New B2B Service Acts Like Facebook's 'Instant Personalization'
Ziff Davis, Dun & Bradstreet, and LivePerson are among major players using Demandbase's service. Crowd Science says the targeting system has improved lead-generation by 46 percent.
Demandbase yesterday announced a service for B2B marketers that’s designed to work in a manner similar to Facebook’s Instant Personalization system, which has been controversial for integrating its platform with certain site partners. Called “Real-Time ID Service,” Demandbase’s service was built to let Web marketers target incoming businesses with relevant offers or pre-populated forms – even if they’ve never visited that site before.
Ziff Davis, Dun & Bradstreet, LivePerson, IDG Enterprise, and Crowd Science are among the B2B brands that have implemented the software-based system. Grover Righter, a lead-gen marketing consultant for Crowd Science, said Real-Time ID Service has the capabilities to indeed become a B2B version of Instant Personalization.
“I’m a marketer, so I like to make Kool-Aid and not drink the stuff,” he explained. “But you can make your content personalized for someone who is coming from, say, the publishing industry. The system allows you to write Java script so that when someone from that sector visits your site, your homepage can deliver targeted content for people in publishing.”
On how it technically works, Demandbase says IP addresses and header information are transferred to sites when visitors arrive. “This data is passed to the site through an API in milliseconds,” said Chris Golec, CEO of the San Francisco-based firm. He claimed the service acts at a transfer speed up to two seconds faster than a reverse-IP look-up system.
But where does the preexisting business information come from? Demandbase’s platform, Golec said, “has integrated business directories, contact databases, Internet registries, and [Web] traffic from more than 2,000 B2B sites… It links the IP address to other third-party sources and back to your CRM so that real-time responses include customer info, custom industry segments, and other important flags for a personalized Web experience.”
In particular, he said the business directories mined for company info include Hoovers, Jigsaw, Dun & Bradstreet, InfoUSA, NetProspex, and LexisNexis.
Meanwhile, Righter said Crowd Science recently ran 45 days of A/B split testing to see if Real-Time ID Service would increase Web form completions. He said the Mountain View, CA-based analytics company saw a 46 percent lift in completed forms when using the system.
Righter said the key to the lead-gen uptick was being able to reduce the number of form fields from nine to three. Due to what his team could see on the backend, information like locale, phone number, company, size of the organization, industry, etc. no longer needed to be inputted by the visitor.
“Demandbase gave us all of that information,” Righter said. “We not only get the company name, but what branch the person is with… If they are stealthy visitors using Yahoo or Gmail e-mail addresses, we are able to go into the Demandbase information and see, ‘Yeah, they are from a major publisher and came from the Chicago office.’ For the first time in my career, we are able to take ISP [e-mail] addresses and use them as valuable business information.”
Follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ.
