Reap Your Revenue with Logic, Empathy & Rewards

Aristotle once said it best: “It is possible to fail in many ways … [but] to succeed is possible only in one way.” This principle also applies to digital marketing. While our programs can fail to reach their goals or produce the desired metrics for many reasons, all successful B2C programs have two things in common: they personalize, and they incentivize. Revenue will be elusive for campaigns that just take, take, take from consumers without delighting them in return. But revenue is the natural outcome for custom campaigns that offer people something in exchange for their engagement.

Personalize

There is a strong, proven link between depth of personalization and conversion rate. When people feel like they’re embarking on a tailor-made journey, they buy more, buy faster, and develop more trust in the brand (which makes them more likely to become advocates down the line). Over 78% of consumers will only engage with offers that have been customized based on previous interactions they’ve had with a brand.

How can businesses achieve personalization? It can start with small concrete steps, like automating first name usage in emails. But overall, personalization is based on logic and empathy from the brand side. Marketers must put themselves in all the possible shoes that could be worn by all their possible consumers, matrixing personas against funnel stages. Each persona has its own goals and challenges, and so must be spoken to with a certain tone, through a certain method, with certain information or content. But at different points in the funnel, even the same persona will think, question, and demand different things.

Good personalization thus requires good market research, so the business can develop creative buyer journeys that predict and preempt each persona’s concerns and thought process. If this sounds intimidating, just remember: persona work, like almost everything in marketing, can (and should) be approached in phases. Start small, with broad personas: like C-Suite Cindy versus Data Science Dave, for example. While not super-granular, even this simple dichotomy could reasonably cover high-level, sell-me-the-dream consumers (i.e., Cindy) as well as in-the-weeds people who want technical specs and not buzzwords (i.e., Dave). You can always optimize later by making subpersonas.

Incentivize

Consumers need a reason—an incentive—to engage with your brand. The marketplace is chockfull of options, and competitors are always trying to tempt your buyers to the dark side. This means it’s not enough to personalize the customer journey. The journey must also have checkpoints of goodwill from business to consumer—opportunities for the brand to show people it will reward their engagement.

Marketing is based in psychology, so some basic principles of reward apply here. Positive reinforcement is a strong motivator! The more times you do something nice for someone after they take a certain action, the more likely it is they’ll take that action again in the future. For us digital marketers, that means the more we surprise and delight people, the more likely they are to continue the customer journey—to keep engaging and not lose interest or drop out. From start to end, we must continually remind people that interacting with us will be worth their time (and eventually money).

If you want people to share your event or webinar or blog post over social, incentivize them by pre-writing the tweet. If you want them to answer an important survey—so you can crowdsource new potential webinar topics, for example—offer a gift card to the first x number of people who respond. If someone downloads trial software, email them a free FAQ guide to help them get started and be productive. Personalization itself is a form of reward: If someone downloads a case study about topic x, enter them into an email workflow about that topic! Since they hunted through your resource library the first time to find what they needed, it’d be an appropriate B2C thank-you to email them once every few weeks with fresh content on that topic.

And if you want to overcome the biggest hurdle of all (besides conversion itself)—generating brand-new leads—consider incentivizing with gated content. I say “consider” because gated content, or content that consumers can only access after filling out a form with personal information, is a classic B2B play. (One study recently found a whopping 80% of B2B assets are gated.) But gates can work for B2C, too! Marketers must simply account for what makes B2C different from B2B, and then package the gate accordingly: B2C users want short, informal content and they want to be entertained while they learn.

Some content, like infographics and blog posts, should never be gated. But in-depth work like webinars, whitepapers, and videos or guides that teach people something (about the industry, about a specialized topic, about a common challenge, etc.) are prime for it. What’s more, gating fits personalization efforts: Different personas will prefer different content types, and different content types are appropriate at different funnel stages. A good gate can inspire consumers to tell brands more about themselves (i.e., to fill out the form) by showing them the reward of personalized, useful content on the gate’s other side.

In Summary

Personalizing and incentivizing are two of the biggest keys to meeting business goals, generating leads, and realizing revenue in B2C. Personalize by matrixing persona against funnel stage; start small with broad persona types and add more detail over time. Incentivize by providing offers and content that show people it’ll be worthwhile to complete their customer journey. Revenue isn’t a one-ways street; it can only come when brands and consumers both give and take! Budging that bottom line happens when marketers put themselves in consumers’ shoes. Then they can make a logical workflow with good, trust-building rewards baked in.