Personalized experiences shouldn't just go half-way or be confined to one-page. Let's take your favorite coffee shop as an example. When you walk-in and they greet you by name then immediately ask about having your favorite coffee that's a remarkable and personalized experience. But what if after that initial encounter, they never greet you by name again, or suddenly forget what your favorite order is?
That experience may leave you disappointed. After all it's your favorite place, how could they forget?
Personalizing a single page of your website is very similar to the coffee shop above. After encountering one page that caught your attention, landing on the next page that is not relevant may be confusing or result in leaving the site altogether.
However, just personalizing your entire website without clear goals can result in an experience that is not relevant to your visitor. Let's step through how you can not only personalize your website, but create a relevant experience every time.
Start with Buyer Personas and Map Site Pages with Visitors
If you don't have buyer personas yet, this is the place to begin. Before you can logically design an experience that is relevant to your audience you should know details about that audience and how they buy from your company.
Ensuring that you do this before you begin personalizing your website will ultimately help connect your marketing with individuals and avoid potential mistakes or assumptions in what is relevant to an individual or group of people. Buyer personas should begin with research into your customers and once you have all the information you can enter them directly within HubSpot. Get started creating buyer personas with this step-by-step process.
Once you have created buyer personas for your main audience, map these to website visitors and lay out pages you created for each specific audience and how they flow through your website. If you are a HubSpot Professional or Enterprise customer you can build an attribution report that displays the pages a visitor saw before converting, which can help determine common pages that should be personalized.
Personalize your Call-to-Action Across Your Site and Landing Pages
Your call-to-action CTA is one of the most important elements of a page, and as a result should be highly relevant to the visitor. We did some research on personalized CTAs and found that calls-to-action that are targeted to individuals had a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than calls-to-action that were generic.
Step 1: Go into Content > Calls-to-Action and then click the drop-down to create a Smart CTA as shown below.
Step 2: Choose targeting your CTA, whether by contact list membership or based on the lifecycle stage of the visitor. Contact list membership enables you to target the CTA to individual personas that you have researched and added into HubSpot or other lists, the other option of lifecycle stage enables you to more broadly target the CTA based on the visitors stage in the funnel, i.e. lead, marketing qualified lead, and more. Because we are utilizing personas to create relevant content across our website, we will use the contact list option for this example.
Step 3: Choose the default CTA for the page. If you have an existing CTA, simply choose that version and in the next step you will have an opportunity to create the smart version.
Step 4: Click the Create Smart CTA Rule link on this page and choose the persona that you would like to target the CTA for in the dialog box.
Step 5: Create the content that you would like to show specifically to the list or persona you selected.
If you have multiple personas you can create numerous smart rules for each persona to deliver a truly relevant experience for each of your key buyers. To extend this element of personalization across your website, consider where you else you could utilize smart CTAs across your website. A few areas that come to mind for using smart CTAs are your homepage where you can show a different CTA for leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and customers, product pages and landing pages that display relevant information based on the persona and lifecycle stage of the visitor, as well as your blog where you can apply the same CTAs.
Use Smart Content to Show Relevant Information on Your Homepage and Site Pages
Smart content can help you make all of your site and landing pages more relevant and as a result keep visitors engaged longer and make them more likely to convert. By using one of the various targeting criteria that smart content provides, such as a visitors country, device type, referral source, contact list membership, or lifecycle stage.
There are numerous ways that you can use smart content across your homepage and site pages, but showing specific messaging that is relevant to individuals across these pages provides a full-personalized experience, regardless of where the visitor goes on your website.
Here are some ideas of how you can extend smart content throughout your homepage and site pages:
- On your homepage display relevant messaging based on the visitors lifecycle stage, and use smart CTAs to show customers a different action than new leads.
- On a product page show customers information about helpful tips about using your product, or use-cases they had not considered. In addition you can think of displaying information about showing a way to contact support if you find this is a common need. For new leads the product page should display information about your offering and unique benefits.
- If you have a pricing page as part of your website, consider segmenting customers to show them more relevant information based on the version of the product they have and possibly the next highest subscription tier, or the next model of your product.
Here's how we can implement one of these ideas within HubSpot.
Step 1: Navigate to Content > Site Pages and choose the page you want to add personalized content to.
Step 2: Choose the Make Smart option as shown below.
Step 3: Choose the relevant criteria for how you want to personalize your content. For example, if you want to show content to only one of your buyer personas you can choose the contact list membership option to show individuals specific content that fit a specific persona.
Step 4: Select the specific contact list(s) that this personalized experience should be shown to. In this case, we are targeting one persona and going to customize the headline and main product messaging by persona.
Step 5: Create the personalized content you want to display to the persona that was selected in step 4. For example, here is how I would change headline messaging for Aviation Al between a lead, MQL, and customer. For this example, we'll assume that Aviation Al provides a local scenic flight service and we sell maintenance and performance solutions into this market.
- Lead: Increase revenue by carrying more passengers with our aircraft performance solutions
- MQL: Did you know, scenic flight operators saved 25% on fuel using our solution. See how today.
- Customer: Schedule maintenance to maintain optimal operating conditions.
This formula of different content applies across pages from site pages to landing pages. Be sure to create different content on each relevant page that is personalized and will resonate with individuals reading and consuming your content.
These examples show how you can clearly add relevant messaging, and CTAs across your entire site based on a number of criteria to improve the visitor experience and make it truly personalized. Creating the fully personalized experience not only delivers a more remarkable experience for your visitors, but enables your website to actively evolve as your leads and customers do as well.
How are you using Smart Content on your website? Let us know in the comments.
Note: Smart Content and Smart CTAs described above are features within HubSpot Professional and Enterprise. If you are a HubSpot Basic customer, you can try professional free for 30 days.
