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Leveraging Personalization at Every Stage of the Customer Journey

Contributed article by Katie Johnson, Vice President, Customer Experience, InvoiceCloud (https://invoicecloud.net/)     

It’s fairly obvious how marketing teams can leverage personalization tools in customer acquisition, but customer experience leaders in the B2B2C space need to be aware of how they can use similar tools throughout the customer journey. In today’s increasingly data-driven landscape, the most effective and savvy customer happiness teams should leverage available tools—especially personalization tools—throughout the customer journey, not just at the acquisition stage.

Personalization and Customer Acquisition

Knowing the customer has always been a pillar of doing business; successful marketing strategies are dependent on understanding customers’ desires and preferences. After all, people aren’t going to buy things they don’t want—knowing whether or not someone drives a car is valuable information if you’re trying to sell tires. Today’s advanced tech, including machine learning and automation tools, have revolutionized how companies learn about and understand their target customers. Modern personalization-enabling tools can tell marketers not only whether someone drives a car, but whether that person lives in a city or the suburbs, whether they commute or take long road trips, and so on. From that, marketers can extrapolate demographic factors like education level, income, and maybe even gender. Knowing the above helps companies market to the customers they want to acquire: They decide what messaging is most likely to resonate with these people, and where they’re most likely to see tire ads. If all goes according to plan, bam, they’ve acquired a customer.    

In many business contexts, this is success. But in the B2B2C space, this is only the beginning. Customer acquisition is, of course, a vital necessity for any business. When your success relies on your customers’ success, acquisition is only half the story. For us, personalization can be a valuable tool throughout the customer journey.

Personalization Throughout the Customer Journey

As the VP of Customer Experience at InvoiceCloud, a vertically integrated bill presentment and payment solution for municipal and utility companies, I know that my success is totally dependent on the success of our customers. We are a vendor, but the relationship is really more like an alliance: when our customers make money, we make money. The best possible customer experience is beneficial to both sides of the equation.    

Personalization tools have proven critical in nurturing and fortifying our relationships with our customers. ABM platforms are a great example, these tools have proven incredibly valuable at the top of the funnel, helping us target specific audiences.Our sales and marketing teams are able to set up alerts when a prospective customer at a certain IP address navigates to our website. This allows us to tailor a customer journey that meets that prospective customer’s unique needs.    

Personalization tech can also improve the experience for customers who are by all outward appearances totally happy. Using automation tools allows us to customize and target ads to make our customers aware of all the ways they can leverage their relationship with InvoiceCloud. For instance, let’s say Anytown, USA uses InvoiceCloud as a tool for e-payments, and they’re really happy with how they’ve been able to move so much of their billing online. Rather than counting that happiness as a win and leaving it there, customer experience teams can use data collation and analysis tools to target personalized ads to Anytown—and other customers in similar positions—to let them know how we can help them move to paperless billing and accept digital payments. This takes that customer from satisfied to delighted.

Measuring Success

Of course, the most sophisticated personalization tech is useless if you can’t tell whether it’s working. That’s why customer experience leaders like myself are all about tech that allows us to visualize the data that we’re gathering throughout the customer journey. Sales enablement platforms not only house assets like one-pagers, video content, marketing-facing materials, etc. but also allow us to track their efficacy. Reps can go into Seismic and see how much pipeline a specific asset has influenced, beyond basic metrics like downloads or open rates. We can see which specific assets contributed to specific sales processes and the dollar amount of pipeline that comes from each asset. Analyzing this allows us to focus resources on the assets we know are driving sales, be those videos, webinars, white papers, or newsletters. This also makes for more efficacious and focused sales teams, who know exactly how some of their grunt work (like admin tasks after an event) is used and how much of an impact they actually are making.    

But the truth is, the real and most accurate measurement of success is customer loyalty. As the VP of customer experience, I know I’m always keeping an eye on our customer retention rate (which hovers around 97%, as of 2023). The fact that our success is our customers’ success is what sets B2B2C marketing apart from other business contexts. Personalization can be a powerful tool for differentiating ourselves from our competitors by forging and nurturing real, meaningful human relationships that drive mutual success.

Katie Johnson, Vice President, Customer Experience, InvoiceCloud (https://invoicecloud.net/)