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PersonalizationMarch 17, 2022

SaaS Personalization: Strategies and Examples That Convert

P
Personyze TeamPersonalization experts
SaaS Personalization: Strategies and Examples That Convert

Personalization for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) websites is a unique challenge, and many companies aren’t sure where to start. Yet there are a few tried-and-true SaaS personalization strategies that are relatively easy to implement and practically guaranteed to lift conversion.

There’s almost always some variation based on the peculiarities of each service and its market niche, but these generalized examples are a solid guideline for SaaS personalization success. Nearly all of them come down to using what you already know about a visitor — their plan, role, industry, company size, funnel stage, or location.

The SaaS personalization toolkit the signals you can personalize by
Almost every SaaS personalization tactic starts from a signal you already have plan role industry stage company size or location

Personalize the homepage header

Changing the homepage header based on lead or account type, industry, or other relevant variables is one of the most straightforward ways to personalize a SaaS website. It means swapping the header image, text, and/or call to action — sometimes even the link the CTA points to. A few examples of homepage header personalization done well:

  • Show header content specific to each stage in the funnel, prompting the visitor to the next one — free-trial users are nudged to sign up, basic accounts to upgrade.
  • Show header images tailored to a target industry, when the visitor’s industry is known.
  • Show text and CTAs specific to the visitor’s role — different messaging for managers vs. IT vs. marketers.
A SaaS homepage header personalized for two different visitors
The same homepage tailored to whos visiting an upgrade nudge for a trial user industry messaging and a sales CTA for a target account

AI-based content recommendations

Most SaaS websites have invested in content marketing — a blog or resource hub — but often don’t have the content feeds that are standard for content-first sites. Personalized, algorithm-driven content around the site can make a big impact, and without a feed it’s hard to pull off — unless you’re using Personyze, which can crawl your site to build one.

You can show recommendations based on the visitor’s industry, funnel stage, whether they’ve signed up, the service model they use, their country, and many other variables that matter to SaaS companies. If a lead arrived from organic search on a specific landing page, you can filter your main blog page toward that interest and related ones.

  • Content by industry — white papers or case studies.
  • Content by the services they’ve signed up for — how to get more from them.
  • Content by individual lead variables — say, if they’re a developer.
  • Content by time since signup — tutorials for new users.
  • Content recently added from their top interests.

Content personalization also extends to email. If you have a newsletter it can be fully personalized — or you can simply drop an automatic recommendation widget into any email you already send, using the Personyze email embed code.

Custom pricing

In many SaaS scenarios you’ll want to show different pricing to leads in different tiers or categories. If you know a lead’s company size, for instance, you might route small companies into your self-serve funnel while directing large companies to contact sales — hiding the online funnel entirely.

Custom SaaS pricing for small vs large companies
Show the right pricing path for each company self serve plans for SMBs a sales led path for enterprise based on company size

All of this is straightforward with Personyze, as long as the relevant variable (like company size) is known. That data can come from your own lead intel, ABM data vendors, or LinkedIn ad campaigns.

Landing page personalization

The unfortunate reality for many landing pages is a high bounce rate: an early-stage prospect comes, looks, and leaves. There are several ways to redirect that pattern into a more engaging, converting experience:

  • Show content recommendations toward the bottom of the page, so when they finish reading there’s something new to catch their interest.
  • Use an exit popup offering a white paper or case study relevant to their industry or use case — which also captures their email for further marketing.
  • Personalize your client logos and testimonials by location, so it looks like you specialize in their region.

For lower-bounce, higher-converting entry points, you can also build dynamic landing pages whose title and CTA match the campaign or audience that brought the visitor.

Account-based personalization for target accounts

SaaS growth increasingly runs on account-based marketing, and personalization is where it shows up on the site. When a visitor from a target account arrives — identified by reverse-IP or matched from your CRM — you can greet them by company, swap in an industry case study, and route enterprise-sized accounts straight to sales instead of the self-serve funnel. See it in our ABM exit-popup example, and go deeper in our guide to ABM personalization.

Onboarding and upgrade nudges

Personalization doesn’t stop at acquisition. Once someone signs up, the same signals — plan, role, and how far along they are — drive better activation and expansion: onboarding prompts for brand-new users, feature callouts for the parts of the product they haven’t tried yet, and well-timed upgrade nudges when a basic account bumps into a Pro-tier limit. It’s the same playbook, pointed at retention and expansion instead of the first conversion.

Getting started: the data behind it

Visitor data

Personyze provides many visitor attributes by default — referral information passed in the URL, cookies, location (from IP), past behavior, and variables in hidden layers or reported through Google Tag Manager. Many SaaS sites will also want CRM data from sources like HubSpot, and in some cases third-party ABM data from providers like Leadfeeder, Albacross, or Clearbit. These are all relatively easy to integrate with Personyze.

Content data

The ideal setup for content data is a preexisting feed with the essentials for each piece — title, author, publication date, an optional description, one or more image links, and the page link. Most sites already have a feed like this; it’s simply a matter of pointing Personyze at it.

Where no feed exists, Personyze can create one with a crawler that also identifies keywords to build interest categories — and it keeps the feed updated as you add content. That said, a feed with interests defined by your own team is always preferable.

Frequently asked questions

What can SaaS teams personalize?

Just about every visitor-facing surface: the homepage header, content recommendations, the pricing path, and landing pages – plus in-product touches like onboarding prompts, upgrade nudges, and feature callouts. Most of it is targeted by plan, role, industry, funnel stage, company size, or location.

Does SaaS personalization require developers?

No. Marketers and growth teams can build and target experiences without code – the targeting, content, and triggers are all managed in Personyze.

What data does SaaS personalization use?

Visitor attributes Personyze collects by default (referral data in the URL, cookies, location from IP, and on-site behavior), CRM data from tools like HubSpot, optional third-party ABM data, and a content feed – which Personyze can build by crawling your site if you don’t already have one.

Can I personalize pricing by company size?

Yes. When company size is known, you can route small companies into a self-serve plan funnel and direct large companies to contact sales, hiding the self-serve funnel entirely.

Can I personalize content without a content feed?

Yes. If you don’t have a content feed, Personyze can crawl your site to create one – identifying keywords to build interest categories and keeping the feed updated as you publish.

Can I show different messaging by industry or role?

Yes. You can swap the header image, text, and CTA (and even the CTA’s link) by industry, role, funnel stage, and other known variables, so each visitor sees messaging built for them.

Get started

SaaS personalization is one of the highest-leverage things a growth team can do — and most of it ships without code. Book a demo or view plans to get started.

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