We Drank Our Own Brew & Here’s What Happened: A B2B Optimization Story

The marketing technology landscape is evolving at an incredible pace. Stacks are becoming more and more complex, usually built with too many different point solutions all glued together in a cumbersome manner. With around 7,000 marketing technologies to power sales and marketing automation, optimization, advertising, lead management and personalization, execution is increasingly complicated.

New marketing technologies are appearing every day, and the average company’s marketing tech stack now consists of more than 17 different solutions. Despite investing in so much MarTech, many marketers are falling short at the most vital stage of the funnel – converting visitors by customizing content to their unique needs. B2B marketers are spending fortunes on acquisition but missing opportunities to hook prospects after driving the click. In the end, marketing campaigns are only as good as their weakest link and for many B2B websites, that link is the onsite experience.

At Dynamic Yield, we drink our own brew, so to speak. By using our own proprietary customer engagement platform for personalization, A/B testing, engaging users and conversion rate optimization, we have simplified our marketing stack to a point where we can measure in details specific users’ journeys, accurately measure intent, understand our prospects and tailor experiences for them in real time.

By using Dynamic Yield’s platform on our own web properties, we’ve been able to share behavioral data across platforms, reduce customer acquisition costs, improve conversions and on-site engagement and measure the true value of our various marketing campaigns and efforts.

Below are some strategies we deploy at Dynamic Yield to be sure our visitors receive a personalized experience from the awareness stage to conversion. These subtle customizations require minimal time investment from our marketing team, zero assistance from IT and have allowed us to maximize the value of our outreach efforts and website visits.

How We Brew

Advanced Segmentation to Discover High Impact Cohorts

Every page on our website carries Dynamic Yield tags. This allows us to analyze intent signals and behavior to identify user segments that are most likely to have a real interest in our product. These high-impact segments are served custom messaging optimized for better engagement and higher conversion.

As we leveraged our advanced segmentation capabilities, we discovered several cohorts which are very important to us. For example:

• Retailers – Visitors interested in eCommerce related content based on pages they’ve spent the most time viewing, based on referrals, or even past ad impressions.
• Unconverted High Intent Visitors – Unconverted visitors who visited some of our top marketing pages, with at least 3 page views in a session.
• Unconverted Demo Request Clicks – Visitors who click on demo request calls-to-action but do not fill out the form.
• Loyal Blog Readers – Visitors who regularly consume content from our blog, with at least 2 page views in a session.
• Content Download but No Demo Request – Visitors who download case studies, e-books or factsheets without asking for a demo.

Dynamic Yield’s Audience engine allows us to easily analyze cohort impact, run side-by-side segment comparison and get real-time projected performance and valuable business intelligence. Using these features, we can identify segments outperforming others for certain metrics and use that information to build targeted on-site actions, custom content and messaging.

Customized Logo Display Based on Region

For US visitors, Under Armour is an unmistakable brand logo representing an active lifestyle. In Italy, Bulgari is synonymous with fashion. To increase relevancy, logos are arranged accordingly based on the user’s geography.

By serving personalized logos by nation or region, we ensure only brands with the biggest local “wow” factor are being showcased. Dynamic Yield’s built-in optimization engine allows us to A/B test different brands per each geography, and measure ongoing performance by analyzing view-through conversions.

Site-Wide A/B Tests to Drive Content Downloads

We’re extremely data-driven here at Dynamic Yield. That is why (almost) every aspect of our marketing decision-making process is based on data. Our data determines whether we want to change something, how we want to change it and when.

In fact, at any given moment we probably have a couple of dozen A/B tests running at once. Some focus around single page interactions while others center on site-wide elements. With Dynamic Yield, we’re able to run comprehensive, site-wide JavaScript-based A/B tests to solve some of our hypotheses.

As an example, one hypothesis focused on understanding whether download modals or dedicated landing pages lead to more content downloads. By running an automated experiment through Dynamic Yield, we found that for ebook downloads, dedicated landing pages are converting 20% better than modals. On the other hand, for case study downloads, modals are converting 30% better than dedicated landing pages. Surprised? So were we.

A possible explanation is that ebook page visitors require additional details about the context of an ebook before deciding whether or not to download, making the landing page a more compelling display. For case studies, all requisite information is on the case study page, making the modal a more seamless user experience.

The ability to measure the outcome of a single test from different point-of-views, using different segments and attribution models is key to understand how to drive the most conversions from our gated content.

Dynamic Display Ads through Google Ads

We capitalize on what we know about our users’ browsing and download history to serve the most relevant display ads for each segment. Using Dynamic Yield’s proprietary Multi-Armed Bandit optimization engine, we automatically and dynamically split traffic between all ad variations to achieve our primary objective.

With Dynamic Yield, we can build HTML-based ads – which allow us to easily create variations, test copy ideas, replace images, control CSS changes, etc. – all without dependency on designers or IT guys. These HTML-based ads are being served on Google Ads (as we’re a certified Google Ads vendor for serving 3rd-party ads).

By onboarding CRM data, we can contextualize and personalize the ads to fit the specific phase of the customer journey as well as past behavior and intent signals.

Custom Notification Bars for Increased Subscriptions

Leveraging social proofing, we added a notification bar on our blog pages highlighting companies subscribed to our newsletter to increase readership. The message, as well as the list of companies, changes based on the specific segment the user belongs to.

By incorporating these notifications, we’ve been able to increase sign-ups for newsletter by 275%.

Link Optimization on Paid Media Campaigns

Dynamic Yield’s optimization automatically incorporates branded links within our social media posts and directs traffic to the highest performing landing pages. By doing this, we can maximize conversions from paid campaigns by dynamically allocating traffic to highest performing landing pages – at the link level.

Results

The results speak for themselves. We’ve been able to increase demo requests by over 111%, improve newsletter subscriptions by 275% and achieve a staggering 800% uplift in demo requests from our personalized display ads.

And believe it or not, it’s a one-man job. Less than 20% of my time is spent on these efforts.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. These are just a few examples of how we use Dynamic Yield’s platform to segment audiences and personalize our users’ experiences accordingly. If you’re looking for more personalization examples, visit our Inspiration Library.

While driving traffic to the website grabs the lion’s share of marketers’ attention, the ultimate success of B2B marketing outreach is defined by what happens after users arrive. For B2B marketers, personalization and optimization represents the largest opportunity to win at the point of conversion and turn clickthroughs into results.