🗞️ The Journey: What B2Bs can learn from B2Cs at personalization?
In this edition of The Journey newsletter, we took a deeper look into the current B2B Marketing analytics scene to gain a better understanding of the benefits and efforts in implementing personalized buyer journeys. We will also share stats that will arm you in your organization’s personalization endeavors.
Personalization is All Around Us
When most people hear the term “personalization”, they immediately think of a B2C customer experience. But the truth is personalization has been around far before e-commerce, or even the internet, existed. Think of your local corner store. Does the worker there know your name or your usual order? If the answer is yes, then you are receiving a personalized shopping experience – and chances are, you appreciate the personal touch you receive while shopping there. It might make you more likely to shop there again, further establishing a buyer-seller relationship that goes beyond simple transactions.
The B2C Story
As the internet took the world by storm over the last few decades, the rise of online shopping, or “e-commerce”, has changed the way customers shop, enabling them to purchase everything they need without ever stepping foot in a store. These changes also caused tidal waves on the seller’s side, especially through the marketing departments. Amazon was among the first to realize the potential of online shopping. The online giant implemented a journey-based marketing strategy, pulling data from a mix of sources. Amazon combines “profile” information (i.e. the user’s age, gender, location) with “journey” information (i.e. previous searches, wish list, links clicked). This combination of data allows Amazon to make personalized suggestions to each customer appealing to their unique needs and interests. This quickly became the standard for online Marketing. Now, the rest of the world will need to adapt and catch-up.
How Effective is Personalization in B2C?
E-commerce as an industry is increasing at an unprecedented rate. In 2014, e-commerce sales reached $1.3 billion globally. By 2018, that figure more than doubled, reaching $2.9 billion. Even the most conservative estimates predict that by 2023, global e-commerce sales will total over $6.5 billion. These figures show that e-commerce is here to stay, and the instant question in B2B industries is – how can we leverage personalized journeys to boost our Sales pipeline as well as the B2C industry has done?
How do B2B Marketers Feel About Investing in Personalization?
As explained in Boxever’s history of personalization, “while most businesses understand the need to personalize and the value that can be extracted from consumers by doing so, there is a reluctance to fully embrace personalization.”
The numbers would agree:
- Only 5% of businesses believe they are using personalization extensively…
- 93% of companies plan to increase their investments in analytics.
- 65% of marketers and analysts said that their top priorities are personalized content and audience building.
- Less than 50% of which believe they are strong in these areas.
So, Why Are B2B Marketers Facing so Many Challenges in Implementing Personalization?
Personalization is a game of integrating different data sources and implementing tools that can help onboard personalized journeys at scale. One of the biggest concerns marketers face today is the explosive amount of available marketing tools and the effort and resources it takes to operate and manage these tools in order to get results.
On G2.com alone you can find 18 different categories for Marketing softwares, while popular categories like Marketing Automation and Account-based analytics have around 70 different vendors each.
And even after the tools were purchased and set up, there’s still a huge ongoing maintenance overhead. According to Marketing Charts, 34% of B2B marketers claim their most critical challenge in digital marketing is scaling tools’ results with current resources.
How Can This Gap be Solved?
Gartner’s recent article on B2B marketing trends names journey orchestration as THE thing marketers need to focus on the most. Journey orchestration means leveraging automations that guide your prospects towards business goals, instead of using fragmented tools that solve separate pieces of the puzzle.
A recent analysis we’ve conducted at Trendemon proved that customers can increase website performance (through personalized offers and their CTR) by 75% while still using the same amount of resources to operate the whole journey orchestration.
To sum it all up in one sentence – ROI is the name of the game, measuring performance uplift vs. effort and resources. And we’ll have much more to say about that in our next edition of ‘The Journey’ newsletter…
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On the same note, we are proud to announce that TrenDemon has been named as the Best Estimated ROI in Personalization Engines category at the G2 Summer 2022 Report. This achievement is based on a combination of an estimated time our customers achieve ROI and the time it takes them to go live compared to other solutions within the category.
We are very proud to add this latest badge to our trophy collection. Thank you to G2 for this acknowledgement and thanks to all our loyal customers who contributed to this award!
