Can we all agree that a personalized customer journey is no longer a benefit reserved only for the big players? In 2022, implementing custom-tailored 1 to 1 experiences is not something we just ramble about in high-level blog posts. The success of every digital company, small or big, hinges on the ability to craft and deliver personalized customer journeys.

• 80% of people are more inclined to buy from a business that provides tailored experiences.
• 72% of buyers will only respond to personalized marketing messages.
• 57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts.
  

Your customers want to be treated as an audience of one. They expect an instant, personalized, and convenient user experience no matter where they interact with your company and at what customer lifecycle stage. 

All the while, marketers are facing the increased challenges of data privacy. Yes, we are talking about iOS 15, the lesser visibility of email engagement, and the numbered days of 3rd-party cookies, to name a few. The collection of critical data required for personalization is harder than ever before. Your audience doesn’t want to feel like they are giving you too much information —  they need to feel in control of their personal data and know exactly how much they share with you.

So how can we gather insights into our audience’s needs and behaviors without making our leads and customers feel like they are being stalked? Then, once we secure the data, how can we use it to design cohesive, personalized customer journeys?

There isn’t one easy answer to these questions. Still, throughout our experience with over 4,000 customers, we found a few ways to combine timeless knowledge of human psychology with modern web tools to create effective personalized experiences.

Keep on reading for some practical tips on using conversational marketing and landing pages with marketing automation as the perfect marriage for start-to-end personalized journeys.

Start the Journey with a Conversation

Have you ever listened to a podcast that feels staged, forced, and so boring that it almost lulls you to sleep? It helps if you struggle with sleep, but it’s not exactly inspiring. 

Most of the time, the reason is that the host is having an interview with his guest. A set of pre-defined questions railroad the call and make both the speaker and listeners watch their wrist, counting the seconds until this torment is over.

Want to run better podcasts? Have a conversation, not an interview.

Want to deliver better customer journeys? Start a conversation.

Look at the landing page below. Does it feel like an interview or a conversation to you?

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Yes, the illustration is attractive and colorful, but the grey lead gen form steals the life out of this landing page. The set of boring, predefined fields will turn off even the most cold-blooded CEO. 

Even if you are selling B2B, don’t forget that it’s the person that has to enter the information, not the company.

Compare this to the personality-fueled lead generation page below by web designer, ArtFull Science

It’s informal and inviting. Milo is the cool, down-to-earth guy that you can’t wait to share your thoughts with, always there when you need him, ears-wide open, listening to you and your business challenges.

I feel what you are saying: “Kalo, that’s nice, but I’m not that artistic or creative, and my business is boring.”

Fear not. 

You don’t have to be the Walt Disney of landing pages to deliver enticing high-converting experiences. 

Instead, you can be a guide or a coach. Your website visitors are checking your landing page for a reason — they might have reached an inflection point with a certain challenge in their business, and you might be just the right solution for them.

You can keep things simple with your first conversational landing page. For instance, you can ask what your audience’s biggest challenge is? 

In fact, this is the approach we use at Encharge:

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I might not be as funny as Milo, but still, this pop-up has a ton more personality than a plain grey box asking you to enter your country and phone number.

This tactic has a 3-fold benefit for both our visitors and us:

• It helps us learn a ton about our potential customers at the very start of the sales funnel when someone visits a blog post or a landing page. Having the answer to this single question can make the difference between a one-size-fits-all customer experience and a personalized, helpful guided journey. 
• It helps us qualify leads. Our solution is not the best fit for everyone; we can’t help but focus on the people we can really help.‍
• We can provide a relevant resource. Based on the answer, we share the most relevant lead magnet. For instance, if you select “Onboarding and converting users,” we will give you our eBook on onboarding email templates. (See, we are already personalizing the journey.)

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Does it work? 4.25% of all people who visit this question answer it.

Collect Data Throughout the Journey

Your job as a researcher doesn’t end with the first conversation on the landing page. To deliver hyper-personalized customer engagement, you need to have as much data as possible.

Think of your overall customer lifecycle and your sales funnel. What other touchpoints can be leveraged to secure more insights into your customer audience?

• Facebook Ads and Google Ads (you can use lead ads to collect additional information);
• Demo booking chatbots and forms;
• Trial signup process;
• Sales calls.
  

The goal is to build a complete 360° profile of your users and enrich them with as much information as you can. This information is vital for the overall creation of personalized customer journeys. You need to collect and send that data to your single source of truth, usually your CRM or email marketing/marketing automation platform.

If you are using Landbot, you can add leads (and lead data) directly to Salesforce using the native integration or integrate seamlessly with a marketing platform like Encharge through Webhooks or Zapier (we are going to explore this a little later). 

The key here is to make the data collection process seamless and frictionless — do not forget our interview vs. conversation analogy.

Asking your leads to submit information for custom pricing? Make the experience enjoyable, avoid extra friction. 

In the example below, the person is asked to email or phone the company. There is also a Whatsapp chat button, but this doesn’t help much when the sales reps are absent.

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There is too much hassle and uncertainty in the whole process — what information do I need to prepare before I make the call, am I going to be hard sold on the call, how fast does the company respond, and the list goes on.

Compare this to the chatbot landing page of Cubert:

This landing page automates the tedious process of obtaining a quote and selling your old phone. You answer a few questions, and in less than a minute, you can assess the value of your device and even complete the sale. 

Even if the lead doesn’t end up making a purchase, you would still have heaps of valuable data to personalize their journey beyond the first visit.

This leads us to the next section.

Personalize the Customer Experience Beyond your Website

Here’s a troubling truth: most of the visitors who reach your website or sign up for your product or service will never come back again. Facebook notifications, cute cats, and YouTube get in the way — It’s the way of the Internet. 

That’s why you want to deliver perfect first-time experiences and capture as much data as possible when a potential customer visits your website or signs up for your app for the first time.

But your job doesn’t end there. You want to continue the customer journey after the first visit.

Once a user leaves your website, you have to find a way to bring them back — the ball is in your court. 

This is where marketing automation tools like Encharge come to the rescue. You can use them to send personalized emails, SMS messages, push notifications, and more to engage your leads and potential customers and get them back to your website.

The critical thing to remember is that you need to personalize your messages — no untargeted email blasts to your whole email list.

Conversational experiences can be used to personalize the user journey beyond the first touchpoint with your website. For instance, Landbot uses Landbot to personalize the onboarding of the app:

Then, they send a hyper-personalized welcome email using Encharge. Check this out:

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This email goes beyond the basic name personalization. It caters to my specific use case — lead generation. It cuts through the noise in my inbox by addressing the most important challenge for me. Then, it shows me what my company (Encharge) can achieve with the right chatbot and even shares the most relevant templates for me.

This is how this part of the journey looks in the Encharge flow. When someone enters the segment for registered users → Wait for 15 minutes → Check if the company use case contains “lead gen” and then send the first email:

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You might be wondering how to automate and personalize customer journeys like this for your business? 

We got you covered.

Personalize the Customer Journey with Landbot and Encharge

Once you have your amazing conversational landing page or chatbot set up in Landbot, you want to send all of your Landbot leads to Encharge.

The easiest way to achieve this is through Webhooks. Webhooks are a universal standard used for sending data from and to web apps. They are free, fast, and super reliable. 

To connect a Landbot bot to Encharge, use the Webhook integration. 

Then create a flow in Encharge and use the “Receive Webhook” trigger. 

You would need to copy the Webhook URL from the “Receive Webhook” trigger into the Landbot Webhook. 

Important: use the “GET” webhook command instead of “POST”.

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Then make sure to enable Send Params and map all of the data you want to send to Encharge. This part is critical, as we need this information to personalize your Encharge flows and emails.

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Last thing in Landbot: Test the request. 

When you do so, Encharge will receive the test data, and you’d be able to map Landbot fields to people fields in Encharge.

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Now, every time you get a new lead in Landbot, it will be automatically added to Encharge with all of the data collected in Landbot. 

With the powerful visual flow builder in Encharge, you’d be able to build hyper-personalized customer journeys using that data.

One way to achieve this is to use the “Check Field” filter step to create unique customer paths based on the response in the chatbot. 

In the example below, we have created two different journeys for our webinar attendees — one for our attendees coming from our Facebook ads (PPC) and another one from those that came from Google:

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As long as you have the data, the possibilities for automation and personalization are endless. You can design custom-tailored journeys based on the answers you get, send qualified leads to your CRM, create follow-up tasks with high-value customers, automate repetitive tasks, and more. 

Need inspiration? Check out how Landbot automates its customer journey with Encharge.

The big question is: What are you going to create to delight your customers with targeted messages and custom-tailored experiences? ‍