9 personalization

strategies to try
in 2020
9 personalization strategies to try in 2020
It’s hard to find a hotter trend in martech than
personalization. And it’s not without good reason: the idea
of content personalized to the user to provide a richer,
better user experience is table stakes for businesses and
consumers alike.
But for all the hype, personalization often falls short. Many “personalization” strategies
are nothing more than basic segmentation strategies using static user attributes that are
anything but personal.

Hey [firstname, fallback=] check out our VIP offer!

Little wonder, then, that 80% of firms who have invested in personalization will drop the
whole thing by 2025, according to a study by Gartner.

But personalization isn’t all bad. It’s simply that most businesses lack the right tools to
help them get it right.

One of the main issues with personalization over the past few years is the tools we used
weren’t equipped to facilitate it. Legacy CRM and email providers couldn’t handle all
these new data attributes they were being asked to collect, let alone unify them.

It meant, for the vast majority of marketers, personalization was reduced to inserting a
[first_name] tag into an email template. But this isn’t personalization. It’s demographics.

The technology today is way more sophisticated than it used to be. Provided users have
opted in and you’re following the correct protocols, it’s now relatively straightforward to
know who your users are, what they’re doing on your website, and where those actions
are taking place, and have all that data stitched together in one profile.

We’ve seen a transformation from simple JavaScript snippets into robust API calls that
will tell you what events users are taking on your website, on your website, on your
mobile app, on your web apps, and crucially, who is taking those actions.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 2

These developments have meant a new frontier of personalization that’s possible, and
better still, they’re all possible using our own product Segment’s Personas. Try out a few
of the strategies, and you’ll realize that personalization can deliver on some of the hype
it has promised.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 3

9 personalization examples to try in 2020

The single best place you can start with personalization is to run a campaign targeting
similar or lookalike audiences for your best customers.

At Segment, we know our best customers are those from a specific industry and specific
company size, with a highly trafficked website.

For this campaign, we use Segment Personas to integrate first-party events and
customer data with Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn Ads. Once there, you can build
audiences of your ideal customers, and create lookalike audiences to reach new people
who are similar to your best customers. This gives you a high-value audience for you to
target with personalized messaging.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 4

Retargeting based on market signals

This example is a little bit more advanced. There are a ton of internal and external market
signals at our fingertips that can inform intent to purchase – web activity, content
consumption, product reviews, switching jobs, etc. These market signals can be found
via tools like Datanyze (now Zoominfo), G2Crowd or Crunchbase.

In the example above, we take an audience of anyone who’s visited, viewed or engaged
with our brand in the last 30 days. Then, we cross-reference this with data from a tool
like Datanyze, in this case, prospects who have uninstalled one of our competitors’
technology in that same time window.

Combining these data points means we can create a campaign hyper-personalized to

the behavior of the recipient, and therefore more likely to be effective.

Bonus: See a recording of exactly how to do this in our webinar How to automagically
identify high-intent leads

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 5

Personalized experiences for
target accounts

One of our favorite campaigns to run is personalizing experiences for website visitors. To
do this, we use a tool called Mutiny.

Mutiny helps you create contextual web experiences for visitors using firmographic,
contextual and behavioral data. It then recommends the best segments for
personalization by enriching website activity with deals from your CRM and other
data sources, allowing you to personalize your website for every visitor without any
engineering effort.

This lets your sales and marketing teams do all sorts of fun stuff. For example, an SDR
can reach our with an entirely personalized landing page – featuring the number of
employees at the company, the tools they’re already using, etc. All of this is dynamic
information that changes based on who you’re talking to.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 6

Fast track to schedule a meeting after
demo request

Not all website visitors are created equal. Some are just kicking the tires. Some are in
research mode. And some are ready to buy. The challenge is ensuring your messaging
caters to the sales-readiness of all these different types of leads.

One thing we’ve found that works particularly well is to open up a “fast lane” for those
that have requested a demo. When someone enters their email and company name,
we pass them onto our predictive analytics tool, MadKudu, which predicts whether this
person is a low fit, a medium fit, a good fit, or a very good fit for our product.

This means we can roll out the red carpet for leads who have a high likelihood of
becoming one of our customers. These leads skip all the usual steps and are fast-tracked
to book a demo with one of our team members right away.

This type of personalization works really well because it goes much deeper than identity
attributes and into sales readiness, greatly increasing your chances of conversion.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 7

Scale positive reviews for your product

Just five reviews for your product can increase the likelihood of conversion by 4X, so it’s
worth spending time generating positive customer reviews for your business.

Doing this manually can be pretty time consuming, but we’ve found a few ways to
automate this and make it personal at the same time.

Whenever a customer takes certain actions (like interacting with our support team)
they’re asked to fill out an NPS Survey. From this survey, you’ll get a cohort of promoters
and detractors.

From there, you can reach out to promoters and ask for a review on a site like G2 or
Capterra, and offer a reward upfront.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 8

Automated personalized follow-up emails

When a user signs up for your product (and opts into communication), it’s a prime
window of opportunity to capitalize on their initial interest.

You might think that because they’ve signed up, your job as a marketer is now complete.
Far from it. You still need to motivate people through intermediate stages of the buying
journey, like consideration and evaluation.

One of the most powerful things you can do is to pull in various first-party data signals
about the particular signup (their industry, company size, their existing tech stack, etc.)
and send a personalized welcome email based on that intelligence.

For example, let’s say a recent signup is an e-commerce company using Facebook ads.
Your email copy can recommend relevant case studies, social proof, and use cases that
help the prospective user know they are in good company.

Personalized campaigns such as these have been really helpful in getting high response
rates, and subsequently activating new signups.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 9

Identify and act on predictive user actions

In an ideal world, every visitor to your website would be raising their hand. The reality
is that some of your visitors will need a series of nudges and prompts to help them get
there.

A good way to do this is to use predictive behaviors to nudge visitors forward through
your funnel. Even though people might not be opting-in all the time, you can look at
behavioral scores and actions that users are taking and send automated follow-ups to
those people based on their actions. For example, are they looking at your integrations
page? Are they looking at your documentation page?

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 10

A visit to your pricing page is often a good signal of intent. A good campaign to run is
to send a triggered email based on specific actions on that page. That could be visitors
who are on your pricing page for more than thirty seconds, and/or have visited your
pricing page more than three times. The options are virtually endless.

By identifying a very specific audience, and one with high intent, you’ve given yourself a
good chance of generating a solid sales opportunity.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 11

Nudge based on non-activity

In the previous example, we saw that website activity can be a great signal for proactive
personalization. But a lack of activity can be an equally important behavioral trigger.
In the B2C world, this could mean people who dropped out of the checkout flow or
abandoned their carts. In the B2B world, it could be someone who didn’t finish signing
up or didn’t take those all-important first few actions in your product.

Regardless of what type of business you have, don’t neglect those users who may be in
most need of a nudge back towards engagement.

For example, when we launched the Segment Startup Program, which gives startups
$25,000 in Segment credits, we noticed that plenty of people signed up for the
program, but that those signups didn’t always translate to usage. By applying
personalization and incentivization, we were able to get those people back on track.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 12

“Roll up” email to summarize
account activity

Why is Spotify’s annual “Unwrapped” campaign so successful? Because it’s a pure,

unfiltered and, often embarrassing, view of who we are, based entirely on usage.
Thankfully, you don’t have to be a billion-dollar music streaming service to take
advantage of this deep psychological need.

One of the most powerful personalization emails we send is a summary of a user’s

account activity. It taps into existing data about a customer’s past experience over the
past month – API calls processed, monthly tracked users, etc.

Emails such as this build on existing momentum by creating a positive feedback loop.
Users are more likely to become recurring, valuable customers for your business if they
feel they’re making progress with your product.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 13

The one secret to getting
personalization right...
Regardless of which of the above strategies you decide to try out, the secret is this – you
must add value with personalization. You have to offer something the user wants, not
just decorative garnishes like adding their company name. Trust me when we say that
nobody is going to buy a product just because you added their company name to an
email. If it doesn’t help them impact their bottom line or achieve their goals, they won’t
be interested.

If you’d like help getting any of these personalization campaigns up and running with
Segment, see if you qualify for our fast-track demo here.

9 PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES TO TRY IN 2020 14