Have you ever met someone in their "early career" that you just knew was going to be successful? That was my feeling when I first met Guy Yalif, Founder and CEO of Intellimize almost 20 years ago!
Guy has been both a Marketing and Product leader, which led to his creation of a company focused on optimizing full funnel conversion. Guy's vision is to personalize each website visit at the moment to create high-converting websites to optimize conversion and revenue.
1:1 web personalization has been discussed and evangelized as the holy grail of web experiences for over 20 years - so why is it just happening now? First, the technology is finally available to make this vision a reality, second marketers have been conditioned to create "segments" and then create custom lead routing rules for each segment due to the limitations of the technology.
The reality is that humans max at 10-20 different business rules, and we cannot scale to the ultimate goal of 1:1 marketing which can combine thousands of different signals to show a user, in real-time content that is highlighted relevant to a market of one.
The common trends of the day include defining Ideal Customer Profile segments and then combining that with different content and paths for each buyer persona(s). Third-party information such as "intent data" has been a recent development to further "segment" content to visitors based upon their intent, but still does not get us down to a unique website experience for each and every visitor - resulting in increased conversion rates.
When asked if the technology is now available to convert this vision into reality, Guy said that before Intellimize the technology did not yet exist. Couple that with the need for scale and volume of traffic to train the machine learning, the infrastructure, and capabilities were not yet available for the masses.
Large scale B2C companies, such as Amazon and Netflix have the resources and scale to build their own highly personalized 1:1 engagement methods. Unfortunately, smaller scale companies did not have access to a similar capability with similar capabilities but bundled as an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box solution for B2B Marketers.
The conversation pivoted to the signals being used to enhance full-funnel, continuous conversion optimization? Signals can include data from any source including internal sources such as the marketing automation system, CRM system, and external signals such as time of day, day of week, location, previous activity/behavior on the website, and what content has previously led to conversion and revenue.
Next, we discussed the measurements (metrics) that B2B Marketers should be measuring - limited to the top three. First, pipeline ($) generated, second was "cost per Lead (actually cost per MQL) and third was "share of voice".
MQL to opportunity and MQL to Closed-Won conversion rates should also be a high priority. When I pushed on "cost per $ revenue", Guy highlighted that this was a great "quality" measurement to determine the quality of Marketing Qualified Leads and their conversion rates to revenue generated.
I had to go to my favorite topic - and that is the time spent on "attribution". Guy said Marketers must be able to highlight the value that Marketing delivers, and though the ultimate focus needs to be placed on the ultimate outcomes of pipeline ($) and revenue ($), it is important to understand the touch points and engagement levels that lead to new customers.
If you are interested in how to optimize the conversion rate starting at the first point of engagement on your website, this conversation with Guy Yalif is a great listen!