You want to execute SaaS product personalization in B2B marketing without the trial and error that can annoy users. But how? One way is to study SaaS product personalization examples that nailed it. Think of the SaaS products you enjoy using every day. You feel like they were built just for your needs. In addition to saving time, they enable you to easily solve problems that matter, so you renew them year after year and recommend them to your friends.
You can bring the same customer experience and results to your SaaS product.
The 5 SaaS products in this guide have successfully executed personalization in various parts of the user experience, such as:
- Demo
- Signup pages
- Onboarding
- Interface
- Communication
Let’s see how they achieved it.
What is SaaS Product Personalization in B2B Marketing?
SaaS product personalization in B2B marketing involves applying user data and behavior to transform your product for each user’s unique needs. Since you built your SaaS product for different customer profiles, personalization ensures an easy user experience and a quick path to user satisfaction.
User satisfaction means less churn and more revenue. According to McKinsey & Company, companies that get personalization right can generate 40% more revenue.
Personalization in B2B marketing also helps you achieve one of your big goals: getting users to take advantage of your carefully built features. After spending thousands of hours building helpful features, personalization places those features in front of the users who need them.
You can execute SaaS product personalization in two major ways:
- Client-side personalization involves a personalization tool and major input from user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designers.
- Server-side personalization involves collaboration between product developers, UX designers, and UI designers.
Now, let’s see 5 SaaS personalization examples that can give you ideas for your SaaS product.
SaaS Product Personalization Examples
1. Bill.com: Use Personalized Demos to Show Value
Today, buyers are as informed as ever. Before they even request your product demo, they’ve researched a few products. Maybe they’ve even gone through demos of competing products. At this point, a personalized demo can be the difference between converting a customer or losing them to a competitor. You have to personalize your product demo to show how it can solve the buyer’s problem. Qualified leads also need to see how your product is better than that of competitors.
Most SaaS companies go through demos in two ways: a live demo or a preprogrammed demo. Whatever method you choose, research your leads to understand the problems they want to solve with your product. If they already use the free version of your product, you should tailor your demo according to insight from their usage patterns. In addition, remember to populate your product demo with relevant data to the lead. If the lead is an auto dealer, the data in your product demo should be relevant to an auto dealer.
By showing an understanding of your prospects, you can easily address their pain points and move them closer to the sale. Overall, you should never lose sight of your main agenda for the demo. In most cases, you want the prospect to sign up for a plan. Ensure your personalized demo guides them through how your product can solve their problems and the next steps to take.
Bill.com, an online bill payment and receivables software, created a demo for two ideal product users: a small business owner and their accounting manager.
Through the demo, each ideal user can see how Bill.com will help them organize invoices, approve payments, and perform other payment tasks.
How to Personalize Demos
- Create detailed buyer personas.
- Derive possible use cases from these personas.
- Create personalized demos that guide prospects through the use cases.
- Set up an agenda for your demo.
2. HubSpot: Use Personalized Signup Flow to Obtain User Preferences
If your product users cut across various industries, your users’ needs will also differ. A great way to ensure each user has a personalized experience right from the start is to group users during the signup process. A frictionless signup makes it as easy as possible for customers to sign up for a product or service. Frictionless signup flows may be easier for users, but building a bit of friction into your signup flow will give you a better chance to personalize the user experience. By using fields, friction-based signup lets you obtain enough information to personalize your product for the user.
How do you achieve personalization with a friction-based signup flow?
Based on your buyer personas, create a signup flow to collect relevant information that can help personalize your SaaS product. This includes details such as a user’s industry, potential product use case, company size, and job role.
HubSpot, a CRM software product, exemplifies this in its signup process. The company asks for industry, job role, and experience with CRM software. This lets the company provide a personalized user experience from the beginning
How to personalize signups:
- Use a friction-based signup flow
- Ask for users’ needs and goals with your tool.
- Let users select use cases that apply to them.
- Ask for users’ roles in their company.
- Use users’ answers to create personalized experiences.
3. GetResponse: Use Personalized Onboarding to Get Users Up to Speed
If you use a frictionless signup flow, you can end up with no data about a user. But even if that’s the case, you can still fit your product to users’ needs through personalized onboarding. An easy way is to use an onboarding prompt. This prompt will ask new users which aspects of your product they want to explore or the goal they want to achieve. From their selections, you can segment users into different customer profiles and personalize your product to satisfy each user. GetResponse, an email and marketing automation product, uses an onboarding prompt that asks users what activities they want to focus on.
From the selection, GetResponse creates an onboarding workflow that helps users achieve their goals.
How to personalize onboarding:
- Determine popular use cases for your buyers.
- Create workflows for each use case.
- Create a status bar for tasks in each workflow.
4. Canva: Use Personalized Interfaces to Engage and Satisfy Users
Once users explore your SaaS product, they’ll show you their most important features and tasks. Their actions in your product even tell you more than what they say.
In most cases, you can personalize your product in two major ways:
- Individualized personalization, in which your product interface adapts to each user’s behavior. With individualized personalization, if you have 1,000 users, you essentially have 1,000 interfaces.
- Role-based personalization, in which your product interface is structured for a role the user has selected during signup or onboarding.
Through personalization, a user can find their most important features quickly and gain satisfaction from your product. Canva, a graphics design product, uses personalization in B2B marketing to ensure that users find their favorite design templates quickly in the “For you” section.
With personalization, their users can discover relevant templates among the more than a million options.
How to personalize user interface:
- Track popular features for a user.
- Make these features visible on their dashboard.
- Provide in-app tips to execute these features effectively.
- Use cohort analysis to recommend similar tasks to a user.
5. Grammarly: Send Personalized Communications to Connect with Users
Even after you’ve personalized your product experience, you can take it further through personalized communication. You can achieve this in a few effective ways.
First, you can send personalized communication about a user’s performance in their tasks. This can quantify how much value a user has gotten from your product.
Second, you can recommend relevant content pages to help users get better results from their favorite tasks. Every professional wants to improve their skills and get better results and will take the opportunity to educate themselves. This can also encourage users to engage more fully with your product.
Third, you can send relevant promotional offers to users based on their current plan and interest. For instance, you can send a discount offer to a freemium user if they view your pricing page or book a demo.
Grammarly, a grammar-checking tool, sends personalized emails containing writing statistics, relevant blog posts, and promotional offers.
This can encourage a user to unlock milestones by engaging with the tool. Beyond that, users can take advantage of promotional offers.
How to personalize messages:
- Determine users’ best communication channel.
- Create automated messages according to behavior.
- Create upsell and cross-sell offers that match user behavior.
- Take feedback through these communication channels.
Personalization in B2B Marketing Can Help You Achieve Your SaaS Goals
Two things are important to most people who use SaaS products:
- Using product features to solve problems effectively
- Solving problems quickly
You can achieve these two goals by executing SaaS product personalization in B2B marketing and, since doing this will lead to better word of mouth marketing and revenue, that’s even more motivation to take personalization seriously.
Study these five examples and create a plan to improve your SaaS product’s personalization. If you want to learn more about how you can improve your SaaS product’s personalization, the experts at Bay Leaf Digital are ready to be of service. Contact us to explore the possibilities.
