Marketing Spotlight: How Simple Personalization Dramatically Increased Engagement

0:03Yeah, I think for us, where we're doubling down for our own business, but also to help our customers do this, is actually in personalization of content. So I love to give this example. We've been personalizing email forever, right? If you got an email that didn't say, hi, Stephanie, you would be questioning, how do they not know my name? It's the most basic thing of knowing who you are in any type of engagement. And I really believe that that expectation is going to span to your website as well. So an example for us, you know, one of the beauties of working at Contentful is also my team runs on Contentful.

0:38And so we found that 26 % of our visitors to our homepage were clicking log in, which obviously means that they are current customers, they're logging into our platform. So they shouldn't be seeing any messages of why buy Contentful. They already bought Contentful. So they should be seeing messages around what's new. What haven't they seen yet? Like, how can we be a little bit more kitschy, a little bit more, you know, catching their eye? And we think about this in every aspect from first-time visitors to returning visitors. Also focus from a marketer's perspective to a developer's perspective.

1:10We provide very different experiences on our homepage, and it's completely tailored to that persona. This is a huge unlock for customers. And I think they, like CMOs today, really need to start thinking about their website differently. Maybe that's where they really need to experiment. We experiment all the time. I think homepages get stuck in, that's my brand. That's the first impression. I can't touch this. And it's like, no, go take risks with that. Go personalize those messages. Because by the time that a human actually gets to your website, they have way more intent. because they've done all their research in an LLM, right?

1:46Like the use of the website, how it used to be is no longer. And now with GEO and AEO, by the time they come to your website, they clearly need something from you. So whether they're in the US interacting with your chatbot or they're in a meon, you know, going through their website on their own, they have higher intent. And so how can you be personalizing the content to them to really make sure that you are driving that to conversion?

2:09Elizabeth Maxson:How much are you personalizing? I mean, for you all, earlier you said we were originally talking to maybe developers or more tech-focused people, and then we wanted to shift to marketers. How much are you shifting when it comes to, okay, I'm a marketer coming. Is the whole entire website different? Not every single part of the website, but the whole homepage is wildly different. We also do that for various product pages, like if it's more geared to developer. But it's everything. It's from images. It's content. It's CTAs. Where do we want you to click? And obviously advance the conversation. And it's really thoughtful.

2:48The problem, though, is I feel like you can go down a dark hole of making it very complicated. And so we have been really trying to be the example of keeping it very simple and already seeing really huge improvements. A great example for you is we host an event called Contentful at the Cinema. So we buy out AMCs all over the world and we host prospects and customers at a big movie premiere. So you mentioned Formula One. Formula One's a customer of ours. You know, we did it for Formula One. We've done it for Wicked. That's a big draw. And so what we did is started using geotagging just in the eyebrow of our website.

3:24So it'll say, hey, Austin, because it knows you're in Austin, you know, come check out Contemplate the Cinema on February 26th. And we saw a 51 % increase in engagement of getting attendees at these events just by simple geotagging. I mean, it's so simple. I can't stop saying the word simple because I think a lot of marketing teams overcomplicate it. And that is what I think is going to be a huge unlock is if they can really do that.

3:50Elizabeth Maxson:I love, first of all, the simplicity of what you're saying. Like, I think that it's a good life lesson in general with almost anything. but what are some other simple things that you did that you know had big movements like the geotagging if you do any a b testing right there's so many different elements you can test one ad against the other but you can only test one element at a time right so maybe it's the headline maybe it's the cta button maybe one you know for an ad it's a person and this is a product And so it's hard to get to the crux of what actually is the differentiator. So when it comes to our website, we really try to focus on really big buckets, right?

4:33So someone who has never been to our website before versus somebody that has. Another great example is we launched a brand campaign last year called Feeling So Contentful. So if you came to our website through a really cool Feeling So Contentful ad, someone looking zen and contentful yogurt out, you then saw that same carry through of the brand looking that way and that same messaging on the website as well. So what I think is interesting here is you're right. I think marketers talked about personalization more as a journey they wanted to put prospects and customers on. And it's very much just this A-B testing, does this work better than this?

5:14But they're not thinking through the other aspects of places that maybe they feel uncomfortable personalizing. And so that's where we've seen that biggest momentum is really these bigger bucket comparisons and just making sure that they're different. Another fun one that we did for marketers was we updated our homepage banner to have Lorem Ipsum. And so people thought we had made a mistake. Obviously, they're like, oh my God, they have, you know, like buffer, buffer font there. And it was kind of like a ha ha, like caught you, go check out our personalization page. And we saw over 250 % higher engagement on learning about personalization on our product page than we had ever seen before.

5:58All because we did just this like funny catfish type banner on our homepage. And again, you only saw that if you're a marketer. If you came to our page and you're a developer, you did not see that. So how cool is that? I mean, we're seeing it. And this is every CMO that I talk to. I'm like, please let me share our story because if we can be an example for you, I can help you think through things, you know, a little bit differently. And same with our customers are doing it as well. Ruggable is a really, you mentioned Ruggable in the intro. They're really great. They do it for pets. Like if you come through an ad by clicking on a cat, I'm a cat lady, you only see cats.

6:34When you see their rugs, you would never see a dog. And they've seen a huge increase in conversion rates based on personalizing if you're a cat lover or you're a dog lover. And again, like that's so simple, right? We're not even getting into the type of cats or how old your cats are or anything like that. It's very simple. You're either this bucket or that bucket. And they've seen really great conversion results coming off of that.