How B2B Personalization Can Help Enhance Digital Customer Journey to Drive Conversions

 

Post the coronavirus pandemic, companies have developed better marketing strategies to stay in competition even with customers moving to online sales. As B2C companies already had the right strategies in place before, this was a huge turning point for B2B companies to actively watch and learn.

So, the big question now is – What Do B2B Customers Want?

Research suggests that 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe that personalization builds better customer relationships. Additionally, 55% of professionals even say that personalization can bring higher conversion rates and growth.

To derive better results and more conversions, B2B companies need to understand how they can leverage customer data and provide a personalized customer experience.

How Does B2B Marketing Personalization Work?

B2B companies today have realized the importance of delivering a high-quality customer experience to their B2B customer. For this, they must collect customer data from all channels that they are using to interact with the brand ranging from websites, applications, and social media. A marketing automation tool such as a customer data platform (CDP) in such a case unifies first-party customer data from multiple sources to build a single view of each customer. Businesses can use this customer behavior data to analyze and predict future behavior. This can help B2B companies gauge customer demand and cater to the right target audiences with personalized product recommendations and offers. This can also help companies offer better customer service using insights from customer data.

How Do You Understand Your Customer?

To make sure that your marketing strategies are working, you must fully understand your customer first. This can eventually help you build customer personas that can then help you effectively segment your target audience and cater to their needs, personally. Furthermore, to solve customer problems B2B marketers must fully understand them. For this, they must collect first-party data from customers. This can be done by:

• Send out a survey
• Look at search queries
• Call them up
• Look back at FAQs
• Figure out their pain points

Some Examples of Personalized B2B Customer Experiences

Personalization can be applied to a lot of areas of marketing while selling to a B2B customer. Here are a few examples to list:

Product recommendations:
A B2B marketer can use customer behavior data to predict and list product recommendations that can increase conversions and sale values by enhancing the digital customer experience.

Fig. Product recommendations displayed on a manufacturing B2B company website

Social media:
B2B marketers are aware of the increasing importance of staying active on social media to expand the business. As most B2B customers, just like B2C customers, are now incorporating Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms in their research lists, B2B marketers must develop better marketing strategies. They can use social selling tactics developed by their sales and marketing teams to provide a personalized customer experience.

Personalized pricing features:

An effective customer data platform can help you offer customizable pricing to customers by displaying personalized price lists with the right products and pricing information. Dynamic prices can involve displaying pre-configured business rules and negotiated contract pricing terms. Tailoring your pricing can increase profitability and improve customer satisfaction.

Fig. Examples of how companies can use loyalty programs to increase customer retention
Loyalty programs:
B2B companies can reward their loyal customers with loyalty points that can be used to purchase other products in the future. This helps in increasing customer retention and improves sales numbers as it gives your B2B customers an incentive to come back and exhaust their loyalty points.

Fig. Examples of how companies can use loyalty programs to increase customer retention

 

How Can Personalization Help Increase Conversion Rates?

Personalizing customer experience for your B2B customers can help your sales and marketing teams to nurture leads on every step in the sales funnel while also increasing customer retention rates once the sale is made. Overall, personalization can help B2B companies in two broad areas -

Personalization makes pricing easier: While dealing with dynamic prices and multiple contracts, B2B companies need an option to dealer prices for each customer. Personalization helps you do exactly that by giving your customers an option to pick from customized prices tailored just for them. This helps you effectively keep up with customer expectations.

Personalization gives your B2B customer confidence: The competition is rapidly increasing as companies are moving to digital ecosystems to stay in the market. With that, many companies can offer the same product as you, and you need a strong differentiator to stay in business. As customer experience has taken over price as the biggest differentiator in the market, delivering top-class personalized customer experiences to your B2B buyers has become mandatory for all successful businesses, today.