it’s important to consider both long-term and short-term goals. Since your bigger goals will take a lot of time and effort to achieve, break them down into smaller personalization goals that you can see the success of quicker. This will allow you to work towards more tangible results.

For example, if you want to go upmarket, you might roll out a personalized home page for your enterprise buyers. Then, you can look at the number of meetings booked or free trial sign-ups from that page to gauge the success of your personalization efforts.

By focusing on these smaller, more specific goals, you can deploy your website personalization more strategically and pave the way towards reaching those big picture goals.

2. Find your high-impact pages

When it comes to your website, not all pages are created equal.

To get the most bang for your buck, look at which pages or offers are generating the most traffic and revenue. Usually, this includes your home page, as well as high-intent pages like your pricing page, contact us page, or demo page. By starting with these pages, you will have the best shot at personalizing the experience for as many people as possible.

If you have a dedicated landing page for an email or ad campaign, you can also start there to drive even bigger results from those marketing efforts.

3. Start wide, then go narrow

While ABM is an undeniably powerful strategy, you don’t need to immediately dive into the deep end with it. Instead, start by personalizing for a bigger audience.

For example, you can start by choosing one of your target industries and building a dedicated landing page for them. By personalizing for a larger audience first instead of a single company, you will be able to learn the ropes and get feedback faster, so you can pinpoint which tactics work and which don’t.

Once you find what is resonating on a broader level, you can then start to narrow down to more in-depth, one-to-one personalization.

How to measure the effectiveness of website personalization

Simply implementing a personalization strategy isn’t enough. If you really want to reach your goals, you’ll need to continuously check in on your programming to ensure that all systems are a go.

If a strategy isn’t working, you can iterate on it or try something different altogether. And if a strategy is working, you can lean into it and drive more value from your efforts.

So, how do you figure out if your website personalization is working as intended? Here’s how:

What should you measure?

There are two kinds of metrics that will tell you if your personalization campaigns are working: engagement rates and conversion rates.

Engagement Rates

In B2B, it can take months to close a single deal. That’s why it’s important to look at a leading indicator, like engagement rates. These indicators can tell you early on if you’re on the right track with your strategy — before you have any ways to measure your conversions.

To measure engagement rates, set a page-level goal based on how a visitor might interact with your website. Then, use a website analytics tool to track those interactions.

Here are some examples of what to look for:

• Click-through rate. This can tell you how many or how often people clicked a link to an offer, a video, or a CTA. The more clicks, the more engaging the content.
• Average time on page. The amount of time a visitor spends on your page is a strong sign of the content’s effectiveness. Based on the goal of your page, you can set a time threshold (e.g. less than one minute or more than five minutes) to determine if the page is working.
• Return views. If a visitor comes back to a page multiple times, that tells you that the content is speaking to them and they’re still thinking about you.

Conversion Rates

While high engagement rates are great, what you ultimately want to see is something that improves your conversion rate. But as we said, B2B companies have longer sales cycles, so you’ll want to measure other conversions that will eventually lead to closed-won deals, like:

• Meetings booked
• Demos requested
• Forms filled out
• Content downloads
• Chats started

If you’re meeting your conversion goals, you’ll know you’re on the right track for meeting your larger business goals. You can also compare your conversion rate across different segments, pages, campaigns, or content to see what’s working best.

A/B testing

Whether you deem your personalization campaign a success or a failure, you shouldn’t stop after just one iteration. Instead, challenge yourself and your program through rounds of A/B testing.

With website personalization, A/B testing should be done widely and continually. Here’s why:

1. A/B testing validates or disproves your assumptions. It’s the best way to quickly get feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
2. You can refine personalization down to the best options for a specific audience. For example, you can start with a broad test and discover what type of headline works for a specific industry. Then, you can try several versions of the winning headline to improve on that even further.
3. What works right now may not work in three months. The buyer landscape is always changing — from industry trends to people’s purchasing habits. The only way to keep providing relevant personalization is to keep testing.

As with everything in personalization, it’s best to test web pages and site elements that tie back to your broader business goals. Here are a few examples of elements you can A/B test:

• CTA language, color, and placement
• Headlines
• Web page copy
• Layout
• Header images
• Video vs. text descriptions on a landing page

Accelerate website personalization with AI

From initiating conversations to generating emails and analyzing bucketloads of data, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way B2B professionals work, making them more efficient and effective in nearly everything they do.

And website personalization is no exception. Our 2023 State of Marketing AI report, produced in partnership with Marketing AI Institute, found that more than half of the respondents (55%) see creating personalized consumer experiences at scale as a primary outcome they want to achieve with AI.

And already, AI is showing that it can be a game-changer for website personalization. With its ability to analyze data and make recommendations based off of its interpretations and training, AI can empower companies to implement website personalization campaigns more effectively than ever — far faster and at a larger scale than a human could do.

There are two key ways AI is helping to drive more effective website personalization: real-time testing and automated conversation channels. Here’s a closer look at how they work:

Turbocharge website optimization with AI

Although the benefits of A/B testing and optimizing your website cannot be overstated, there’s also no doubt that it can take up a lot of your time. And that’s where AI can help.

AI website optimization tools like Intellimize’s AI Optimize enable businesses to test thousands of page variations simultaneously. These tools allow you to tailor your website to each individual by quickly and continuously surfacing the best-performing variations in that moment.

Since the AI uses a handful of variables to build unique pages for each site visitor, you’re able to test hundreds — potentially even thousands — of different page combinations at the same time. This empowers you to scale up your optimization efforts to a level that a human couldn’t imagine doing.

And because each test builds on what worked before it, you can effectively iterate on your pages in no time. The best part is that it’s all automatic: You don’t have to take the time to come up with a hypothesis, implement the test, and then wait for results. AI immediately puts the best option into action to reach your conversion goals.

AI-powered website optimization in action:

With a business model that relied on buyers filling out a form on their website, coworking space provider Industrious understood how critical website optimization was to their success.

Historically, Industrious ran a standard A/B testing program. However, they were feeling limited by the number of elements that they could test at any given time, and it was slow to show definitive results. Tasked with optimizing their most critical website pages, Industrious used Intellimize to easily set up AI-driven experiments on their home page videos, imagery, and messages — without any coding.

Within the first 90 days of using Intellimize, Industrious saw an impressive 12% increase in lift on their primary goal, and in just two quarters, they drove $1.6M in value for their business.

Start more human conversations with generative AI

While chatbots have been around for some time, they’re just now starting to reach their full potential.

Before, rule-based chatbots were limited to conversations that locked into a single path — with no room for flexibility.

But now, thanks to AI, it’s possible for chatbots to drive dynamic conversations that pivot paths with every visitor input. For example, Drift’s Bionic Chatbots ingest a company’s existing material to train the AI on brand voice and content. Then, they leverage generative AI to answer any open-text question from a site visitor, while also taking them down the conversation path that recommends the most relevant next steps for them.

This means that, using generative AI, these chatbots can automatically personalize copy, make recommendations, and serve up content based on existing customer data and the visitor’s own responses. This personalization leads to a better customer experience that seamlessly guides people through the buying journey, without having to rely on humans every step of the way.

In addition to driving more personalized conversations, the AI chatbot also stores and analyzes every conversation it has. In doing so, the AI not only learns from every interaction, but it also provides valuable data back to your marketing team on what content and messaging is resonating the most. Armed with that data, your team can now come up with even more creative campaigns that are further personalized to your buyers.

AI chatbots in action:

Back in 2018, cybersecurity company Tenable largely relied on email marketing to reach their ideal buyers — however, this approach led to inefficient handoffs and less-than-ideal leads. To reach their goals, the team knew they needed to drive quality engagement, more consistently.

For this reason, Tenable turned to Drift’s AI chatbots. With AI chatbots, Tenable enabled visitors to map out their own conversational journey through open-text responses and get what they need instantly, even when the sales team was offline. Additionally, the AI provided the team with valuable insights into their buyers, allowing them to further personalize their messaging.

After implementing Drift, Tenable saw a 20% conversion rate on their AI leads — double the goal they originally set. And these successes have only made Tenable more excited for a future filled with more AI-powered conversations through the likes of Bionic Chatbots. As Tenable’s Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations and Campaign Strategy, Matt Mullin, summed up, “Drift is really helping us future-proof our business.”

The era of personalized websites is now

Until very recently, B2B companies had no choice but to create impersonal and static website experiences. They knew they needed a website in order to be relevant, but they didn’t have the technology to build anything more than a basic storefront.

But, in the last few years, everything has changed.

With all the time that buyers now spend online, a company’s website has become an integral part of the buying experience. It’s no longer just about having a digital storefront, but about offering a complete digital buying experience that caters to buyers’ individual needs. It needs to feel as personal, authentic, and relevant as an in-person conversation.

Companies that don’t invest in their website experience right now will be left behind. But if you jump on the trend and do things right, you can use personalization to become a household name to all of your buyers.

Although personalization may feel like a big initiative to undertake, you’ll be on the right track as long as you remember this: No matter what page, site element, or copy you’re trying to personalize, always focus on what will be relevant and useful to your buyers.

Because putting your buyers first? That’s one thing that will never go out of style.