“The focus is always relevance”: How data can drive personalized experiences at scale

Personalization is the number one priority for Tom Mitchell, Senior Lifecycle Operations Manager at Sona, the UK-based SaaS platform used by industries as diverse as social care to hospitality for frontline scheduling. But creating personalized experiences that cater to completely different audiences, each with their own unique pain points and goals can make building personalized experiences at scale a challenge. The answer, says Tom, is having a complete view of all the data you hold on your customers, so you can segment your audiences and target them with the right message at the right time.

Adapting your messaging for different audiences

“The big thing for us right now is adapting our messaging for different verticals,” says Tom. “Different sectors have very different goals. For example, in social care, our messaging is how we can help our customers provide better care by giving staff a better way of working, whereas, in hospitality, the messaging is going to be more about how our customers can maximize their income by recognizing when they need more or fewer staff at different times.” 

The challenge, says Tom, is ensuring everyone who lands on Sona’s website understands how the product relates to them. “We’re thinking about how we can market the product in a way that is industry-agnostic, without alienating anyone when they visit the website, but also providing them with enough specific information without compromising SEO or diluting the messaging across different pages.”

The solution has been to use “live chat, pop-ups, and other dynamic spaces on the website to offer a personalized experience,” says Tom. “If someone downloads a certain piece of content, we’ll guide them to other related content and take actions based on their interests. We make the most of automation to guide them towards booking a demo, creating an efficient journey.” The focus is always on converting hot leads, says Tom, “so we give people as many opportunities as possible to convert—but that means we need to get creative and efficient with how we’re doing that.”

Data is the key to effective personalization

Customer data and automation is enabling Sona to provide personalization at scale. “We segment everyone based on what we know about them, making sure we’re categorizing people by the right level of seniority, whether they’re the decision-makers in their business, and the area that they work in, as well as their activity, which we use to create demographic and behavioral lead scores,” says Tom. “The focus is always on relevance.”

Once a prospect becomes a sales-qualified lead, Sona takes its personalization to a whole new level, creating bespoke landing pages the sales team can send to everyone in their pipeline.

“For every new lead, we’re able to generate a branded proposal page based on their data, with a personalized message from sales and an interactive demo,” says Tom. “The reason we’ve created these pages is that, in B2B, most purchase decisions are made by committee. You might give one person a demo, but then you need them to go and sell it to the rest of the company.”

A single source of truth

Achieving this level of personalization would be impossible without a “single source of truth”. “You have to have a product that lets you centralize data to enable a more personalized experience,” says Tom. “Essentially, your left-hand needs to know what the right-hand is doing and vice versa. You can't operate in isolation across the lifecycle; everything needs to work cohesively.”