As marketers, part of our job is to keep up with the latest trends and best practices, and stay ahead of the curve in terms of strategy, tactics and tools. As we’re all aware, though, the number of solutions available to us is growing by the day. As we aim to be the most innovative and try out the latest technologies (and all their bells and whistles), it can be easy to lose sight of what we’re really trying to do – provide the best possible experience to our prospects and customers, and engage them more effectively.
B2B marketers often face this struggle as they look to improve their demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) results, while also having to navigate long, multi-touch sales cycles. It’s easy to get caught up in complicated testing strategies and micro-segmentation while at the same time overlooking more basic – yet essential – opportunities for personalization and testing.
In our webinar this week with Alex Schutte, Director of Digital Strategy at Paycor, a leading human capital management (HCM) software company, we explored how getting back to personalization and A/B testing basics can be quite impactful in providing first-rate experiences and increasing engagement and conversions for B2B organizations. Here are three easy-to-implement examples from that discussion. (And be sure to watch the full replay for more great ideas!)
1. Show Your Homepage Some Love – Testing Visuals
This might seem obvious, but taking your homepage experience for granted is a surefire way to limit its effectiveness with prospects and customers alike. So take some time to make sure your homepage is performing optimally.
Running simple tests on the impact of design elements, calls to action (CTAs), language, recommendations, etc., is an easy way to stay on top of homepage performance. In the example below from Paycor, you’ll see its homepage control features a hero image with a text overlay. Through testing a variation of the homepage – with a higher-contrast banner and more prominent CTA buttons – Paycor experienced a remarkable 71% lift in clickthrough rate (CTR).

The control homepage experience had a 0.2% CTR.

The variant homepage experience had a CTR that was 71% higher than the control.
2. Make Your CTAs Count – Testing Copy
This slightly more subtle test by Paycor had not-so-subtle results. On the surface, adjusting CTA button copy might seem like a lower priority, but testing the impact of different phrasing gives you an opportunity to maximize the potential for conversions, especially with new visitors landing on your site. You want to see which language best spurs action.
As you’ll see in the images below, Paycor’s CTA variations included “See which products fit your business,” “Try our interactive Solutions Finder” and “Find your solution.” The winner in this case was “Find your solution,” which drove a whopping 242% increase in clickthrough rate over the original phrasing.

A/B testing revealed that visitors were most likely to click on the “Find Your Solution” button versus alternatives.
Your homepage is also a great area to test and deploy ABM strategies – detecting and greeting visitors from target accounts and dynamically deploying industry- and company-specific content and experiences. You could easily apply similar tests as outlined above – like changing images, copy, CTAs, etc., for these visitors – all with the goal of engaging and converting your highest-value, target prospects.
3. Trust Your Tech – Personalizing Content Recommendations Using Machine Learning
On the Evergage site, as is often the case with B2B companies, the majority of homepage visitors are also first-time visitors. We want to maximize the opportunity to engage such visitors with relevant content, so we have a variety of personalization campaigns running that are industry- and behavior-based. We also utilize Contextual Bandit, our advanced machine-learning algorithm that determines the most appropriate high-value piece of content (or promotion, offer or product) for each individual visitor, even if there isn’t that much known yet about that person.
In the example below, Contextual Bandit automatically displays the most relevant eBook promotion to each visitor. This resulted in a 42% lift over our previous recommendations method. The algorithm works well for first-time visitors and return visitors alike, and considers a wide variety of data points about the visitor, as well as the value of each download to Evergage.

This content is promoted at the 1-to-1 level and driven by machine learning.
We know that letting machine learning “take over” can make marketers uneasy, so we recommend choosing tools that take a “white-box” approach, giving marketers insight into – and the ability to test and tune – the algorithms that power their personalization campaigns. This is a great example of how applying the technology and tools you have on hand can really improve your demand gen and ABM results.
Final Thoughts
Most marketers have more data at their fingertips than they know what to do with. Or, even if they do know what to do with it, they have trouble getting started or figuring out how to make the biggest impact. Sometimes, taking a step back and working with what’s already in front of you is the right move, and you can iterate and improve your demand gen and ABM efforts from there.
We hope this blog post (and webinar replay) inspired you with some concrete ideas for how to use personalization and A/B testing to strengthen your demand generation and ABM programs. To learn more about how Evergage can help drive B2B engagement and conversions, request a demo today.
