Personalized, targeted, relevant marketing messaging at scale is the grand prize for digital marketers. Business success begins with simply getting the right message in front of the right contacts in the ideal moment, creating a one-to-one personalized experience for your target market. While the goal of most marketing efforts can be distilled down to this simple desire, making the required inbound marketing tactics come to fruition takes the right combination of strategy, martech, copywriting, and deployment.
If you are using HubSpot, you are one step closer to this ultimate goal and deploying the inbound marketing tactics that will support it. Here are three tactics to consider as you embark on the journey toward 1:1 marketing or relevance at scale.
Personalization tokens
Sure, this might be an obvious one. You are probably already using the “first name” token if you automate emails and might use “company name” in the subject line to improve open rates (which is one of my favorite tactics). But, what else can you do to hyper-personalize your communication?
Meeting your leads where they are in the buyer’s journey helps them feel understood and cultivates trust between you and them as a potential partner. Some personalization tokens that might be worth exploring are product/service interests, job title, recent event attendance, sales rep, recent conversion, to name a few. Have you considered sending out premium content based on the topic interests of your contacts? For instance, it’s possible to set up email workflow triggers based on a contact visiting a certain number of blog posts or resources about a specific topic. The more you can customize the buyer’s journey, the more you can improve the customer experience, which is one of HubSpot’s core values as defined in their customer code.
See Also: How to Set Up Lead Flows in HubSpot
Smart Content
Smart content personalizes the content delivered to your visitors depending on specific contact properties. This capability is present across forms, call-to-actions, and text modules in HubSpot. If you have vastly different personas or a long sales cycle, this tactic can be specifically effective to create a one-to-one marketing experience.
For example, a simple smart content strategy might be that unknown visitors to your site will see your brand story on their version of your homepage along with awareness-stage CTAs like “subscribe to our blog” or “download our industry white paper”. In contrast, visitors who have been on your site multiple times in one week or reached other predefined engagement thresholds might see case studies on the homepage along with a “request a demo” or “speak to an expert” CTA.
Hubspot reports that “personalized calls to action perform 202% better than basic CTAs”. Smart content helps propel visitors through the buyer’s journey by leveraging relevance along the path to purchase. HubSpot makes this easy with simple rules and criteria build right into the platform.
See Also: Stalled Out for Blog Content? Follow the Buyer's Journey
Workflows
Workflows might be HubSpot’s most powerful magical wand and enable a wide spectrum of one-to-one marketing tactics. With branching options as infinite as you can imagine, workflows enable certain actions to happen depending on your leads’ behavior.
A great use case for this is lead nurturing campaigns that can deploy based on a behavior (such as a form fill or a chat engagement) and branch based on how a contact responds. If your contact opens and engages with the first email in your awareness-stage nurture series, maybe they get fast-tracked into consideration-stage content. If your contact fails to engage with any emails in your lead nurture, perhaps he or she gets rerouting to your resource center with a “break-up” email to determine whether there is a topic (and subsequent lead nurture) better aligned with their current needs. Workflows are the true relevance engine in HubSpot and enable next-level specificity in your marketing strategy.
Gone are the days when blanket email blast yield results. In fact, they may do more harm than good nowadays, when prospects expect a customized experience more than ever. Not only does the commitment to relevance reduce unsubscribes and disengaged contacts, it cultivates brand connection and loyalty. Matt Ariker, the Chief Operating Officer of McKinsey’s Consumer Marketing Analytics Center reported in The Harvard Business Review that “personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more”. And with HubSpot, these essential inbound marketing tactics are more accessible than ever.
