How to Do Trump-Style One to One Marketing on a Budget

Every time you fail to engage a potential buyer, you are losing revenue.

Yet, only 20% of companies are using a strategy that's PROVEN to be one of the most effective for keeping buyers engaged.  Are you one of them?

What You'll Learn from this Article:

• What you'll gain by implementing personalization
• Challenges to mid-market businesses
• How to employ personalization with minimal resources
• Our recommendations for platforms best suited to the mid-market

Here’s a crazy statistic.  ​

Personalization improves conversion and engagement for 87% of companies,
yet only 20% of companies are using web personalization to improve engagement.

​Many companies, especially those with smaller teams or budgets, think personalization is too complicated, or that they don’t have the resources to manage it.   

In reality, the Return on Investment (ROI) for web personalization, even for companies with limited resources, is often higher than other, more traditional marketing programs.  Let’s look at why it’s so effective.

One to One Marketing for Presidents

The Presidential arena, with its massive budgets and resources, is a test case for personalization at its most ambitious levels.  Both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaign teams leveraged vast amounts of voter data, combined with sophisticated ad and email targeting to hyper-target their message to voters.  

The scope and complexity of one to one marketing in political campaigns is growing at a staggering rate.   In 2012, Obama’s campaign employed 50 data scientists who developed 9 predictive models for voter segments. This was ground-breaking data science in 2012.     

Just four years later, the Ted Cruz campaign used 1,809 predictive models.  According to Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Research and head of Data & Analytics for Ted Cruz for President, “In 2012 there were a few hundred piece of data you could append to a voter file.  By 2016, it was a few thousand.  In some states, we had more than 10,000 pieces of information available to append to the voter file.”  

Trump’s team tested 175,000 different message variations on Facebook to prepare for his third presidential debate with Hilary Clinton.

Political candidates are willing to make enormous financial and resource investments in personalization because hyper-targeting drives huge payoffs in user engagement, conversion, and ROI.  

The August 2016 Jivox Benchmark Report analyzed performance data from over a billion ad impressions.  They determined that personalized digital ads perform 3.3x better than Google’s display ad benchmark.  Personalized digital ads also deliver measurably better Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).    Autopilot found that a personalized offer quadruples the likelihood that a consumer will engage.  

Personalization for Real Marketers

Trump spent $15M on data and personalization in the last 4 months of the Presidential race, and it’s rumored that Hilary Clinton employed close to 1,000 data scientists.   If you’re a mid-market company, you don’t have the resources to develop and manage thousands of segments and multivariate tests.

Are mid-market businesses doomed to lose market share to Enterprise businesses with deeper pockets?  Not necessarily. 

Venture capital firms have invested nearly $300M in personalization tools in the last 18 months.  Many of these companies are developing sophisticated AI and machine-learning platforms that reduce the overhead costs of employing personalization.  Other companies offer personalization as a value-added service.  

Automation and value-adds are the key to mid-market businesses remaining competitive in web personalization.   Below are the results of our research on the best companies building smart and affordable platforms in this area.  

Click a logo to jump to a platform review:

​Demandbase

• Approach:  Targeting by Account (ABM) for Advertising, Email and Websites
• Best for:  B2B Companies
• Solution:  “Demandbase’s platform helps business marketers identify the companies most likely to become customers and market to them more effectively.  It uses machine learning that scours the Web for behavioral signals such as what partnerships these companies are forming, what software they are buying, and what people skills they are investing in and combines that data with proprietary firmographic intelligence to target tailored marketing messages exclusively to those accounts,” says John Dering, Director of ABM Technology and Strategy for Demandbase. Demandbase's algorithm automates the identification of high-priority accounts by predicting the likelihood of a target company being in-market for their client’s solution.   Demandbase ranks these companies in order of strongest intent and then targets their entire buying committee with personalized advertising and web content.  The result:  thorough penetration of your key message and value to every member of a buying team that is currently researching solutions like yours.   Imagine walking into a meeting where every attendee is already aware of your product.  For many in B2B sales that’s an uncommonly rare scenario. 
• Unique Offer:  While a number of companies have rolled out similar ABM solutions in the last few years, what sets Demandbase apart is the quality of their data (i.e. their ability to identify high priority targets), and through that the granularity and accuracy of their targeting.  Many competing solutions in this space target individuals based on B2C technologies that have poor match rates for B2B data.  Demandbase uses IP targeting to deliver ads to the companies you want to target.  Demandbase’s approach also means it’s naturally immune to ad fraud, which impacts up to 35% of an advertiser’s ad spend according to The Association of National Advertisers.   “When IAS (an ad verification service) audits our campaigns, they consistently find that less than 1% of our traffic is suspicious. This is because we target corporate networks. These organizations have departments dedicated to keeping their network and devices malware-free,” shares James Allgood, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Demandbase.
• Price:  Most recent information found dates back to 2014 in an interview with Demandbase CEO Chris Golec.  The article states a price of $100 per targeted account per month.

 

​BounceX

• Approach:  Omnichannel, omnidevice behavioral marketing.  This often appears as an offer or content served via popup upon imminent site / cart abandon
• Best for:  Ecommerce, Publishers, Travel companies with +250k monthly visitors
• Solution:   BounceX is a behavioral targeting and acquisition platform, powered by device graphing technology, that monetizes unproductive traffic into buyers.  Imagine you’re shopping for a Mother’s Day gift before bed.  After a good hour of searching shopping sites, you’ve narrowed it down to three options.  You’re too brain dead to make a decision at this point, so you put them in your cart and plan to quickly make a decision and purchase in the am.   Except – at home you were on your iPad, and now you’re at work on a laptop.  The retailer doesn’t recognize you, so there’s nothing in your cart.  You’re not even totally sure which three items you selected the night before, and you don’t have time to start over again right now.   You abort.  BounceX’s predictive models, based on behavioral science, predict quite accurately when someone is about to leave your conversion funnel, and then automatically provide timely relevant information to keep them engaged.
• Unique Offer:  “BounceX is the only behavioral marketing platform that looks holistically across the prospect’s digital experience, delivering that user a customized experience that spans both channels and devices,” says Julia Spano, Director of Marketing Partnerships, BounceX.   While many companies deliver personalization based on segments, BounceX is true one to one marketing, and is providing consistent lift in ROAS for its clients.  For about the cost of a marketing manager, you get the software, a team to manage your content, and BounceX also puts a guarantee on your results.
• Price:  While most of BounceX’s customers are Enterprise businesses, they do take on some smaller businesses in the $8k/month range.  

 

BrightInfo

• Approach:  Automated, Real-Time Website Personalization
• Best for: Companies with 5k+ monthly website visitors, and a Content Marketing Strategy
• Solution:   BrightInfo’s algorithm reads and understands all your website’s content on an almost human level. Then, in real time, each visitor is recommended the most relevant content based on his/her user data, browsing and crowd behavior. 
• Unique Offer:   “Our solution requires almost no configuration during onboarding and ongoing operation. The algorithm performs semantic and textual analysis on all content assets all by itself and recommends the right content for each user, without manually creating lists, rules or segments,” says Merav Zaks, Product Marketing for BrightInfo.  This is good news for organizations with tight resources, as most web personalization platforms require that a dedicated individual spend a good chunk of time every month managing the program.  If you’re shopping, pay attention when solution providers talk about defining lists, segments, rules, and tagging content.   BrightInfo’s platform automates all of these time consuming tasks.   
• Price:  Pricing is customized based on site traffic, so I’m not able to provide a relevant price quote, but Merav did say that “one of our main goals is to be ROI positive for every company.”

 

El Toro

• Approach:  1:1 Cookie-free marketing
• Best for:  B2C’s with high-cost CPAs, such as Healthcare, Automotive and Higher Education and Political candidates
• Solution:   First, El Toro’s onboards customer data from your customer databases, such as CRM, Analytics, and point-of-sale (POS) systems.  Next, PII is removed.  Then, customer records are matched to online devices or IP addresses, segments are created and then those users are targeted with video and/or display advertising.   What makes El Toro’s approach particularly effective is their ability to measure exactly what worked, and what didn’t.  “We’re tracking every touchpoint even though the users are anonymous.  Once the sale is made, we can tie the sale back to the advertising, making ROI transparent.  After every campaign we provide a matchback analysis, which informs our clients exactly how likely someone was to buy from them, how much they spent for that engagement, and their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS),” shared Stacy Griggs, El Toro’s CEO. Optimization of your campaigns is partially automated, and partially managed by the El Toro team, ensuring that campaign performance is continually improving.
• Unique Offer:  El Toro is the only 1:1, Cookie-Free IP Targeting solution.   
• Price:  Smaller companies can get started with El Toro for $2k - $3k/month

 

​Evergage

• Approach:  Omnichannel 1:1 Real Time Personalization
• Best for:  From Evergage’s website, “Whether you’re a B2C company with extensive resources or a B2B company with a small team, Evergage can help you cost-effectively increase conversions.”   
• Solution:   Evergage’s platform leverages a person’s complete visit history and combines that with the activity in their current session and responds with targeted, relevant content, messages and CTAs.  It can literally adapt on the fly, to each user signal.  Evergage comes pre-loaded with a number of segments that have proven to be effective, and its Customer Success team is available to help you create customized segments.  One of Evergage’s claims is that the platform is designed to be managed by a single marketing resource – which may be an attractive feature for resource-constrained businesses.  Personalization can be delivered based on marketer-defined rules or automated machine learning.  Also included – A/B and multivariate testing, and predictive analytics for optimizing conversion rates.   
• Unique Offer:  Evergage is the only personalization platform that delivers real time personalization anywhere in a page, app or email – all without flicker. This ebook does a great job of explaining what real time personalization really means, its advantages, and why not all solutions live up to the ‘real time’ claim.   Evergage is also the only personalization platform that measure not just the count of a user’s pageviews, but the quality of each of those views – weighting their experience towards the content they spent more time with.  
• Price:  Evergage’s pricing structure is based on the client’s number of websites, web applications or mobile apps and monthly unique visitor and user volumes.  Also available – a Free, 15 day Proof of Concept test.

 

Marketo

• Approach:  A comprehensive Marketing Automation Platform, which includes web personalization as a feature
• Best for:  According to SiriusDecisions 2017 Report on Marketing Automation Platforms, 84% of Marketo’s customers have revenues under $250M.
• Solution:   In Tolkein-esque style, you might just think of Marketo as “One Marketing Platform to Rule Them All”.  Marketo’s platform covers Marketing Automation, Email, Mobile, Social, Digital Ads, Predictive Content and more.   SiriusDecisions warns that some of Marketo’s more advanced features can quickly become too complex for small teams to manage, but according to Marketo, most of their SMB’s are able to deliver results from web personalization with one or two people focused on this 20 – 40% of the time.
• Unique Offer:  Marketo is the only Personalization platform in this list which automatically integrates with Marketo
• Price:  For 50k contacts, the price is $22,000/yr, for 250k contacts the price is $106,000/yr, and for 1M contacts the price is $182,000/yr.

 

Could be a fit for growing businesses, but not entirely clear:

Optimizely:  Optimizely has built a stellar reputation on its testing & experimentation platform, which changed the testing market by putting variation design right into the hands of marketers.   In October 2016 Optimizely announced the launch of Optimizely X, which “allows experiments and personalized marketing across any platform, device, or channel” (even TV.)  What landed Optimizely in this category of providers was the lack of information available on how much personalization work Optimizely is able to automate, or what types of professional services are available to make personalization an option for the typically resource-strapped growing business.  While Optimizely does appear to be focusing more on larger business recently, it was reported in Oct. 2016 that Optimizely X pricing starts at $999/mo.  Worth investigating, based on the strength of their brand.
​

Watch Category:   These personalization companies received significant funding in 2015 / 2016:

• Smarter HQ
• Certona
• engagio
• Vmob (now Plexure)
• SundaySky
• BloomReach
• Boomtrain
• Get Smart Content
• Leanplum​​

Now it’s your turn.

Have you starting using behavioral targeting or web personalization already?  What were your challenges in getting started?  What were your results? 

Please share your recommendations, frustrations, strategies and wisdom with all of us via comments below.

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Attributions:  Trump supporters - CC image courtesy of jbouie on Flickr

Trisha Merriam is VP of Demand Generation at SWOPtimize, focused on helping companies optimize their digital marketing strategy for higher volume and better quality leads.  We are Your Partner in Awesome.

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