Summary
We delivered a Netflix like experience for B2B decision makers that led to binge-worthy sessions directly contributing to business outcomes while keeping the customer at the heart of it. This program influences the entire Marketing & Sales funnel – from awareness to decision and has set the foundation for the organisation to deliver an end-to-end digital "visit to order" experience in the near future.
Challenge
Tata Communications operates in a complex business environment – a myriad of customers cutting across different regions & industries, an ecosystem of partners with multiple routes to market. The perceived value that our products & solutions deliver varies according to the Industry and regions our customers operate in. Our Sales & Solution teams deliver hyper-personalised propositions to our customer. Since the pandemic started and face to face sales meetings were not possible, the importance of a digital channel to deliver personalised experiences at scale went up. Since 67% of the buyer's journey is digital and 70% of content is sourced directly from vendor's website* (Forrester), it is imperative that our website delivers a personalised journey addressing the critical business priorities of the customers' industry and region.
Objective
The objective of the campaign was to deliver personalised experiences to the "Segment of 1" at scale for all visitors to the corporate website. Tata Communications caters to a wide variety of global enterprise customers from a mix of industries comprising of but not limited to IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Aviation, Automotive, BFSI, Media & Sports. Our website delivers experiences for these customer segments basis the industry and region they operate by addressing challenges faced by these organisations. All journeys are optimised to a "3 click journey" – enabling visitors to fulfil any goal in just 3 clicks.
Strategy
There were multiple challenges that needed to be addressed taken to bring this to life. 1. Unless a visitor fills out a form, we have no idea which industry and organisation the person belongs to. We had to shed light on this big blind spot 2. Since the b2b buying decision making is non-linear, our personalisation strategy had to consider multiple journeys starting from different points on the website having different objectives 3. We had to incorporate a multi-layered personalisation strategy to stay true to the way we segment and sell to our customers To implement a multi-layered personalisation strategy, we followed the following approach: 1. Identify which company and industry a visitor is coming from through reverse IP lookup and 3rd party enrichment 2. Finalise the segments to personalise for – IT/ITES, BFSI, Manufacturing, Automotive & Professional Services across 4 regions – India, APAC, Europe & Americas 3. Leverage behavior data (attached) & Market insights to identify business & IT challenges for each region & industry 4. Map insights to content on the website and create personalised journeys for each segment by using a personalisation engine on the homepage and key solution pages on the site 5. Implement personalised chat on the website basis the identified cohorts 6. Always-on optimisation & A/B tests to improve engagement and conversion metrics for each cohort
Data
On an average, approx. 85% of all visits every month are from anonymous visitors -> addressing this blind spot was critical. For this, we used a reverse IP lookup tool called Clearbit. This helped us see more information behind anonymous visits that helped us identify the cohorts (Industry & Region based) we needed to personalise for, as well as the behavioral insights of those cohorts - where they are going on the website and what actions are they performing. Using this, we identified that IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Professional Services and BFSI industries were the top Industries visiting our site. Hence, these were the segments we chose to personalise for to start with. There were 3 data inputs fed into our Personalisation Engine - 1) what are our top visited & engaged pages for each identified segment (data attached) 2) Our Business strategy & priority for each region and industry -> we needed to make sure that our personalisation strategy incorporates our business priorities for each region. 3) Market Insights to identify the key business problems and priorities for each Industry in every region -> to make sure our content address the key areas that keep our prospects/customers up at night (attached) Using these 3 data inputs, we crafted personalised experiences that were not just customer centric, but also in line with what our organisation's priorities are.
Solution
65% of our visits start from the homepage and 45% of the clicks on the homepage take place on the top banner and 4 grids under that - this was the first real-estate on the website we chose to personalise. We changed the imagery, text and CTA basis the Insights churned out by our Personalisation Engine (described above). Next, we went one level deeper and personalised the inner pages that people visited after the homepage. This ensured that our personalised journeys stayed true to the customer's context no matter where they went on the website. We also placed website chatbots that triggered automated chat conversations based on where on the website a user went -> this was done to ensure that we serve the most relevant content to our identified segment based on where in the wen journey he/she was. We also deployed personalised sliders and CTAs across the website to promote assets that addressed the top priority area for our identified segment. So, with the combination of webpage content + personalised chat conversations + strategic journey breakers in the form of sliders, we were able to create compelling journeys for our target segments that yielded best in class results.
Results
Broadly, the results can be categorised into 3 parts -> Improvement in Engagement Metrics, Improvement in Conversion Metrics, Actual Business Impact. 1. Improvement in Engagement Metrics: (Source - Google Analytics): 200% lift in the amount of time spent on our website -> Visitors who saw personalised experiences stayed on the website for 3 mins on an average 65% lift in the return visit rate to the website -> If a visitor saw personalised content on our website, he/she was more likely to come back to our website for more. Our return rates went up from 13.5% to 22.3% because of personalisation 43% reduction in bounce rates -> our bounce rates went down from 50.64% to 28.78% which is best in class across the industry -> This shows that visitors found our content relevant 2. Improvement in Conversion Metrics (Source - Google Analytics): A visitor was 2 times more likely to download an asset/schedule a consultation with sales if we served him a personalised experience. Overall Goal Conversion rate on the website for personalised sessions was 3.39% when compared to 1.61% which led to 33% more qualified leads from the website when compared to last FY. 70% of all content downloaded from the website was owing to personalisation. 3. Actual impact to Business (Source - Salesforce) : When a person fills out a form on the website to talk to Sales, we qualify from a BANT perspective leveraging our telemarketing agency and then pass it on to Sales as a Marketing Qualified Lead. This then gets qualified by Sales and converted into an opportunity which gets attributed to marketing as funnel/revenue generated. We have generated 25.7 Millions USD worth of opportunities (+270% y-o-y) and our average deal size has gone up to $107k (+167% y-o-y)
