So many things happened in 2019. We closed a funding round, attended lots of events and conferences (such as Emerce eDay, DMWF, Codemotion, AWS Summit etc.), appeared in podcasts (like HelloMaas), and were featured in many local publications (like the Dutch Financial Times) and international media outlets (such as Product Hunt and TheNextWeb).

Of course, a notable highlight of 2019 was winning the jury’s favorite vote at the Computable Awards in the category Digital & e-Commerce Provider of the Year. Our machine learning prediction technology beat products of many major names from the industry, so it was a proud day for our tiny team. But let’s head on to the really cool stuff!

So what did we do?

Last year’s wrap up post was all about democratizing website personalization, making it accessible for everyone. We opened up shop for thousands of really small customers, mainly to test the waters. In 2019, we began catering to significantly larger customers like CGS, Kruidvat, Prenatal and Kamernet. Working with these people gave us a lot of insights into what customers want - and we acted accordingly.

By aggregating various data sources using our integration library, you can now use your existing knowledge to improve the user experience of your visitors even more. Even more importantly, we took the first steps on our quest to make your websites as empathic as your best sales rep - so now, we offer insights for attention span, engagement levels and stickiness factors to each Unless account.

In short, it is now easier than ever before to turn visitors into hot leads, and hot leads into customers! Let’s dive a bit deeper into all the new features.

Know your leads with Visitor Insights

To offer individualized experiences for all your website visitors is hard without actually knowing all of them. This is why we launched Visitor Insights. It’s a live view on every single visitor of your website. You can find information about a visitor’s last visit, audience memberships, goals achieved, and pages viewed.

This opens up heaven for B2B websites in particular. Using one of our integrations for IP matching (like Clearbit or Kickfire), you can instantly match visitors with company names and full firmographic datasets. All of these will show up in the Visitor Insights and can be used for segmentation in our Audience Builder, and subsequently for personalization of your entire website. Imagine that you can tell different stories to different industry segments, or make different offers to differently sized prospects!

Through our brand new email capture add-ons and the Unless Identify API, you can even connect a visitor profile to an email address. This can be used to power multi-channel personalization. Using one of our integrations, you can now sync identified leads with your favorite email tool or a CRM system, so your communication will be aligned and consistent across all your channels. And these are not the only integrations we launched.

Integrations

So, it is obvious that we announced a lot of integrations this year! Here is just a few:

• Our Google Analytics integration enables users to send data from Unless to their GA accounts.
• The Google Tag Manager Monitor lets you capture and send GTM events to your Unless account - where they become part of the visitor profile and can be used to create audiences.
• As mentioned, segmentation for industry and company type is now super easy. Integrations with Clearbit and Kickfire heighten the level of firmographic personalizations, particularly for our B2B customers.
• Our Slack integration helps sales teams stay up-to-date about new leads incoming on their website.

So, this sure was the year of integrations... and hey, we are probably not done yet! However, to change your headlines and images using all of these data points can be hard. Luckily, we now have many more options than just inline personalizations. For example, you can communicate by means of add-ons.

Add-on library

In the beginning of the year, we began rolling out our smart add-ons. It is essentially a library with dozens of ready-made components that appear on top of your website, whenever you want them to show to specific visitors. The library contains bars, overlays, side-boxes and pop-overs - some of which have specific features. For example, you can use countdowns for special days and campaigns, collect email addresses for newsletters and demos or get to know your visitors better with self-segmentation. And of course, you can style these to look exactly like your website.

Add-ons are particularly useful for messaging when you need to respond to the specific behavior of a visitor. For example, when you detect that he or she is losing interest. But how do you do that? Enter three new predictions!

Predictions, predictions…

Every sales rep knows that besides hard data, you need to read the room by carefully analyzing the body language and unspoken signals of the prospect in front of you. So, you need to empathize with your prospect to be able to tell the right story and make the right offer at the right time. We vowed to let websites do the same.

As a start, we focused on developing a series of statistical and Machine Learning algorithms to predict the behavior of anonymous website visitors. These predictions range from attention span and engagement to stickiness and conversion probability, opening up many new personalization opportunities. Imagine a visitor who wants to buy, but also is in a hurry - you can now simply show a pop-over at that moment to make a quick offer.

So, to put it simply: you can now create individualized experiences that fit the state of mind of your website visitors. Just like you would in a conversation.

2020: individualized stories for your personas

In the year to come, we will keep moving forward relentlessly. We will help you capture leads by telling individualized stories to each and every visitor. This will not only increase your number of leads or your conversion rate - but it will offer your website visitors a more relevant and user-friendly experience.

One peek into the future is already there. Our newly designed dashboard gives a glimpse into what it will look like in the year to come. We will provide you with ready-to-cook recipes for your use case and more automated options that will make your life easier. Firmographic data will be built-in. Our reporting will contain more and more useful insights about your website, your visitors and your leads.

Creating 1:1, personalized experiences will be easier than ever before, using traditional metrics and almost magical empathic traits. Your website will finally become your most effective sales channel!