As marketers, we have to make decisions about how to accomplish several things in one campaign:
With HubSpot, we have a lot of tools at our fingertips to accomplish all of these; smart content is the biggest tool in the marketer’s toolbox.
Smart content allows you to personalize the user experience far beyond just a simple personalization token (“Hi Joe!”) in an email or on a landing page. It can be built around country, device type (desktop, tablet, smart phone), referral source, or a specific list membership or lifecycle stage. This flexibility allows you, for example, to deliver a different experience to a prospect than you would a customer.
Here’s an example of how we put it to use for one of our clients, International Expeditions:
International Expeditions offers nature travel expeditions around the world. Their escorted tours deliver an award-winning experience in some of the most remarkable places in the world. One of their more popular trips right now, as you might expect, is for travel to Cuba.
IE currently offers three packages that allow a traveller to experience Cuba in unique ways:
They have assets such as blog posts, webinars, and videos for each of these trips but being able to find these assets on their current site can be rather challenging. Our goal was to deliver the information that the visitor was most interested in and guide them through a funnel that would ultimately result in more bookings.
Since these trips are three very distinctly different packages, we used the contact activity from visitors who had already booked to determine patterns – what pages they viewed, articles they read, etc. This information was utilized to build smart lists based on interests.
Then came the fun part…
Using a workflow to deliver the messages at the right time, we developed emails, CTAs, and landing pages that were all based on smart content. The emails contained it not only in the body of the email but also the photo that was shown in the sidebar as an example of what they would experience on their trip.
Additional emails in the workflow delivered resources such as blog articles, videos and webinars that were specific to the trips of interest. Each email also included smart CTAs that drove visitors to the landing pages with smart content.
These delivered an experience based on the trip they were interested in most.
Smart content puts a tremendous amount of marketing power in your hands. Just remember the goal is to enhance your visitors’ experience not to make them feel as though you’re looking over their shoulder. Remember – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Plan out not only the HOW you’re going to use it, but the WHY. As long as those two things align with delighting your site user then it's okay to get started putting your plan into action.
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