You may only get one chance to earn business from a potential customer. Don’t blow it on a generic landing page. Website personalization is the key to increasing conversions.
Personalized landing pages are an engagement strategy used to convert visitors to customers using highly customized communication.
In other words, it’s how to woo and romance customers by treating them as individual human beings.
Non-Personalized Advertising Stinks
We are bombarded by ads. Everywhere we look and everything we hear has been invaded by advertising, and most of it is entirely irrelevant, so we tune it out. Personalization is a game-changer. It breaks through the clutter and gets your attention…and your money.
In the future, all advertising will likely be targeted to your exact preferences. Personalization is the next big thing for marketing, and as of today, it’s underutilized, except by the most forward-thinking companies.
This is a great opportunity for your business to get ahead of the curve – and stay there!
Benefits of Using Personalized Landing Pages
You spend a lot of time and effort luring people to your site.
When a visitor clicks on a link either from an email, a targeted PPC ad, or a Google search, they are interested in one thing and one thing only: What they came for.
Personalized experience allows you to deliver exactly what they want, exactly when they want it.
“We know that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more.” – McKinsey Insights
Customers want personal service from brands. When Sprout Social asked consumers what they want, more than half of consumers will increase their spending with brands they feel connected to and say to feel connected, the brand must understand them and their wants.
If your marketing is properly targeted, the email or ad they clicked on was deeply personal. It was based on their shopping preferences, demographics, geolocation, social media posts, browser searches, or other actions that reveal what they are shopping for.
Which means you sent them an offer for the exact product or service they are in the market for – the right offer at the right time.
What if you do all of it right and your conversion rates are still not as high as they should be? Your landing pages hold the key.
How did personalized landing pages work for us here at Proof, you ask? Only a 50.77% increase in demo trials and a 31.44% increase in new trials for our B2B social proof product.
Yeah, we were impressed, too.
How to Personalize Landing Pages That Convert Like Crazy
There are 5 steps to creating a personalized landing page designed to lower your bounce rate and increase conversions:
1. Goals to measure
You need to define your end goal of what you want your visitor to do. What’s the purpose of your landing page? Examples of goals you can measure:
- Account creations
- Sales or donations
- Traffic
- Email addresses
- Phone call
- Demo sign ups
Understanding your goals gives you a baseline to measure success when you start A/B testing the personalization on your landing pages.
2. Collect data to build audiences
The amount of data we can collect today is insane. The challenge is to select the right data that will help you build your audience and raise your conversion rates.
For Example, the ShipBob marketing team identified 3 typical steps on the customer journey:
- Download content
- Request a quote
- Create a free account
With this info, you can use Experiences to collect data and design CTAs for each step. Your customers will be delighted to take each next step.
Here’s some of data you can collect for each visitor:
- Past visitors
- Pages visited
- Time on site
- Past downloads
- Where the click originated
- Their company name (based on their email address)
When ProfitWell wanted to showcase the most relevant content for each visitor, personalized CTAs proved to be a great solution.
Using info about visitors’ origin, industry, and past actions, ProfitWell used our easy tools to create CTAs on the fly for targeted content downloads…and increased blog leads by 162%.
3. Build a personalization strategy
A good personalization strategy addresses the customer directly at every stage. Dynamic landing pages can do more than say Hi, [Name]!
To increase conversions, your strategy should include personalized offers, personalized calls-to-action (CTAs), ease of use, and personal contact. Some examples:
Personalize greetings and communications
When KlientBoost, the leading PPC and CRO agency, personalized their landing page with the customer’s logo, merge tags, and targeted offers, customers loved it! Proposals increased by 11%. “The number of people saying that they were so impressed in the chat or in the email or on our phone calls was amazing. We probably had 50 or so people, giving us props for what we’re doing.” – Johnathan Dane, Klientboost Founder & CEO
Personalize offers and CTAs
ShipBob, an ecommerce fulfillment software, ran an A/B test with personalized offers and dynamic CTAs that identified where the customer was in the cycle as they moved around the website.
Customers at different points in the buying cycle were shown content relevant to the information they were searching for in relation to their past actions.Over 28 days, ShipBob saw a 123% increase in content downloads and 53% increase in leads.
Carry your personalization through
When they click a CTA, visitors can move on to a personalized form builder.
BuildFire, a mobile app development platform increased marketing leads by 46% by filling out forms with all known information, and by providing social proof on every page.
We fill in any information we have on file for each customer, which may range from the name and address the number of employees and job positions.
4. A/B testing personalization
Not all ideas are good ideas. The only way to discover if your copy is as clever as you think is to test. You might be surprised at what works best!
Use A/B testing on small groups to see how people respond. Test every aspect of your marketing campaign, from the subject line of your email to the color of your CTA button.
Refine your personal landing page until it outperforms expectations. Small tweaks, like placement, font size, and time of day influence consumer behavior.
After a 14-day A/B test, Tithe.ly visitors who saw personalized content blocks and CTAs had an 82% higher email submission rate.
5. Give the people what they want
Use the knowledge you have gleaned to create the ultimate user experience. Offer a personal greeting and show customers the personalized content you know they are looking for.
Amazon offers the most impressive example of personalized marketing. This is automated marketing at it’s finest, and it’s why Amazon has surpassed Google for product searches.
When you return to Amazon, you see:
- Personalized greeting
- Products you’ve recently viewed
- Recommendations based on what you’ve viewed and ordered or viewed in the past
- An invitation to learn more about your Prime account
- Your accounts and lists
- [Your name]’s Amazon.com
- Your browsing history
- Your delivery address
- Your returns and orders
- Buy again
Everything you might want to know or access, with highly targeted personalization. You don’t even log in.
What Happens When You Don’t Personalize Landing Pages?
Let’s say you’ve earned that click through. You delivered a marketing message that really spoke to a shopper. To do that, you carefully crafted your subject line or ad copy, and delivered a message that person really wanted to see.
They give you that valuable click and go to…your home page? A squeeze page that demands their email before they are allowed to go further? A product page for a different product, because you are sold out of the one you advertised? All of these things have happened to you. They’ve happened to everyone. If you’re like most people, you closed the window and felt annoyed by the company. Encouraged by your clickthrough, this clueless company spammed you with so many more emails you consigned them to the spam folder.
In a 2018 Evergage study, 98% of marketers agreed that personalization helps advance customer relationships, with 74% claiming it has a “strong” or “extreme” impact. Of the respondents, 87% reported a measurable increase from their personalization efforts.
More than half – 54%- experienced a lift of more than 10%, while 13% reported a lift of over 30%.
Despite this, only 37% said their companies are using personalized landing pages.
Putting it All Together
In the big picture of personalized marketing, landing pages are the end game. Each step is carefully crafted to entice, engage, and encourage your customers. To let them know you understand their needs and wants and care what they think.
As you nudge them along to answer your CTA, you develop your relationship and earn their loyalty.
