Multiple customer segments, one website.
Software buying has changed. For many SaaS companies, customers are signing up for their product after just a single website visit without speaking to a salesperson. This is the era of Product-Led Growth. It has afforded go-to-market teams a ton of opportunity, but has also come with its fair share of challenges. If your website is now the SDR, how do you personalize the experience across different verticals, customer segments, and personas?
Stewart Hillhouse, Head of Content at Mutiny, notes that “For Product-Led Growth companies, segmenting the website experience between SMBs and enterprise can be hard to balance.”
The biggest problem he has observed with PLG companies is that self-serve isn’t always the right motion for every potential buyer that lands on their website. The most common example Stewart has seen for Mutiny customers goes like this:
Cohort A of customers work at a small company and respond well to a PLG friendly call-to-action (CTA) like “free trial:. They have ownership over the decision (both end user and buyer) and can make the decision quickly.
Cohort B of customers are enterprise users who work at a large company. Their companies have specific security and procurement processes that need to be followed when they bring on a new vendor.
Both are high potential, high lifetime value customers with very different needs from the website.
Website personalization at scale.
Using 1st and 3rd party data, you can create customized website experiences for each cohort and run experiments to increase conversions in each segment. This is how Mutiny users are able to unlock personalization at scale to drive conversion.
By running a website personalization playbook you can help your users and prospects reach value faster. This helps with improving sales, reducing churn, and creating a holistic experience for each of your personas.
Case study: How Mutiny helped Sprig increase conversions by 95%
Sprig, a customer journey tool, identified that their enterprise segment of website visitors were converting at a lower rate than their self-serve prospects. There was a natural fit for a PLG motion with their end users so they built a self-serve trial motion for SMB customers. Companies with less than 150 employees got served with the free trial experience, while companies with over 150 employees were funnelled into the sales-led motion where they were served with a “book a call with sales” CTA.
They saw an increase immediately, not only on the free trial conversion (95% lift as a result of adding the word “free” to their CTA) but also also on the booked calls metric which had an incredible lift in the enterprise segment.
Try this playbook yourself
#1 Define customer segments
Stewart recommends you start by analyzing historical data to identify a cutoff point in company size based on won and lost deals. For this analysis, you’ll have to bring on folks outside of the marketing and growth teams. Plan to loop in leadership and sales to get alignment.
#2 Segment traffic through acquisition channels
After segmenting the audience, define your best channels for reaching and engaging them. Create landing pages personalized for each segment and build out an SEO plan with keywords that will attract each segment. You can also run paid ads to target your different audiences.
#3 Personalize website content for each
Offer different CTAs, messaging, and value propositions depending on the audience. It’s important to get super clear on your website journey and matchCTAs to the specific end user. For example, when Sprig changed its CTA for SMBs to “start for free,” at first, they saw a decrease in conversions because prospects were taken to a landing page that was very similar to enterprise, with wording that made it seem like they had to schedule a demo before they could get started.
Once they had separate landing pages for each segment instead of generalized language, the trend reversed! Conversions started to increase as their SMB segment was prompted to answer a few questions before starting with their free trial.
When getting started with website personalization, the areas you want to focus on are high-traffic and high-intent pages. People are usually inclined to start with the worst-performing pages — but according to Stewart, that’s a mistake.
“If your site is already converting, that means the intent is there, allowing you to get to statistical significance, prove your hypothesis, and reach ROI faster.”
Keep experimenting
Don’t stop at just splitting the experience between enterprise and SMB. You can run infinite tests depending on how granular you want to get with each of your segments. You can create PLG motions that are very specific i.e: healthcare vs insurance. You can test messaging, buttons, CTAs, and more. The key is to work backwards and think about the situation that your buyer finds themselves in and start piecing together all the value props that are relevant to that person.
You don’t need to make a whole new website to try and get it right. Instead, start small and build on your learnings.For example, try changing the header of the landing page, and if conversions lift then you can keep changing the rest of the website.
The truth is, personalization doesn’t really work unless you’re willing to experiment a lot.
One thing to keep in mind is that since you’re splitting experiences, the outcomes you’re measuring might not be the same for each group. For example, if you’re creating a homepage with a “book demo” CTA for your enterprise audience and comparing it against a homepage for SMBs with CTAs to start a free trial, both of those outcomes count as conversions for the sake of your experiment, but they provide different results.
