How a web personalization strategy delivers consistent experiences across channels
The path that people take before making a purchasing decision has evolved greatly. With modern digital marketing technology, all of your channels can work together seamlessly to deliver a consistent experience — no matter which touchpoints you’re dealing with. Your customers’ expectations of a personalized experience are no longer limited to just your website. Your personalization efforts need to reflect customer activities across every channel and at every stage of their relationship with you.
In part 1 of this series, we learned how to build an effective web personalization strategy that scales seamlessly with your current marketing initiatives. In this post, we’ll cover how to integrate your personalization efforts with other marketing channels beyond your website — and how to inform each channel for consistent user experiences across your brand ecosystem.
Personalization creates seamless, consistent experiences between your website and other marketing channels
As customers have adapted to taking a multi-device path to make a purchase, seamless and personalized experiences across channels have become the norm. In fact, B2B customers now often use more than nine channels on their buying journeys — from traditional channels like email and phone calls to more modern channels like mobile apps and webchats.
You need to make sure that all of your marketing efforts are aligned to give customers a seamless experience as they move from one channel to the next. Your website acts as a hub that all of your other marketing channels connect to, whether you encourage users to click an ad or email link or review your product. A marketing automation platform can help you achieve a single, unified view of your customer to deliver a cross-channel presence.
Bring all your channels together with a marketing automation platform
A marketing automation platform is a software tool that helps automate your marketing workflows. These platforms are designed to streamline your process by automating repetitive or time-consuming tasks such as email campaigns, social media posting, lead generation, lead nurturing, and more.
Marketing automation platforms play an important role in implementing a cross-channel strategy that communicates with customers in real time, at scale, and with elements of personalization. These tools can help your business:
- Create and manage marketing campaigns. Marketing automation platforms make it simple to plan, execute, and manage multichannel marketing campaigns that include email, social media, and digital advertising.
- Segment and target audiences. Automation tools simplify data analytics and customer insights by segmenting your audiences and targeting customers with personalized messaging.
- Generate and nurture leads. You can automate your lead generation and nurturing to automatically follow up with existing leads and help move them through your sales funnel.
- Measure and optimize campaigns. The right marketing automation platform can provide you with analytics and reporting, allowing you to measure and optimize your campaigns in real time.
When you combine automation and web personalization, you can build detailed customer profiles based on demographic and behavioral data you’ve collected from a number of channels. This empowers you to create highly targeted marketing campaigns, improve your audience segmentation, nurture leads, and more — all to drive results for your business.
Example — get personal with digital advertising
Web personalization can help elevate your marketing efforts across all channels to improve your return on investment (ROI) and other metrics. One way that brands use personalization is with retargeting within digital advertising campaigns. This strategy involves placing display ads across an ad network to specifically target previous website visitors who left without taking a desired action like making an online purchase. To make this strategy even more effective, you can personalize the ads that each person sees. You may change the ads based on the person’s browsing activity on your site, their demographic information, or other data relevant to your business.
For example, a highly interested business professional shopping for a customer relationship management (CRM) platform may receive a demo offer through a display ad on other sites they visit. Or someone who has connected with your brand through multiple channels but hasn’t made a purchase might get an offer for a discount or free shipping to encourage them to become a customer.
Targeting your ads to people who have already expressed interest in your brand is a great way to improve your ROI. Adding personalized elements to those ads further improves your results.
Expand your web personalization strategy to connect with your customers
Now that you’ve learned how web personalization can boost your cross-channel marketing efforts, it’s time to put it into action. Learn more about incorporating personalization into all of your marketing channels and building deeper connections with your customers by downloading our guide to web personalization.
About Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage is the world's largest marketing automation platform, a singular solution that combines the power of automation, content, lead development, and account-based marketing. It helps connect you with customers and keeps them coming back, saving your team time, effort, and resources.