How Personalized Sales Pages Can Help Close More Leads

Justin Harrison
Posted by Justin Harrison on June 24, 2021
personalized-sales-pages

Website personalization has been around a long time. So long, in fact, that even your B2B website visitors and prospects have come to expect some level of customization in their experience — an expectation that’s influenced by their consumer online experiences

But personalization can also support an industrial or manufacturing sales strategy when you take it to the next level: dedicated, single-client targeted pages, purpose-built for specific prospects. We first started experimenting with them after learning about them from Stream Creative’s Jeff Coon several years ago. 

Customized web pages serve as sales enablement tools to showcase who you are, what you do better than competitors, and all the ways you can help those prospective clients you’ve had contact with (and with whom you’ve had conversations) grow their businesses

On a customized sales page, you have an opportunity to highlight that prospect’s specific goals and needs — and to show the ways you’re ideally suited to meet those needs. Personalized sales pages can deliver a competitive advantage to your team by delivering a website experience to targeted accounts or sales-qualified leads (SQLs) that includes:

  • Precise, controlled user experience
  • Content created to reflect and address the target’s needs
  • Differentiation from competitors
  • A human connection that sparks an emotional response

What makes a personalized sales page work?

There are a number of components that can be included on a customized page. You might not include all of them, but it’s important to consider the ways each part contributes to your objective for the page — and that is, of course, getting closer to closing the sale.

For an agency like ours, a client-targeted sales page might include video of agency principals and associates talking about how eager we are to work with a specific prospect’s team, and why. We’d provide some key information, like a list of clients in the same and/or related industries, maybe images and links to some relevant content pieces we’ve created that we believe will resonate, and perhaps case studies or team bios that highlight relevant experience. Throw in a downloadable proposal, and we can pitch a lead continuously until we close it. That’s assuming we’re doing all this in a way that’s helpful, relevant, interesting — and not too salesy.

There’s plenty more to choose from for content, capabilities, and features on a given page to make sure it hits the mark with your targeted lead. In the rest of this article, we’ll take a look at the options, share what we’ve learned about creating sales pages for our own prospects and our clients’ prospects, and point you toward the most important best practices.

RELATED: A Guide to Website Personalization for Inbound Marketing and CRO , Inbound Sales for Industrial Manufacturers

Why bother customizing a sales page?

How many times have you bought a car, a home, or another big-ticket item because you were influenced by the emotional side of the purchase? You think that retiree in the Mazda Miata bought it to haul groceries? Of course not; he did it to feel the wind in his hair (or what’s left of it). People react emotionally about purchases, and that can be as true for B2B marketing as it is for mid-life crises. 

Using a sales page gives you the opportunity to create an emotional connection that helps drive a decision. By featuring your people and their personalities, you make your company more likable, relatable, and authentic. It communicates stability, demonstrates to prospects that you really know your stuff, and spotlights your team’s uniqueness at the same time.

Another reason sales pages can be so effective is because they engage more sensory experiences all at once. Would you rather watch a video of the team you’d be working with or read a text-heavy PDF document on its own? Snoozefest on the latter.

All the same information you’d put in a written presentation can be featured throughout the sales page, in far more dynamic and engaging ways.

Finally, a sales page can actually spark just enough anxiety. We all know FOMO (fear of missing out), a common issue in our connected social media world. Well, FOMO can also light a fire under a prospect, suggesting they need to make a decision or potentially lose out. Stream Creative experimented with limiting the time pages were available to help amp up that touch of anxiety, and the responses to those “limited-time offers” were often quicker than responses to pages that had no limit.

Is sales page personalization worth the effort?

Setting up a sales page takes time; the good news is that if you’re using HubSpot CMS or Marketing hub, you can put the work and thinking into creating a base template, and modify it to address each prospect’s unique needs, goals, and challenges. Your focus should be on making the template page as easily editable as possible, whether that’s the front end in the modules section or in the styling markup on the back end. 

Once the initial setup is complete, you can create a customized page easily in just a few minutes. Our first template took a few hours to create, and then we took some time for internal review, but our second and third took far less time. By the third, it took only half an hour or so to tweak a few items, and just like that, we were up and running and the page was shared.

Anything worth doing is going to take some work and learning on the front end. But it’s that value you’re going after, so it’s an investment and a process improvement — not just a stand-alone deliverable.

RELATED: HubSpot CMS Review: Features That Make it the Best for B2B Marketers 

Things to remember when creating a customized sales page

Keep in mind, your knowledge and understanding of the prospect are as important as the expertise you’re showcasing on the page. So you don’t have to include every possible component — but put some consideration into the items you choose to include, and remember a few important dos and don’ts:

1. Remove the navigation on the page. The reasoning behind this is the same as removing navigation from a landing page where you’re trying to convert a visitor: it helps keep the lead on the page instead of navigating away. Keep your visitors focused.

2. Build page content with a focus on the buyer’s journey. What pain points do they experience, and what are they trying to solve? Show the lead that you’re there to solve their problems. Choose content that aligns with what matters to them: your company’s culture code, case studies, etc.

3. Take advantage of the potential of social proof. Reviews and testimonials from current clients can be especially powerful. 

4. Make your contact information easy to find on the page. If you want them to reach out to you, don’t make it harder.

5. Gate the page! If you are putting a proposal download on the page that shows pricing, make sure no one else can access that content. Password-protect the page and provide the password only to your contacts. You also don’t want Google indexing the page, making random visitors able to find it. Make sure you add no index, no crawl code to the head of the page: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

6. Using HubSpot? Store documents in the Sales Documents section of the site. HubSpot will send you an email when someone has opened the document, and tell you who that person is. It’s a great way to see if the lead actually opens the proposal or other documents you’ve placed on the page.

HubSpot-trackable-sales-documents-library-tool

7. Personalize the page to the lead.
Add photos of their business, or at least something related, showing you know and understand what they do. Use their name in copy, too – it’s far more personal that way.

8. Add video. Weidert Group produces a dedicated “welcome” video that talks about the proposal and what we can do for the prospect and a team video highlighting the people within the agency the prospect would be working with. Don’t make the video too perfect though. The point is to show you’re human, relatable, and likable.

Wistia and Vidyard both integrate well into HubSpot, so you can build native forms and capture and analyze viewing and engagement data to see what gets results, how viewers interact with the video, and if/when they drop off. Wistia’s free Soapbox tool is super-handy for quick and easy videos, including screen recordings.

9. Add analytics tracking using Lucky Orange. Heat mapping, tracking, even page recordings allow you to see and understand a lot more about what leads interact with and click on, how they scroll and view, and how they navigate your page as they digest your content.

10. Connect via HubSpot Chatflows. You can use live chat to route inquiries about page content directly to designated sales team members for a seamless prospect experience. You could also build a customized Q&A chatbot to answer some of your most common questions.

11. Use behavioral event tracking, if you’re on HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise. With behavioral event tracking, you can measure your leads’ actions on the page — clicked elements and submitted forms, for example — and over time, you’ll learn which components on your page are doing the heavy lifting in terms of converting leads to sales.

12. Remember to use analytics to inform your growth-driven design (GDD) approach. With all the data and reporting available, you need to access and review it to drive your iterative, continuous improvements each time you create a new client-targeted sales page. Over time, you should see your results improve in measurable ways.

Our team at Weidert Group can’t stop learning and experimenting with ways to help our clients convert more leads into customers. Personalized sales pages are one way Marketing and Sales teams work in alignment to support business growth — and that shared success demands that everyone is on the same page in terms of goals, performance targets, tools, and other expectations. A Service-Level Agreement (SLA) ensures a smooth, aligned process of generating, nurturing, qualifying, and closing leads. Get your own introduction to creating an SLA for your team with our eBook: Service Level Agreements: A Guided Tour. Just click the link to get yours.

A Guided Tour of Marketing & Sales Service Level Agreements

Topics: Inbound Sales, Sales Enablement

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