Make Every Visit Count with Smart Website Personalization.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:04 - 00:46
Hello First Name, it's 11AM on the West Coast, 2 PM in New York City, and local time in User Location. You know what that means. It's time for a Coffee Break.
I'm Alex Jonathan Brown. And as you might have guessed, we're doing a deep dive into personalization today. But there is so much more to it than form fills that would have worked in 1996. And to get us up to speed and explain how personalization can help you fill your pipeline, we've got two amazing guests.
From Iron Horse, it's our director of marketing, Ellen Smoley. And from our friends over at Webflow, it's Chief Evangelist, Guy Yalif. Hi, everybody.

Ellen Smoley
00:46 - 00:47
Hello.

Guy Yalif
00:47 - 00:50
Hey, Alex and Ellen.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:50 - 00:57
You know yourselves better than I know you, so I'm gonna let you do your own introductions. Guy, would you like to kick us off?

Guy Yalif
00:57 - 01:45
Happy to. My name is Guy Yalif, and I'm a former CMO and former cofounder and CEO of Intellimize, which was an AI website personalization company that Webflow bought a year ago.
And I'm now, as you said, Webflow's Chief Evangelist. For those that don't know, ten seconds, Webflow is a platform that makes it really easy for designers, marketers, developers to work together, to design, manage, and optimize visually stunning enterprise grade websites that build your brand, and personalize them and optimize them to drive measurable business results, coding optional.
Last bit of context, I've had the privilege of putting AI in the hands of fellow marketers to personalize digital experiences for more than twenty years, while at Twitter, Yahoo, BrightRoll, Tradeweave, and then Intellimize.

Alex Jonathan Brown
01:45 - 01:52
Thank you so much. Ellen, you're a familiar face around these parts, but, tell us a little bit more about you.

Ellen Smoley
01:52 - 02:43
Hello, everybody. So, Ellen Smoley, Director of Marketing. And I'm super happy to be here today to talk about one of my favorite marketing topics, which is personalization. And, I've had the pleasure of working with my team to develop a personalization strategy and deploy that and working with our clients to do the same as well.
So we've taken all of our learnings and put them in a playbook for y'all. So that's why we're here today is to kinda open up that playbook and talk about it, but it is also located in the document section of Goldcast.
So if you click docs at the top, then you'll find that and and go to the playbook and download it. But today, we'll give you two little sneak peeks of the plays and then download that and see the rest of the eight. There's 10 really great plays in there that our team has put together for y'all. So excited to be here and talk you through it.

Alex Jonathan Brown
02:43 - 03:11
Thanks, Ellen. I'm so glad you're both here. Before we get started, we wanna take just a little temperature of the room. So I'm gonna go ahead and open our first poll. Basically, just let us know how would you describe the maturity of your personalization strategy? Basic, intermediate, advanced, or you don't have one yet. All of those answers are fine.
And wherever you are in your journey, we hope that this proves helpful to you. But, Guy, I think to start the conversation, like, I obviously open with an incredibly hilarious bit of one of first name stuff.

Guy Yalif
03:11 - 03:12
It was wonderful.

Alex Jonathan Brown
03:12 - 03:32
Thank you. But that's not what we're talking about today.
We're really focused on why personalization matters for companies and especially why it can matter for your revenue, which is why we're all here anyway.

Guy Yalif
03:32 - 04:37
Thank you, First Name. Continuing with your personalization from before.
Our goal as marketers, basically, since the fifties, when modern marketing began, was to do one-to-one personalization. Why? To be genuinely helpful, to be relevant as we move prospects through the funnel.
And today, now, we can actually meet each prospect where they are in their own journey. And we've actually been doing it for a while. Predictive AI, not the Gen AI we're all talking about now, it's been helping us personalize ads and emails down to the individual for more than twenty years. And just about a decade ago, I had the privilege of cofounding and being CEO of Intellimize, which brought similar new predictive AI, similar logic to do the same thing on websites.
Now Gen AI is added to both, making it easier to create content at scale, all of which is with the goal of then helping move people through the funnel and drive more revenue.

Alex Jonathan Brown
04:37 - 04:52
I think that's such a useful overview of kind of, like, where things are and where things have shifted. But can you kinda talk us through some of the basics of effective personalization now in, you know, 2025 and the state of things?

Guy Yalif
04:52 - 07:18
Absolutely. The two, three things come to mind. First, choose your target. Find high impact opportunities. Typically, it's high probability to begin by looking at the journey from first touch all the way through to conversion, which typically then is like pipeline or revenue. When you optimize off of that journey, you may do a lot of work and get great lift, but it won't drive the revenue you're looking for.
And so often, we as marketers, when we're thinking about that journey, we don't actually have the data readily available to us. You go to your tool and you see this, like, spider chart of where everybody ever has gone on your site.
I invite you not to get trapped in that. I invite you to think about, like, “Hey, what were you trying to achieve at each step in the journey? What journey have you been trying to craft?” You already have intuition on this. It's not that the data isn't key. It's that the data practically often isn't available to us in a usable way. So then look at that journey. Look for points on that journey that have like a lot of traffic and high drop off. Those are the leverage points.Those are the place to invest your energy. 
Then two, go meet each prospect where they are.Take what you know about that prospect and use it to the best of your then current ability. And what you know typically falls into three buckets. One: Behavior. What have they done on your site and other touch points that you have? Two: You've got contextual data. What device, what location, what day of week, and so on. And three: You might have enriched with firmographic or demographic data. Like, are they enterprise or SMB? What industry are they in? Tells you a lot about what they're trying to accomplish. And the final, Alex, is to put those to work for personalized.
And I invite each of us to have a mental model about the granularity of personalization as a key to our strategy. You can improve the experience for everybody at once. That's AB testing. You can improve the experience for an individual segment, and to do that, you use personalization in the way most people are used to talking about it.
You could go finer grained and improve the experience for an individual account. That's ABM, account-based marketing. Or you can go improve the experience for each individual human, and that's where AI optimization is key. So find a place of high impact, meet each prospect where they are, and then go put the data you have to work.

Alex Jonathan Brown
07:18 - 08:05
So first off, incredible overview of things. Thanks for thanks for taking us through that. I can feel people being like, okay, I know what my website looks like. We've checked everything. Everything lines up with our brand. When we start doing this, it feels like we're forking out in a lot of different ways. So, there's obviously there's branding parts of that. There is also technical parts of that. I wanna make sure that my website kind of works for everyone across the board.
So how do we really preserve, if we wanna call it, brand integrity and site stability while all of these parts are moving to deliver that, to deliver the real end experience that we wanna give our audience?

Guy Yalif
08:05 - 10:15
Alex, I it's a great question. This is so important. You don't wanna break the site. You don't wanna, I've heard brand teams talk about demand teams Frankensteining the experience by, you know, just optimizing for the numbers. And, humbly submitted, I think the solution is often a combination of tooling and process. What are the constraints? What are the things to consider? I think our creative teams, they typically want, like, total creative freedom.
They wanna tell emotionally evocative, visually compelling stories, and then they wanna control and verify. They want the brand consistency. And since we're trying to influence human memory like that, consistency is really important. Our personalization team, they're often part of performance, demand gen. They typically wanna experiment really rapidly. They wanna do something like never been done before to gain advantage over competitors. And if things aren't quite on brand, so be it. That tension just slows you down.
It costs you revenue. And the solution I've seen work best is for the brand and design teams to create a sandbox in which the performance teams can safely operate. And that sandbox, it's a design system. It's an embodiment of your brand. It's your fonts, your colors, your spacing. Maybe you create reusable components. Maybe you even go to the point of having templates. Manually, this is often a document that requires enforcement through constant reviews, which the performance teams are like, this just slows me down.
However, you can use tooling, Webflow happens to be an example of that, to empower teams. Instead of these reviews being a burden, the brand teams can give the performance teams all these brand elements in a tool, and the performance teams, they can then experiment as fast as they're capable because all the experimentation will happen within that sandbox, within the style guide framework because the performance teams don't have anything else to work with. And so I think ultimately this is about effectively creating a playground where folks optimizing the numbers can operate safely.

Alex Jonathan Brown
10:15 - 10:59
From a creative like, primarily one of the tasks I do here at Iron Horse is as a copywriter. And the number of times where I have got into virtual almost fist fights over it doesn't say in the doc that I can't do this, which I think means I should be able to do this, is high.
And so having that built into a system where it's just very clear, like, no. That's, it's not in your sandbox. It's, no. Do it in a way that the sandbox says. Just that space to play and those guidelines. Creatives are really like puppies. We just want guidelines to to play around in.

Guy Yalif
10:59 - 11:01
Hopefully, it saves. a lot of time. I love that.

Alex Jonathan Brown
11:01 - 11:31
Hopefully. So there are differences in the level of personalization, though.
Like I said, we're all very familiar with first name replacement if we wanna stretch it back that far. But some of the stuff that we're talking about and thinking about is really complex. So as we're kind of working through this, where, how do we know where we kinda wanna fall between simple or complex personalization tactics?

Guy Yalif
11:31 - 13:18
That rings a lot of bells. When we started Intellimize, we thought empowering marketers to do more technically complex personalizations was really important. We thought more technically evolved experiments would yield more revenue. Now, candidly, after seeing tens of thousands of personalizations, experiments, tests, we see that it is indeed true that if engineering can empower marketing to run quickly without breaking the site, you make more money reliably. That's a good thing. 
However, we did not actually find a correlation between technical complexity of a personalization or experiment and increased revenue. There wasn't one. We had, we had one poignant example. It was an online jewelry retailer. They had some beautiful jewelry they were selling. We helped them optimize the whole buyer journey. We obviously focused on the checkout page, in the cart, and we tried everything.
We did custom product recommendations to expand cart size. We prefilled out fields. We narrowed things. We did things that took a lot of work. The single most impactful thing that was done on that page was none of those. It was just about the products literally adding the words, “This looks great on you.” That was an insight that came out of crawling inside the mind of the buyer and having them think, oh, wait. This is jewelry. I really like, will this be a good thing to buy? And bringing that to life in plain text, which was technically super simple, but ultimately impactful. So I humbly submit on the tech, on the simple complex spectrum, that we actually focus not on that, but on really understanding the prospect journey and their mindset at each step of the way, which personalization should help us all do.

Alex Jonathan Brown
13:18 - 13:48
Ellen, I know in the playbook, there's some pretty significant sections about really just figuring out what experiments make sense for your company to run and where with your level of effort and the level of time you wanna, dedicate to that. Really choosing the ones that make the most sense. And I think keeping that in mind, the idea that, like, just because it's harder for you doesn't mean it's gonna work better Right. Is super, super valuable.

Ellen Smoley
13:48 - 14:22
Mhmm. Yeah, and we'll have it in the playbook. We have a road map template. So download that and then be able to put in your experiments. And I'll talk about that here in just a minute. But to help you understand, this is a high level of impact or it's a low level of impact in a high visibility spot. So just kind of understanding, like, I've got all of these ideas. Where do I begin? You can start to put those in there and then filter on it and kinda understand, like, okay, here's my set of five that or two or one that I'm gonna go test and run with and see how that does for me.

Alex Jonathan Brown
14:22 - 15:06
Obviously, I think there's and you were just talking about this, Guy. There are some lessons learned during this process. You get better at recognizing those situations the more of them you do. But to be able to experiment, you gotta you gotta be able to do the first one.
And a lot of times that requires some serious internal alignment from the stakeholders that you need to make it happen to the teams that are gonna go and execute. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about building that alignment. Because as a marketer, I'm like, this sounds amazing. This sounds awesome. Please let me do all of it tomorrow. Unfortunately, they don't let me just make those calls on my own. So a little help in that regard and building that alignment would be much appreciated.

Guy Yalif
15:06 - 16:55
Delighted to share some battle scars and experience that is hopefully helpful to the listeners, and I agree totally with what Ellen was saying before about that mental model of what are the high impact places, that that you'll get big benefits in as you try to build that internal alignment. 
I would suggest three sets of internal stakeholders to get involved. One is the CTO engineering IT, the technical teams, where ultimately, ideally, you want them to empower us, the marketers, to go run quickly in a way they feel good about and won't break the site so that they can go focus on building the core product and doing more advanced complex things. They don't want us to go put a, “Please change this text into an engineering queue that gets prioritized in the next sprint.”
And so this practically often involves a bunch of due diligence upfront and then periodically the ability to explore audit so they feel comfortable. Two, we talked a bunch about it before. Brand. Brand empowering the personalization team, the performance team to run quickly by laying out the rules of the road, saying what's okay, laying, creating that sandbox.
And the last is actually getting buy-in around the company. There's a strategic choice to make. Good ideas come from everywhere. Consider driving involvement from others around the company. And if you do, if you solicit ideas from everywhere, ensure they're heard and get a response. And we've definitely found, not a rule, the correlation, that the closer people are to the customer, the more impactful their ideas are likely to be. So customer support, customer success, sales tend to run into really great ideas because they're talking to the customer every day.

Alex Jonathan Brown
16:55 - 17:55
Awesome. I always love hearing that note of just, like, the closer the people are to the customer, the easier it is for them to come up with the ideas that are gonna resonate. Like, with your example about the jewelry, like, on some level, if we turn our marketing brain off, yeah, that's all somebody wants to hear is that this looks great on them. Like, why are we making them work complicated? Also helpful if you're buying jewelry for a partner. Just remember, just make them look nice. They'll like it.
But backing out maybe a little bit more, securing buy in for all this is really important. There's nothing worse than getting the, like, yeah, you can go ahead and do that. You can experiment. You can play around. And then realizing that you're hitting blockers in every way because it turns out you might have been aligned enough to get started. You didn't have the buy in you needed to actually execute. Any thoughts on that? How do we solve that problem? In the next couple seconds.

Guy Yalif
17:58 - 19:12
Yeah. Just a couple seconds.
Very bespoke to each company and each team in each situation. Most often, the ultimate goal is exactly what you opened with, Alex, and that's revenue or pipeline.
I invite us as we're setting expectations and trying to get buy-in to remind people, hey, ad campaigns, when we set them up, they took some time. We needed to get targeting, creative measurement. Took a moment, personalization will take time to set up too. And then invite yourself to be evaluated against speed and lift in pipeline and revenue, but not every day, maybe every quarter.
Because if you focus on lift on week two, you're almost certainly not gonna get what you or those folks you need buying from want. Why? Because this whole game is probabilistic. This is experimentation where if we knew the answer, if there were rules, we'd just implement them. But instead, industry benchmark is that 70 to 90% of the experiments you run, they're not going to drive improvement.
And so what you really wanna optimize for is speed of learning. Because that speed plus the customer insight you were talking about earlier, that will inevitably lead to pipeline and revenue.

Alex Jonathan Brown
19:12 - 19:58
I think that's one of those things that is so important for so much of what we do as marketers, but especially when we get into this more experimentation place, is really just from the beginning, start managing those expectations. Like and don't let yourself get into sales mode about, here are all the things that this is going to do for you tomorrow. Because it's not.
Like, that process is where you're building the bricks to get to that success. It is the dumb Thomas Edison quote or idea about how many times he built a light bulb before he built a light bulb. Right? It's very much that, and we don't do ourselves a service by acting like that's not the process, especially when it comes to clients. Like, it's.

Guy Yalif
19:58 - 20:08
And by the way, it's easy to fall into that trap because we want the, “Yes,” from those we're looking for approval from, and then we end up promising something that practically you can't deliver.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:08 - 20:46
And it is like, the momentum there, like like we talked about, when you're learning each time you do it gets faster. It's just the slow grind or hopefully not always slow. See, I just did it right there.
It's hard for me to say this might take a bit, but it's worth having those conversations. But, that is not the only concern that can come up when we talk to people about these kind of big personalization efforts.
So from where you're at, Chief Evangelist, you're out you're out in the world. I'm sure you hear it a lot. What are some of the concerns that kind of you bump into, and how do you address those?

Guy Yalif
20:46 - 21:43
Rapid fire, the top three I hear. One, are you gonna slow down the site? Easy to solve. Just run the test and see, and you'll know very quickly. Two, we don't have enough data on our prospects. In fact, a bunch of them are anonymous. You actually now can personalize for 100% of visitors on first page view with the right intuition and tooling.
AI optimization is especially useful here because it can find correlations between conversion and your creative that us mere mortals wouldn't find without extra data, like, hypothetical example, in New York, on weekday evenings, on mobile devices, for first time visitors, you didn't need any extra data to know those things. This headline works best.
And the third concern, you're gonna Frankenstein the brand and there to our discussion about design system system and some process and tooling, I think that's the antidote for that one.

Alex Jonathan Brown
21:43 - 22:24
Awesome. We got an incredibly well-timed comment in the chat. Hey, Ellen. Let's talk about the playbook a little bit.
So, Guy, thank you so much for chatting us through that. And now, Ellen, we get to talk a little bit more about the plays that we've kind of worked to put together to really take those ideas and start to, like, show you how they can work.
It's the follow-up content from this conversation, I think, and a great next step. So maybe give us some quick examples of some of the plays that you can find in the playbook. And, again, if you don't have it yet, it's in the docs tab. Should be right above the shot.

Ellen Smoley
22:24 - 27:41
Yeah. So we, Guy told us, you know, the number one goal that we have is to drive revenue. And so we have that in mind as we created these plays. And as we've learned from a ton of plays that we've done for ourselves and for our clients.
So I'm gonna share a few, and then download the playbook, and you can find the rest. This first one here is, the goal here is to accelerate pipeline velocity. That was our main goal to drive more revenue. So one really great example here, and this was really fun to put together.
So you can see in the top my little, like, equation. So I used our CRM to pull down the opportunity stage, and I was looking for late stage opportunities and visitors who are returning to the site. So as Guy mentioned, I don't even have to know who these visitors are. I just know that they are part of this account that's in a late stage opportunity, and they're a returning visitor.
So what I wanted to do here is to customize the hello bar, which is you can customize whatever you want. But one space that we use all the time at Iron Horse is this little message bar at the top. And, so we have that message bar at the top, and we're able to customize that. So if you are late stage opportunity and you're returning visitor, then you see a different message here.
And it says, “Hey, let's pick up where you left off. And it has a link to book time with your sales rep.” So it doesn't take you off to the contact us form where you're gonna wait a little while. You'd contact your rep who you once were in contact with or your team was in contact with. One thing that we wanted to measure here was the increase in the reactivation rate of these stalled opportunities.So this one was really fun to put together and and watch. 
The second one here. So we all spend a lot of time on our advertisements. We spend a lot of time. We spend a lot of money. And what, as a marketer, I have found myself so aggravated that my balance rates continue to be high. And so it's really taking a look at, like, there's so many variables. Is it my messaging? Is it my imagery? Is it my CTAs? What is it? And one thing that we can really focus on was that, okay, when people are coming from this ad, I need to make sure that they have an experience that looks like where they clicked from.
So in this example here, you can see that our main goal here was to increase conversion rates of those display ads. And we have the ad here on the left. And if we didn't personalize the page at all, you came to an Iron Horse page, looked kinda similar, maybe some similar messaging, but we really took it the next step by personalizing and putting in the same imagery. We changed out the predictable messaging, so that matched. And then we use some account tokens to personalize it for the account name there too. So by doing this, it was not, you know, five different technologies coming together. I was using our personalization tool, so, Webflow Optimize, and looking at the UTM campaign. So all I had to do was make sure that that was in the ad, and that's the audience that's all that. So, super simple way to just make a really big impact on those on that audience. 
So there are two of the eight or two of the 10, sorry, experiments that are in the playbook. And we've heard a lot from our clients, and from internally too, is, “Where where do I begin, and and kinda how do I prioritize all of my ideas?” So in the playbook, we have a personalization experiment road map template. And we filled it out with all of the 10 experiments that we have in the playbook. So you can kinda see our thinking as you go through that. But this and you download it, and there's a Your Plays tab that's completely empty.
So as you start to think about those ideas, whether it's a change of a button color, oh, it's as simple as that, or if it's something that belongs to a campaign to a specific vertical. Put in your ideas here and start to fill this out and look at the level of impact. Does it involve dev work? Do I have existing insights on it? What's my hypothesis? So it's just a place to really document your thinking. And then I visit this with my team, and we kinda go through and document some of the insights because, one of the questions that we have as someone was registering for the webinar was, “How do I measure all of this?” And there's a ton of different data that we can look at. And within Webflow Optimize, you can look at how your experiment is doing. And they've got a really cool AI bot that would just kind of press a button, and it tells me how I'm doing. So I don't have to do too much analyzation of that. 
But then I can look at, okay, how is this experiment running on mobile versus desktop? How is this doing in a certain city? So there's a ton of different metrics that you can look at to understand how your experiments are working and get a really good sense of, okay, let's now take this for this one vertical that we were doing it for and shift it over to the second vertical because it's working really well. So anyways, the playbook has been so much fun to create. It launched yesterday, so I hope that it's valuable for y'all as you go through those 10 plays. And, of course, reach out and ask any questions as you do go through that.

Alex Jonathan Brown
27:41 - 28:13
I think it's really important to call out too that the playbook is not theoretical stuff that we created and wrote down, and we're like, yeah. Sure. Go try this. This is what we do at Iron Horse, and it's the text that we use.
And it's been so cool to watch it come together. And I'm very excited that, like, Ellen, you and the marketing team get to show the world a little bit of how the magic gets made.I don't know.

Ellen Smoley
28:13 - 28:15
Yep.

Alex Jonathan Brown
28:15 - 29:29
Okay. So, from there's a ticker. It just popped up. If you wanna download the playbook, just circle back to our poll for a bit. Roughly two thirds of the people who responded have themselves at the intermediate stage. The other third is basic.
Perfect. The perfect kind of place, I think, to hop in and poke around in that playbook. It is super valuable stuff. We're gonna get to questions in a bit. We're gonna run a little overtime, which, you know, that's the last 10 of these have run a little overtime because the conversations are always so good. But before we do that, it is time for my favorite part of Coffee Breaks.
That's our Piping Hot Takes where we give each of our speakers and myself, just a little bit of time. The other two of us are gonna back off, and let you just let us know what one of, if not your hottest, take about it can be about personalization if you've got something else. If you wanna talk about how great the Indiana Pacers have been this season, go for it. But, Guy, we'll give you the floor first. What's your what's your piping hot take?

Guy Yalif
29:29 - 29:56
My piping hot take supports exactly what Ellen was saying earlier. You've been personalizing through targeting and creative in ads and emails for almost twenty years.
It is a small incremental lift to extend that personalization to your website. And, frankly, if you're not, you are probably frustrating your prospects and have a lot of low hanging fruit ready for the picking.

Ellen Smoley
29:56 - 29:58
Short and sweet. I like it.

Alex Jonathan Brown
29:58 - 30:02
Ellen, the floor is yours. What's your piping hot take?

Ellen Smoley
30:02 - 30:24
Yes. So mine is don't let personalization overwhelm you. It's easy to think that there are a bazillion things that you could go do. I think it's fun and exciting, and it's time to kinda get your teams involved and working together. So start small and integrate it into your campaigns little by little, and watch the results. It's really fun.

Alex Jonathan Brown
30:24 - 32:08
So as the person who initially pitched the idea of Piping Hot Takes, one of the reasons I always love when we do it is because everybody has their own definition of piping hot takes, and mine is always much more unhinged than anybody else's. So, two very good, very professional, very thoughtful piping hot takes.
Here comes the wild one. So I don't know how much this happens with current personalization tech. We don't see it nearly as often as we used to. But for a while, a thing would happen where when somebody would come to your page, the first version of the page would load, and then X amount of time later, the personalization would replace it.
Obviously, that's not the ideal case. We would love it if it all just works magically. But here’s the piping hot part: I think there is a value, especially if you are marketing to marketers, especially if you are marketing to people who are interested in this kind of stuff. I think there's value in opening that curtain just a little bit, and being like, oh, yeah. Something magic happened here.
And, like, they are thinking through this process, and they are executing in a way that, like, is a little special. Obviously, ideal case, it doesn't happen. But, don't, I'm so against letting that be a blocker and not a thing that we're gonna keep working to make better. That's me. Like, just just let them, it's fine. It's fine. Nobody really cares that much. It's fine. I guess it's not the hottest take if your takeaway is just, it's fine.

Guy Yalif
32:08 - 32:10
Alex, can I react?

Alex Jonathan Brown
32:10 - 32:10
Yes. Please do.

Guy Yalif
32:10 - 32:56
I love your hot take, and I think you're right that it rarely happens now. It is hard to find examples where it does when people have put things together the right way. Every once in a while, we'll get an engineering team who's like, hold on. Hold on. I used Chrome and I went to 3G and it's slow. That is true because 3G no longer exists, at least in The US. And so everything is slow, including the site. Okay.
That exception aside, I actually think you can take it further and highlight it. You could say, and now we're gonna apply personalization on a timer, or you can allow people to opt in. Right? If you serve multiple segments, you can let them choose. I see some sites doing this. We're like, choose who you are. We're gonna personalize the page as a result if you want to bring it front and center as you were saying.

Alex Jonathan Brown
32:56 - 33:52
It's, thank you for backing up my hot take. Another quick browser-based one, since we're talking about browsers.
I don't know how we feel about Microsoft Edge these days, but if you're gonna be a company that's gonna be like, yeah, we need to make sure this works everywhere in every place, just pick someone on your team and be like, “Sorry, you're gonna take a bullet. You should primarily work in Edge.”
So we see these things as they come up, and it's not, oh, did we make it all the way to the end of the process and then we realized nobody checked whether or not this works in Firefox? That's not the time to do it. Just have somebody whose job it is to, like, spend all day in there.
Okay. Enough enough of my rants. We do have some questions from the audience. We'll go through those quick, and then we'll get wrapped up. Open to the floor. What's the number one thing a brand needs to do to unlock personalization? You know? Easy.

Ellen Smoley
33:52 - 34:19
Well, I'll start. I think that Guy answered it earlier, and it's really understanding your audience journey. So nobody likes a spider chart. But if you look at them inside of your GA and you're understanding what are your highest visible pages, where is your audience coming from, kinda start there understanding some of those journey points. And, I think that's the normal place to start. Who is your audience and what are they doing?

Guy Yalif
34:19 - 35:02
I'll build on what Ellen said then, but cop out and take three. Customer insight, exactly what Ellen was talking about. And sometimes folks say, I can't do this yet. I need to go do some big study. I think those are great. You also already know a lot about your customers and can activate that.
Two is empowerment in the org, which we talked a bunch about to test, fail quickly, and learn. And three is just a tool to free up marketing to run quickly without breaking the brand or the site.
We might have lost Alex for a minute. Ellen, should we try to go after the next one?

Ellen Smoley
35:02 - 35:13
Yes, Guy. So the next one we have is, well, I think okay. So how do I manage the metrics within personalization?

Guy Yalif
35:13 - 35:44
Do you wanna take that one first or shall I give it a crack? 

Ellen Smoley
35:14 - 35:15
Give it a crack. 

Guy Yalif
35:15 - 35:44
Okay. I think, speed and then lift. I think, subjectively, you can show execs improved experiences. They're like, oh, this is better. But, ultimately, you want to be evaluated on how rapidly are you learning, because that plus the customer insight inevitably results in lift. To our earlier discussion, it's not lift every single day because most tests don't work. How about you, Ellen?

Ellen Smoley
35:44 - 36:27
I mean, I think that within, Webflow Optimize. Oh, getting some feedback from you Alex.
No worries. I think within less well optimized, there are a ton of different things that you can measure. And so managing the metrics is really starting with what is your hypothesis. What were you anticipating that you were going to change when you set out to do this experiment? And don't get overwhelmed by having all of those amazing data points at your fingertips. Really focus on, if my hypothesis was I'm creating this test to increase more conversions, take a look at that first, and then start to unpack the rest of that data. So really think about that hypothesis throughout the whole experiment.

Guy Yalif
36:27 - 36:33
Totally resonates. Alex, we just covered the question that came in about how do I manage metrics with personalization.

Alex Jonathan Brown
36:33 - 36:40
Amazing. Thank you so much for hopping in as my laptop randomly shut off, and now I'm on my phone.
It's, the future's a wild place to exist. I think that's as good a place as any to go ahead and wrap us up. Before we do that, Guy, if you wanna learn more about you or what you're working on, where can they do that?

Guy Yalif
36:57 - 37:09
I would invite you to go to webflow.com and download our state of the web report where we surveyed 500 marketing execs about what they're doing, and I'd be delighted to continue the conversation directly on LinkedIn.

Alex Jonathan Brown
37:09 - 37:21
Ellen, I know I know our plugs. If you wanna learn more about what Ellen and I are doing, it's over at ironhorse.io. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. But, Ellen, one more time, let people know about the playbook.

Ellen Smoley
37:21 - 37:48
One more time. So the playbook is 10 really great plays that have been tried and tested, and we've done it for ourselves and for our clients there.
Thanks, Todd, our amazing Ops Manager who makes all these run smoothly. Thanks for putting that there. So, yes, download it, and then reach out to me if you have any questions. We've been working on this for the past couple of weeks. I've thought about it a lot. So if you have any questions, just reach out to me. I'd love to talk about it.

Alex Jonathan Brown
37:48 - 38:09
I can't recommend the playbook enough. I wasn't involved. I got to read it, and getting to do that as a reader was a delightful experience. Guy, Ellen, thank you again both so much for taking the time.
Everybody who joined us, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, break's over. Let's get back to work. Bye, everybody.

Ellen Smoley
38:09 - 38:10
Bye.

Guy Yalif
38:10 - 38:11
Bye.