Smart marketers always look for opportunities to enrich their customer data. For marketers at SaaS businesses, that means finding ways to integrate your marketing tools with your product whenever possible to ensure you’re not leaving any valuable data on the table.
Why is customer data so valuable? According to Twilio’s 2023 State of Personalization report, 56% of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience — and you can’t create a personalized experience without key information about your customers.
Managing personalization without the right tools can be cumbersome, and can ultimately fold into lost causes and untrackable efforts. That’s why integrating tools like HubSpot directly into your SaaS platform can be a game changer, helping you to leverage data you are already collecting to deliver more personalized experiences as part of your marketing efforts.
CRMs enable personalization within marketing campaigns by leveraging stored customer data to provide customers with relevant, contextualized user experiences. In this way, your company’s marketing strategies can effectively target audiences based on their goals, buyer journey stage, geographical location, and more.
For SaaS businesses, collecting the kind of customer data that SaaS marketers dream about is often baked into demo signups and other onboarding activities, and provided you offer the correct opt-in content as that data is collected, it’s relatively straightforward to leverage that data for additional marketing efforts. When a tool like HubSpot is directly integrated with your platform, the migration of customer and lead data into your CRM can be seamless.
Once you’ve connected your product with the HubSpot CRM, there are many possibilities for how you can use the data you collect to personalize marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular trends for personalizing your efforts.
B2B buying habits are often driven by changes in the B2C landscape — after all, even when acting on behalf of an organization, buyers are consumers themselves and generally don’t separate their expectations into “personal” and “professional” categories.
As personalization has increased in consumer marketing efforts, we’ve seen a similar acceleration in the B2B space. Reportedly, 70% of customers expect personalization and feel frustrated when the ball gets dropped. That can be enough to discourage them from doing business with you, whether it’s for themselves or their organization.
So, what can you do about it? Start by taking note of these personalization trends that use data to bolster your SaaS marketing.
Online personalization is a priority for digital advertising. When customers are out and about in the real world, they are targeted with ads for a general audience that aren’t truly informed by data, which means that out-of-home (OOH) and offline ad efforts are often irrelevant to the people who see them.
By leveraging the data you’ve collected from customers using your SaaS product, you’ll be able to serve personalized, highly targeted content online through retargeting and other approaches, ensuring relevance and helping to incentivize engagement with your ads.
Customers love to shop in-store and receive offers and advice tailored to their needs. An expectation of this omnichannel experience also extends into the B2B space.
While personalization is key, it’s often challenging to execute well. In any omnichannel journey, customers make contact with multiple online and offline touchpoints. Customers expect their experience to be seamless and often dislike it when they can’t move from one communication channel to another.
Integrating HubSpot’s hubs together can help ensure you deliver on your audience’s expectations. For example, using Service Hub for your customer success efforts and integrating it into your product can help ensure your support team has access to all the pertinent data at their fingertips when addressing an issue or communicating with a customer.
Data collected from audiences through your own channels, or “first-party” data, is in focus as consumer privacy legislation and regulations continue to squeeze third-party data out of the market. One thing to know is contacts must opt-in to receive marketing communications to adhere to General Data Protection Regulation and best practices, but tools like HubSpot can help ensure you are collecting data in a compliant manner.
This is another area where companies who integrate HubSpot into their SaaS products have a natural advantage — your onboarding workflows for demo experiences and freemium tiers can generate a tremendous amount of first-party data to power your own marketing efforts. While businesses that relied on third-party data for personalization may see their marketing efforts wane in effectiveness, your own campaigns can continue to deliver strong results.
Customer data can create better experiences that align with where your customers, or potential customers, are on their journey. If you offer trials, demos, or freemium tiers within your SaaS product, you’re probably collecting all the data you need to get the most out of HubSpot (or any other CRM tool). Here are five of our suggestions for how to create value with the data you collect:
Customer segmentation categorizes your customers into groups based on certain shared traits, whether by demographic data, spending levels, product interests, or buying patterns.
Research tells us that segmented email sends perform better than those that aren’t, and that principle applies to almost any outbound communication. Just think back to when you received a marketing email that felt like it was for someone else. If the marketer had used better segmentation, you could have received a more relevant, personalized offer.
To segment your audience effectively, you’ll need to ensure your buyer personas are accurate and up to date.
HubSpot’s smart content is content that dynamically updates depending on the viewer’s segment. As we’ve said, “static content is out, dynamic content is in.” It’s imperative that CRM data is kept tidy so personalization works as expected.
Personalized emails have a better shot at success, receiving higher click rates than emails without personalization. Marketers surveyed by HubSpot say that it’s their most effective strategy for helping reach their marketing goals.
However, starting an email with “Hello, FIRST NAME” is not personalization on its own; true personalization requires far more than just adding contact info tokens to the subject line or email body within an HTML template. Personalization means using language that resonates with your audience and makes them feel seen — and as discussed above, segmentation is critical for achieving this.
HubSpot’s closed-loop revenue reporting provides insight into how to improve the efficiency of every dollar spent on your marketing. You can track and compare the success rates for all your SaaS marketing efforts relative to their respective costs. Detailed, well-organized CRM data is critical to effective closed-loop reporting, and integrating your SaaS product with your CRM is one way to ensure you are capturing all the necessary data.
Forget about chasing your tail for answers. Closed loop reporting takes the guesswork out of what’s working and what isn’t, giving you the factual basis to take action.
Related: How to Use the HubSpot Data Quality Command Center
Organizing customer information can be challenging — deciding on what information to track and how to track it takes time and resources. Add marketing-specific information into the mix, and you could quickly find yourself with an unwieldy data set.
With HubSpot’s customer profiles, everything is streamlined: Marketing analytics, interaction history, lifecycle changes, meeting notes, and more. This tool equips your sales team with contextual intel while making marketing information accessible.
Using your CRM to power automation is the best way to make sure you collect valuable data and optimize what you can achieve with it.
As an Elite HubSpot partner agency, Salted Stone has the experience to seamlessly integrate HubSpot into your SaaS company’s products, providing you with the foundational data and analytics to deliver a personalized experience throughout the customer lifecycle.