Creating a Personalised Customer Experience with HubSpot

According to research conducted by Salesforce, 75% of buyers expect a fully customised customer experience from brands. That suggests that the website’s ability to understand their individual needs and provide relevant recommendations is a big selling point. Other research has also proven that customers are willing to part with their personal data as long as it’s used to generate personalised offers.

In other words, personalisation is not a buzzword marketers throw around: it’s an effective long-term customer focus strategy for addressing your target audience in a way they want to be communicated with. Excluding building a Customer Experience out of your marketing strategy in 2021 will make any brand fall behind their competitors.

What is Customer Experience?

To put it bluntly, Customer Experience (CX) is what builds the customer’s impression of your brand throughout the buyer’s journey. Positive experiences will make them want to return, whereas negative factors will have the opposite effect. In other words, Customer Experience directly affects your bottom line, including revenue and conversion rates.

CX focuses on the relationship between a business and the customer built on customer data. It also entails every interaction regardless of its length or whether it’s resulted in a purchase: exposure to an ad, a customer service call, a download of a mobile app, etc.

The more context, value and convenience you offer, the more likely customers will come back and recommend your services to their network.

Key Reasons to Creating Personalised CX

The feelings customers experience and associate to the business are at the core of lifetime value, customer retention and brand loyalty. In 2020, ZenDesk released a report which showed that 52% of customers would go out of their way to purchase from the brand they’re loyal to.

Most business sectors are densely populated and therefore providing a better service in the customer’s understanding, which entails building a seamless customer experience, can make a huge difference. To put it shortly, if the shopping experience on your website does not meet the customer’s expectations, they can easily find your competitor who may live up to their preferences.

The numbers suggest that 50% of customers need one bad experience before they switch to a competitor. More than one bad experience raises the number to 80%.

Simply put, good products and competitive pricing alone are no longer enough to build customer satisfaction and loyalty. The missing component is a personalised experience. 

HubSpot CRM to Customise the Experience 

HubSpot CRM provides a great tool set to create unique experiences to every customer. Before we as far as mention the features that allow building different approaches, it’s important to pinpoint that HubSpot collects, stores and digests personal information of your prospects that’s the foundation of customisation.

You can’t build a personalised approach unless you can pinpoint the customer's needs in real time. We have spoken a lot about how HubSpot captures and processes data in our previous article. Based on the knowledge collected, HubSpot offers many assets to customise customer experience: from custom designs and lead generation assets to social media automation and smart content.

Don’t Underestimate HubSpot Workflows  

Workflows is one of the best known and widely used features of HubSpot. And, frankly, often underestimated due to how commonly used they are. However, knowledge does not equal efficient usage. With so many trigger options in HubSpot, as well as freedom to create complicated and highly customised routes, Workflows are a crucial element of personalisation strategies.

Covering the basics, you can create something as simple as sending a personalised email to prospects that have not visited the website for 60 days, or set another sequence to chase those who had abandoned their carts, as well as personalised promotions based on their browsing history.

Alternatively, you can get more sophisticated in building automation trees that map out full customer journeys with multiple branches based on the prospects' interactions and data you’ve gathered.

Workflows can also be used for segmenting the audience. For example, one of our clients works in Event Production. Although they do target both Ops Directors and Event Directors, they would be on different tracks in a Workflow as they have different needs and challenges. In other words, segmenting the audience through Workflows enables an individual approach to prospects, saving them from receiving irrelevant information.

Finally, Workflows allow seamless connection of all the channels and therefore enable creation of a personalised multi-channel customer experience. Their interactions with your website can influence not just the email they receive but even the sales rep they will interact with, as well as personalised attention they may require.

Right Content to the Right People

HubSpot CRM has a feature called ‘Smart Content’ and the essence of it is that different content can be shown on the website (or in the body of an email) depending on who’s viewing it. It means that you won’t need to create multiple content variations in order to build them into multi-branched workflows to ensure the right content reaches the right people. Smart content will be doing this for you.

In other words, smart content on HubSpot is dynamic content that will change in accordance with who’s viewing it. Since HubSpot CRM stores and automatically updates the data on your prospects, smart content pulls that knowledge from the database and actions on it to create an individualised, customer based experience for each user.

Based on dynamic data criteria such as IP address, device used for browsing, communication preferences and myriads of others, smart content presents content that a particular user is likely to find relevant. A precise communication across different channels, such as web content, email and chat bots, will deepen the relationship between your business and the client, making each interaction feel like a one-on-one individual approach.

Testing & Optimising

Despite all the great personalisation-enabling features of HubSpot, you can’t set them up and let them run. You need to keep tabs on the numbers to ensure the customer experience is relevant and, most of all, pleasant. 

By tracking the performance of content you will be able to identify what works with certain user segments and what’s either irrelevant or redundant. This will lead to producing better, more targeted and valuable content to your audience moving forward. Testing, tracking and adjusting never ends. Even as you find the settings that work great for your business, it’s important to remember that customer behaviour changes all the time - and you want to stay ahead of the game.

A/B Testing for Assets

The smart content approach is not limited to blog posts, emails and chatbots. It stretches across assets like CTAs, images, forms and others. This makes HubSpot CRM very comfortable for running A/B testing. 

Here’s a very simple example of how dynamic assets work in practice. When you land on the website for the first time, you will be greeted with a pop-up offering you sign-up for a newsletter. The next time you come, you get a pop-up welcoming you back instead and presenting you with the deals you might be interested in, based on your interactions with the website during the first visit.

To illustrate A/B testing, we will use our own website as an example. As we launched our new site at BIAS, we were uncertain what opening message works better. The opinions within the company would differ, but in reality all of us were basing that on our personal views rather than the data. 

So, we have created two variants of the page and set it to differentiate from user to user. This way we would no longer guess among ourselves which option is better - the numbers of customer engagement would tell us that.

This is the most recent example - but you can test literally anything on your website using HubSpot CRM and of course HubSpot CMS for maximum customer experience.

Summary

The core of the inbound methodology is delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, everytime. Many chalk this up to be something that only applies to email automation, but inbound marketing covers the entirety of the experience you provide your customers throughout the buyer’s journey. 

Every business industry is going through rapid growth and the market is saturated. While competitive pricing and high quality products are both as important as ever, they alone are not enough to beat the competition. Unless you are capable of providing customised customer experience that doesn’t just meet but exceeds the expectations of your audience, you stand no chance. And HubSpot CRM and the other integrated HubSpot platforms enable you to tailor that experience.

Are you looking for ways of creating an impeccable customer experience on your website? Drop us a line - we’ll provide you with a solution that’s uniquely yours.