Why Personalization Matters

Personalized Buyer Journeys Can Give Businesses a Competitive Advantage

Meeting customer expectations through personalized messaging, content, offers, and experiences is more than a trend; it's a necessity. Surveys and analysis show that consumers worldwide increasingly expect personalized experiences, and they want brands to provide them. 

Research also indicates that competition to reach and engage buyers is fiercer than ever, and a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective. 

For example, reaching B2B customers versus B2C customers introduces challenges that stem from B2B’s typically longer conversion and sales cycle, as well as the growing involvement of B2B buying groups. Companies hoping to make a vendor shortlist must convince business buyers they’re knowledgeable, not only about the solutions they’re selling, but also the challenges faced by individual companies and their industries as a whole.

The growth of omnichannel marketing – which integrates multiple online, offline, social media, and mobile channels into a seamless and consistent customer experience – complicates how B2B and B2C campaigns are being built, monitored, and reported. Effectively forging a connection with customers across various platforms, without any disruption or inconsistency, is no easy task. And the tendency for buyers to remain anonymous for much of the cycle adds further complexity to RevOps efforts.   

In all cases, customers want to feel understood and valued. Personalization is essential to achieving that. 

Today, personalized customer journeys have become crucial to B2B, B2C, and B2B2C companies because of their impact on revenue operations (RevOps) — the strategic framework that helps align revenue-related activities and typically includes the marketing, sales, customer success, and finance divisions. Keep reading for an explanation of how companies benefit from personalized buyer journeys and what’s needed in order to create them.  

How Does Personalization Help Business Performance?

The benefits of personalization extend to several RevOps strategies and performance goals. For example, personalized email campaigns can increase open rates and click-through rates. This helps drive brand awareness and loyalty, which can result in higher levels of customer engagement and retention and more predictable cash flows. 

Personalized content and relevant recommendations can help raise conversion rates; customers who receive offers that align with their needs and interests are more likely to make a purchase. With this targeted approach, RevOps teams can also reduce the time and effort required to convert leads, which helps increase sales and revenue. 

By using personalization to focus resources on the most promising leads and customers, companies can streamline marketing efforts and allocate marketing budget more effectively. This can help lower customer acquisition costs, increase the efficiency of marketing spend, and improve return on investment (ROI). 

In addition, the comprehensive data and analysis required for personalization can be used to help optimize sales processes, improve product offerings, and enhance customer communications – all of which benefit RevOps. (To learn even more about the relationship between data, personalization, business performance, and revenue, watch this video.)  

Overcoming Data Challenges Is Crucial 

To achieve personalization, RevOps teams need a 360-degree view of customers. Before businesses can create that view, they must unify multiple types of data and tools to help analyze and leverage information. 

Unfortunately, the use of multiple systems and applications by the various teams in RevOps often results in data siloes and disconnected processes – both of which can hurt the bottom line.

Isolated data increases workflow inefficiencies and leaves teams working with incomplete data and an inability to generate meaningful analysis. The lack of analytical insights can lead to problems such as incorrect leads and missed cross-sales, so revenue opportunities may not be identified and pursued promptly. 

Incomplete, obsolete, or disjointed data can diminish the ability of RevOps teams to collaborate. Targeting and segmentation can suffer, which in turn reduces marketing conversion and sales effectiveness. 

Without high-quality, comprehensive data and real-time insights, decision-making can be arduous and slow. Teams may struggle to gather accurate due diligence and understand risk exposure, which may weaken go-to-market strategies. That can lead to forecast inaccuracy, pipeline management and commission tracking problems, and revenue reporting issues. 

Create a Single, Comprehensive Customer View 

With the right data and data management strategy, RevOps teams can develop and leverage a centralized view of buyers, target the right audiences for personalized campaigns and sales plays, activate compelling messaging across channels, and monitor customer journeys for continuous optimization.

The base layer for this view is first-party data — the information that businesses collect directly from their interactions with customers, such as company name, contacts’ names, work phone numbers, address, emails, and how much customers spent on their last purchase. Adding third-party data helps fill in crucial company details, including financials, ownership, and corporate family structure.

It’s important to combine first- and third-party data with other datasets in order to understand contacts’ traits beyond their work environment. B2B2C data can be connected via an identity graph, which links various identifiers associated with individuals. It includes an extensive array of data points that can be leveraged to associate business characteristics to consumers and consumer characteristics to business contacts. 

Adding consumer data — which includes demographics, browsing information, and lifestyle and interest data — sharpens the picture of who customers are. Buyer intent data is also crucial for creating a comprehensive view, as it provides details from consumers’ digital interactions (such as website visits, social media engagement, and online transactions) to help RevOps teams understand customers’ behavior online. 

Once businesses have connected datasets and built a deeply detailed view of customers, ideal person profiles (IPPs) can help them put this powerful, integrated data to work. IPPs offer actionable insights into what people are engaging with outside of a brand and help RevOps teams refine and personalize prospecting and engagement strategies in a meaningful way. 

RevOps teams can use IPPs in addition to buyer personas to support personalization. Buyer personas usually include data on demographics, behavior patterns, goals and needs, and pain points. IPPs typically provide details on skills and competencies, experience, personality traits, and values and motivations. 

Ultimately, a holistic understanding of individual buyers at work, online, and at home helps businesses customize RevOps initiatives that are much more likely to resonate and drive higher engagement and conversion rates. 

Make Connections with Customers More Quickly

B2B, B2C, and B2B2C businesses today need to focus on understanding target audiences and their needs at every stage of the buyer journey. They have a shorter and shorter window of opportunity to introduce themselves and make a pitch, if they even get that chance. If a business can’t be among the first to make a connection, it risks losing out to competitors who can swiftly identify and target those buyers. 

Personalized customer journeys can transform revenue operations by improving customer engagement, increasing conversion rates, enhancing efficiency, providing valuable insights, and accelerating revenue growth. With integrated, comprehensive data, smart RevOps teams can think creatively to tailor compelling messages and content for those journeys, especially if they keep these best practices in mind:  

• Simplify and personalize B2B, B2C, and B2B2C customer experiences so they’re as seamless, familiar, and comfortable as possible. 

• Do it respectfully, without making buyers feel that they’ve been closely watched or stalked. 

• Be sure that access to the 360-degree view of customers is shared among all teams that support RevOps. 

• Build trust and position the business as an authority. Focus on creating valuable content that provides meaningful, actionable information to customers.

• Ensure messaging, content, and offers are consistent across all platforms but tailored to fit the specific channel's format and audience.

• Continuously track the performance of personalized content. Use analytics to understand what works and what doesn't. Optimize strategies based on these insights to improve engagement and conversion rates.