How To Use Personalization In SaaS At Scale (2019)

The final piece of your personalization strategy is to design your messaging plan. Having done the all the work:

  • Define your entities - the individuals and organisations you’re targeting
  • Define your funnel(s) - the lifecycle stages contacts progress down
  • Define a tracking plan - for monitoring progression through the funnel
  • Define the data you need - for targeting the right entities and progressing them through your funnel
  • Create a segmentation plan - to define who you’re messaging and why

You know know who you need to talk to, why you need to talk to them (the goal at every stage of the lifecycle) and how you’re targeting them.

From our personalization framework, we just have the what(message) left to define.

Hull Personalization Framework

Messaging in this context is sending the right message to the right segment at the right point in the funnel.

You don't have to be an expert copywriter to write really powerful copy here. You know who you're writing to, and what you want them to do - this is much more defined than speaking to a broader audience.

Your segmentation plan defines you’re targeting. This maps one-to-one onto your messaging plan. For every advanced segment, you need a message to send to them. That specific group of people.

With your messaging plan, you want to define the key messages and points that matter for each segment at that stage of the funnel.

Depending on the number of stages of your funnel, and the number of segments defined by your segmentation plan, you’ll have a lot of messages to create and implement.

This can be overwhelming

Don’t tackle this all at once. Prioritise one area of the funnel to focus on optimising with personalisation.

Once you’ve drawn out your funnel, you’ll quickly and easily be able to identify the most important stage to focus on. This is almost always business specific.

With that in mind, you can start by creating a messaging plan for the set of segments at a particular stage of the funnel.

Since your segmentation plan generally includes 2-3 “facets” (to narrow down the targets. Job titles, cities etc.), you’ll probably still have lots of segments to manage.

Again, this can be overwhelming.

Here’s how to tackle it…

The Messaging Hack

Back up to where we started with this personalization guide. The goal of all this data-driven messaging is to be more personal.

Technology removes us from the face-to-face in-person interactions. The be personal, we have to go back to being personal…

How would you talk to each of these groups of people differently?

If one of them was right in front of you, what would you say to them? What would you say differently to them at different stages?

If you haven’t spent a lot of time interacting with each group here, you need to get to know these people.

  • Interview them. Yes, interview them!
  • Review existing dialogue with those customers (lookup conversations in that segment - email, chat, support, wherever.).
  • Lookup some sample people in those groups on social media. What are they like?

With this documented, and given a place to add more documentation to, it then becomes easy to hand off to your marketers, copywriters, sales team and more - you know what motivates each set of individuals at that stage.

This research and documentation makes it incredibly easy to write highly effective copy targeting individuals at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

Ed Fry

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth

If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇