Create a Personalization Strategy for your business. Follow this 5-part framework to implement personalization with your existing tools, teams, data and content.

1. Personalization
EVERYWHERE
Ed Fry @edfryed Hull.io

2. Employee #1 at inbound.org
Growth through personalization,
particularly email.
Moved to join...
Employee #1 at hull.io
Connects tools together, combines
and sync profiles without code.
Enables effective personalization in
your current tools.
Ed Fry <3 Personalization

3. Ask your questions
@hull @edfryed

4. We need to do better
personalization!
Send more relevant messages. Convert more leads. Make more money!

5. We need to do better
personalisation!
… because I’m British ;) #QueensEnglish

6. The coolest stuff I was doing at
inbound.org* was personalization
Particularly email personalization.
*my last role. Community of 150,000+ marketers founded by Rand Fishkin
of Moz and Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot

7. 4x click rate
Plugged data from our production database into HubSpot. Used that
data to send hyper-segmented emails which performed 4x better

8. 4x click rate
This took lots of
engineering time :(

9. Hull makes it point-and-click
to sync your data together
Hull makes it possible for more people to do better personalization easier. Everyone
should be doing better personalization! So, I moved to join their team in August 2016

10. Personalization
has a problem.
Why isn’t everyone already personalising
their sales and marketing?

11. YOU HAVE NO STRATEGY.
You don’t know how to bring everything together.
The tools, the data, the content, the teams….

12. “Hi {firstname}!”
Personalization = dynamic content, right?
Like injecting firstnames...

13. “Hi {firstname}!”
NO STRATEGY.
Personalization is bigger than this. You’ve got their
attention by yelling their name. But what’s the next step?

14. Abandoned cart emails
Highly effective emails for driving conversions.
Well timed. Personalized product content...

15. Abandoned cart emails
NO STRATEGY.
Personalization is bigger than this. How do you send
another well timed email with highly focused content?

16. Demographics?
Personalization can just be targeting right?
We love using demographics for this sort of thing.

17. Demographics?
NO STRATEGY.
Personalization is bigger than this. Me saying “Hello Israel”*
hasn’t formed a one-to-one bond between us, has it?
*slides presented in Tel Aviv, April 2017

18. 5-Part Framework for
Personalization
WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY
Five simple questions to help you think through personalization. Framework I developed at inbound.org, and we
work through with customers in workshops. This is the first time it’s been presented in full as a presentation :)

19. How can we think about
personalization?
How can you take all these “good ideas” and apply them to
your business? In a way which makes sense and performs?

20. FIRST,
WHO?
Who are you trying to reach with your message?

21. DESCRIBE
Your Ideal Customer Profile
What do your best customers look like today?
Ask customers, support, sales and data team

22. “Growing startups with
many sales and
marketing tools”
For example, an Ideal Customer Profile statement for Hull

23. Effective ICPs #1 Nouns + Verbs. Avoid adjectives.
“Growing startups
with many sales
and marketing
tools”
“Startups with
millions in
revenue and many
sales and
marketing tools”
Nouns and verbs make definitions clearer.
This makes them easier to target.

24. Effective ICPs #2 Be specific
“... Startups with
millions in revenue
and many sales
and marketing
tools”
“B2B startups with
millions in revenue
who use Segment and
Salesforce”
Specificity where it matters. Worth digging into your sales /
support teams to see what they notice.

25. Effective ICPs #3 Be quantifiable
“B2B startups with
millions in revenue
who use Segment and
Salesforce.”
“B2B startups with
more than $1 million
in revenue who use
Segment and
Salesforce”
Quantifying measures is important for classifying and grouping later.

26. Your marketing is only
as good as your data!
The reason we want nouns, verbs, specificity and
quantifiable ideal customer profiles is we can tie it to data!

27. Your personalization is only
as good as your data!
Personalization is powered by data.
Know what data you need up front by defining your ICPs.

28. Seek sources of nouns
Sales CRM
Marketing automation
Product database
Enrichment ($)
Names. Emails. Job Titles. Company. Industry etc.

29. Seek sources of verbs
Analytics Sales CRM
Marketing auto.
Ad networks
Product d.base
Enrichment ($)
Page views. Form submits. Logins. Clicks. Email opens etc.

30. Example: Where Hull gets its data from
“Startups with more
than $1 million in
revenue and uses
Segment and
Salesforce”
Clearbit
Salesforce
Datanyze
We source firmographic data mostly from Clearbit,
and technographics from Datanyze automatically
and call notes in Salesforce

31. If you don’t have access to reliable data, you can’t scale and automate personalization.
Spend a little to increase performance. This saves someone time too, like sales guys. Using
Clearbit and Datanyze for us allows us to focus on the right leads and say the right thing.
PRO TIP
$ource the data you don’t have
See the guide at the end

32. GOAL
One set of segments to
target your ideal customers.
Don’t send emails to everyone. Send effective emails, ads,
web pages and sales calls to the right people

33. Which segments should you build?
How do you decide how to slice your database?

34. Pick from your nouns and verbs
make sure it is “groupable”
E.g. job titles. Pick a data type which makes sense to be grouped together. A segment of
CEOs makes sense. A segment of “people called David” does not. But don’t stop there...

35. PRO TIP
Build segments where you have
the biggest variation in conversion
Make the best perform better, and bring others up to par. For instance at inbound.org, locations outperformed job
title for reactivation so we focused our campaigns there. I’ve a guide coming out on this you can access at the end

36. Building segments is hard.
Once you know who you want to target, actually targeting them
can be hard to do “out-of-the-box” with your tools and data

37. Your data may be scattered
and siloed across many tools
Because you may have multiple sources of data tracked, stored and used in different
places. You can’t then have the right segments accessible for emails, ads, web etc.

38. PRO TIP
Get your tools all in sync.
Break down silos of data. Make sure all your tools have complete, up-
to-date, reliable data to target people correctly

39. Syncing tools when you’re small and starting out
Workflow tools
One-click sync
Manual export
Starting out you make do with these solutions. You might recognise some...

40. Syncing tools when you’re growing and specialising
Workflow tools
One-click sync
Manual export
As you have more complexity, you move to spending significant real time and money syncing data together
All-in-one
</code> your own
Data warehouse

41. Share the same data across all your tools
Customer Data Platform
CDPs put the data you need in the tools you want in the format you need. There are different types for
different businesses. Enterprise. Mobile. B2C. Hull is a customer data platform for B2B SaaS companies

42. GOAL
One set of segments to
target your ideal customers.
… with your messages across email, ads, web, sales calls.
Whatever way you do it, this is what matters.

43. 5-Part Framework for
Personalization
WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY
We’ve defined who we’re targeting. Defined our ideal customer profile, defined the data we
need, how we’re going to build those segments and how we’re going to coordinate our tools

44. SECOND,
WHAT?
What message do we want to send to each segment?

45. Personalization = Hi {firstname!}
Remember personalization is much more than first names

46. Personalization ≠ Hi {firstname!}
If you know who they are, you can speak to their needs.
What else matters to them besides their name?

47. PRO TIP
Write to people’s identities
Who are these people? What do they care about.

48. Find out what they care about!
Analytics Surveys
A/B testing User testing
This is a whole separate topic. But four methods to finding out what people really care about.
At inbound.org, we had a ton of data and insight into what people care about, so we sent things like...

49. Hi Matt,
I suspect you’ll have a fair few opinions in this thread here…
Agency pricing.
Costin here asks how much to charge at his new marketing agency:
https://inbound.org/discuss/how-to-setup-pricing-for-a-marketing-agency-services
If you’ve got a moment today, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments there!
Many thanks,
Ed Fry
General Manager, inbound.org
4X
click
rate

50. Send different messages to different roles
Onboarding to a new product requires different work for different people. Segment.com split
up their onboarding emails by job title (marketers, product, engineering etc.) for a 30% lift.
30%
lift in
activation

51. Focus on messages to match their identities
Ran a reactivation test campaign targeting inbound.org members by city (found that
to be more responsive segment). Talked about local influencers, meetups etc.

52. Focus on messages to match their identities
For Dublin, how would you target them? What message resonates most with the Irish? Apologise for stereotyping…
but I asked them “Pub?” inviting them to a local meetup. An audience in Dublin acknowledge it was effective :)

53. Focus on messages to match their identities
27%
clicked
+67% opens
41% CTR
27% of people sent this email click through. That’s almost 1 in 3, on a stone cold list
(remember it was a reactivation campaign).

54. Dynamic content follows segmentation
Remember the {firstname} dynamic content. Now you’re writing to individual’s identities, this can
become very effective. See this example profile completion campaign targeting SEOs
What would I see if I
Google you?

55. Dynamic content follows segmentation
We personalized the email subject line, dynamically inserted the Google search URL for their name.
For an SEO professional, they engaged 50% more with the personalized variants.
What would I see if I
Google Rand Fishkin?
+50%
more clicked
12 → 18%
Click rate

56. Like with our emails to job seekers. Target segments like job seeking members, then add dynamic cities and ads
Dynamic content scales personalization
38%
click rate

57. Segmentation first
Dynamic content second
For truly personal messages and effective personalization, who you’re targeting comes before what you say

58. PRO TIP
Don’t be creepy…
Be careful about how your treat other human beings.

59. DOs and DON’Ts
➔Company profiles
➔Company actions
➔Perfect segment
➔Perfect timing
➔Personal profiles
➔Personal actions
➔Overly personal
message
Company profiles and actions are generally better than personal ones, unless they’re clearly in the public
domain. If in doubt, let the personalization and timing do the work, not an overly personal message.
Quick litmus test: would it work in a bar?

60. GOAL
Know what message to send
to each segment you have
By the end of this, you’ll know how who you’re targeting and what you want to say to them

61. 5-Part Framework for
Personalization
WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY
Now we know who we’re targeting and what message needs to be sent… we can 4x our emails!
But we’re not done. personalization is bigger than email.

62. THIRD
WHERE?
What tools and channels can we send personalized messages to our target segments?

63. Email sets the standard
Email is a closed loop for sending and tracking messages, linking reactions to a profile.

64. Message
You can send a message...

65. Tracking
Message
… where we can track their reactions. Opens, clicks, replies etc.

66. Tracking
Message
Profile
This data gets recorded into a contact profile with their name, email address etc.

67. TrackingAction
Message
Profile
The profile data can be used to trigger actions

68. TrackingAction
Message
Profile
These actions can involve sending more messages.
This is the closed loop system we need to manage personalization.

69. Clicked...Drip Flow
Email
Contact Record
So making this framework slightly more specific to email...

70. Clicked...
Email
Contact Record
Avoid manual work.
Connect up your tools!
A broken loop means you need manual work to send personalized messages to your target segment.

71. Clicked...Drip Flow
Email
Contact Record
With a closed loop, you can automate and scale your personalized messages.

72. What about other channels?
… like Facebook ads? Personalization is more than email.

73. ClickedAdd to audience
Ads
Cookie
Ads are clicked which records to a visitor session. This can be used to enroll in new ad audiences.

74. EventShow live chat
Web Page
Cookie
Similarly you can look at web pages, where events can trigger live chat windows.

75. Segment personalized their live chat. 5x the engagement, and the #4 source of sales opportunities in one month

76. IP addressPage variation
Homepage
Profile
With anonymous visitors, especially in B2B, the IP address can be the key to effective web personalization.
Optimizely found a 117% increase in account starts. Here’s what they did to land Sony...

78. Form submitShow interstitial
Web Page
Profile
WIth web, you can also track identified individuals through logins and form submissions

79. BEWARE
No identified user profile?
Make do with cookies.
This is a different kind of loop. It’s tied to a cookie, not an identified person.
Try and reconcile this later in the with hidden fields in form submissions.

80. What about other channels?
Personalization is more than marketing. Personalization is for the entire customer lifecycle.

81. Call notesTask
Sales call
Profile
A typical sales role has a closed loop like this.

82. Lots of data!Task
Sales call
Profile
Pass additional data to a CRM to prompt your sales team to deliver the right personal message

83. PRO TIP
“Hire tools”
to do a job.
Use this framework to evaluate tools. Where can they send messages? Do they have a complete loop so
you can automate and scale? Are you missing tools? Do you have redundant tools? Hire and fire your tools.

84. Email subscribed
Drip email flow
Sales call
Demo requested
Qualify lead
Landing page viewed
Ad audience created
Prospects list created
The reality is your sales cycle will look something like this...

85. Multiple trackingMany decisions
Many messages
Many profiles
Which means your loops of sending messages, tracking reactions, recording profiles and deciding actions
becomes very complicated. So to re-iterate...

86. PRO TIP (AGAIN)
Get your tools all in sync.
Make sure all your tools are on the same page! Remember the seven ways of syncing data between tools.
One-click integrations, manual export and import, workflow tools, all-in-one tools, code your integrations,
data warehouses and customer data platforms,

87. GOAL
Coordinate personal messages
across multiple channels
Personalization is more than email. You need a way to tie all your tools and channels together so you can
deliver effective personalized messages everywhere. Your personalization is only as good as your data

88. 5-Part Framework for
Personalization
WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY
We know who we’re targeting, what we’re saying and where we’re messaging. How to take this further?

89. FINALLY
WHEN AND
WHY?
When do we send these messages? What’s the purpose of our personalization? The goal of each message?

90. TrackingAction
Message
Profile
If we go back to this circular framework.

91. One of our clients took one of these circles...

92. Visits
Leads
Opportunities
Customers
… and drew it out for their entire customer lifecycle. A complete circle at each stage of the lifecycle.
Send messages, track reactions, record to a profile and decide actions

93. What are the “jumps” in your lifecycle?
Visitor Email submitted
Lead Demo requested
Opportunity Account paid
Customer Account renewal
Each cycle has a purpose for each stage of the funnel. What are the conversions or “jumps” for each stage?

94. Personalise your message for each stage
Visitor Email submitted IP address
Lead Demo requested Job title
Opportunity Account paid Price Tier
Customer Account renewal Price Tier
Personalize your message for each stage, define WHO you’re targeting.

95. Build out WHO → WHAT for each stage
Job Title
Sales
Marketing
Operations
Engineering
For each stage, define WHO you’re targeting.

96. Build out WHO → WHAT for each stage
Job Title Messaging for segment
Sales Increase sales efficiency
Marketing Convert more leads
Operations Control your data w/o code
Engineering Build less integrations
For each segment, define WHAT message to send. Build these campaigns in WHERE your channels are

97. GOAL
Create a messaging plan each segment
for every “jump” of the lifecycle
Take everything we’ve done so far, and apply it to each stage of the customer lifecycle
So every message is personalized across every channel

98. Some personalization needs to happen quickly. Look at Banana Splash personalization here...

99. Banana Splash triggers
personalized mobile
overlays. This example
based on search term, scroll
length and time on page
drove a 78% lift in sales.
+78%
sales

100. Similar story with Segment’s live chat mentioned earlier.
Connect your tools together intelligently and deliver personalized messages to users in seconds.

101. GOAL
Deliver the most relevant
message at the right time
Leverage the power of being immediately relevant to drive action.

102. 5-Part Framework for
Personalization
WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY
Send personalized messages to the right segments, saying the right thing,
across the right channels, at the right time across the entire customer lifecycle.

103. Great! How do you do it?
So far, we’ve discussed how to “think” about personalization.
How do YOU do personalization everywhere.

104. 10 STEPS TO
Personalization
EVERYWHERE
We run this process in a day long workshop where we can get everyone
on the same page. We recommend you do the same in your organization.

105. Describe your ideal customer profiles
1
Source definitions from your key stakeholders, particularly customer facing teams like sales,
support and success. Remember to be specific, quantifiable and use nouns and verbs only.

106. Define the data you need for your ICP
2
Turn your nouns and verbs into a list of data
required to define your ideal customer profile.

107. Define your entire customer lifecycle
3
From first visit to becoming a repeat customer, define
each distinct stage in your customer lifecycle.

108. Define the “jumps” between stages
4
What are the key conversions that move from one lifecycle stage to the next

109. Define the data needed at each stage
5
For each stage of the lifecycle, what data is needed to progress. It may start with just an
email, but later becomes more complex with names, industries, logins, pricing plans etc.

110. Summarise your shopping list of data
6
Combine the data from your ideal customer profiles with your lifecycle stages. Create
a unique list. Figure out what you can source internally. Buy the remaining data.

111. Design your data flows
7
Figure out your strategy for syncing the data you need across your tools. One-click integrations, manual work,
workflow tools, all-in-one tools, coding your own integrations, data warehouses. And customer data platforms.

112. Identify “groupable” data
8
Of the data you have, identify which of it is “groupable” for segmentation.
A segment around job titles like CEOs makes sense. First names do not.

113. Create a segmentation plan
9
Use the data you already have to slice your database.
How are you able to slice up your contacts at each stage of the lifecycle?

114. Create a messaging plan
per segment per “jump”
10
Every segment is a common group of people with their unique needs and identities.
Craft effective messages for each of them. Remember dynamic content comes second.

115. Grab the template
hull.io/start/template
Use the spreadsheet template we use in a full day workshop align companies for personalization across
their lifecycle. I’ve also bundled our recommended data sources and blog posts there too.

116. Ask your questions
@hull @edfryed

117. Grab the template: hull.io/start/template
Ed Fry
ed@hull.io
Growth at Hull.io
Follow us @hull
Follow me @edfryed