How to stop being ignored online after 7 seconds using personalization at scale on your website.

Without a lot of work, you can create an almost unlimited amount of variations of your own website catering to specific people.

Three, two, one, and action! It's all high budget here. Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. Today, I'm delighted to have Sander Nachtigall. I should say goedemiddag, Sander, because you're joining us from Amsterdam.

I do, I do.

Goedemiddag, and Sander, you have a company called Unless, and I'm really interested in this because you've got what seems to be a very interesting way of accomplishing personalization at scale on websites. So can you tell us what sort of problems are you solving for business owners?

Yeah, let me start with that. Before I start, you guys will probably have to understand that I'm a product guy, so I will probably talk much about the product and how much I love that. So if you have any more sales-related questions or anything, please interrupt me and feel free to do so. Well, the problem that we solve, it can be divided in like the real problem that we want to solve versus maybe some practical problems that we solve today. But in the end, we want to solve a really big problem. And I think the big problem here is that on the internet, the attention span of people is actually very, very short. And the result of that is that most of the people that visit your website, they will probably leave without doing whatever you want them to do. do. And also the data says the same thing, right? Because globally, I think conversion rates sit at approximately 1 to 2% for the average e-commerce venture. And that's a terrible number because it literally means that only 1 out of 100 people does whatever you want them to do. We figured that face-to-face people do much better, right? So if you ask the average salesperson who does account-based marketing, I'm pretty sure they will tell you that their conversion rates are more like at the scales of 30 to 40%, which is like a healthy conversion rate for a human being. Also, if you like to think about it in a different way, if you go to a bar and talk to somebody randomly, I don't think you will drop out of the conversation within 8 seconds because that's what people do on the internet. They spend like well below 10 seconds on each given domain. People, humans, they're much better at this. The reason that they're so much better at this is because they adapt their narrative to whomever they're talking to. They basically personalize their pitch. And we were thinking at some point about 3 years ago that maybe if we would play our cards right, we could make websites behave similarly. So basically make websites behave like humans. So that became our giant goal. We want to change the internet from a static publication medium that it is today into more of a conversation, like a talk that you have with your best friend or with your favorite salesperson.

I love that idea that people would stop listening to you after 8 seconds. Socially, that would never happen, right? So how do you transform the web experience, which as you said really is just publishing online, into Conversations and engagement?

Well, you know, how people do it is that they— we are capable of— we have empathic skills. Basically, we can read whomever sits in front of us. And accordingly, we have the verbal capacity to be flexible enough to change whatever we want to say, to make it shorter, to make it longer, to use different words. So if we could put empathy into a machine, and then also build some sort of structure that could change the content of any given website into something that would be more relevant to the visitor, we would already be there. So that's what we built. What our product does, what Unless.com does, is we first use machine empathy to figure out who sits in front of the keyboard. And we do this in several different ways. You can think of it as the simple stuff that A/B testing platforms also use, like contextual stuff. Where do you come from? What time of the day is it? Is it the weekend or not? Did they come through a certain campaign or something like this? You can think behavioral stuff like what did I click? What did I view? What am I interested in? And then we offer profile segmentation based on CRM integrations where you can add additional stuff to a visitor profile, like everything you know about your prospect, right? If you use Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever, you can connect that to Unless.com And then you can sync this information to us, so we will also know what our visitor has, you know, what a visitor looks like in your database. And then additionally, because this is all the easy stuff, right, you could probably find this at companies like Optimizely or whatever, but what we do, we add qualitative empathy to it, so we do predictions. For example, We try to figure out what the attention span of a person is. We try to figure out what the engagement factors are. We try to predict the stickiness of the session. Is this person going to leave or not? And of course, we estimate the lead score. Is it a hot lead or a cold lead? Is he going to buy or not? And how can you use this? Well, you can think about it like how you would use it in a sales conversation. Like if you as a salesperson look at the person who's sitting in front of you, and you know that he wants to buy something, but he's also looking at his watch, what do you do? You quickly make him a good offer, right? An offer that he can't refuse and he has to accept it within 10 seconds. You can do the same on your website, because if we figure out that this high-profile lead that's now visiting your website has an enormous probability to buy something and is a very hot lead, and at the same time has a very low attention span factor, we can simply add content components in his face that says something about, you have to really do this now, and we give you an additional discount if you do so. And that's the kind of stuff you can do with these kinds of audiences. Well, so if you first classify your traffic, that's what we do, that's the machine empathy part, then of course you have to create experiences that are slightly different or more relevant to this person. We do this in technically very clever ways that I will not talk about because we only have 20 minutes. And if you get me started, we're here for at least an hour. But what we can do for you is we can change existing content like pictures, headlines, that kind of stuff. We can add additional components like pop-ups, bars, and all these simple things. And even we can add additional feature blocks in your website. So you can basically add you know, like industry-specific recommendation blocks on your homepage if you figure out that your visitor comes from a certain industry and things like that.

Is someone using, in effect, the Unless.com sort of content management system plugged into their existing website, or is it freestanding? How does that work?

We believe in loosely coupled applications, and that's a technical term for something you could throw away at any point you like. So because we feel that it's better to not intervene with your existing systems, because if we would do that, then our implementation cycle would be very long and we wouldn't be able to serve that many customers. And also it's much safer for the CTO to actually, you know, try something if he knows that he can take it out at any point in time. So Unless works very simple. It's just one JavaScript snippet in your website. And that will give you the entire power of what I just described. The integration will be with your existing systems will only be like this. And if you want to integrate, for example, your CRM system, all you have to do is go to the backend of unless.com itself, press the Salesforce button, and then say connect, and then authenticate against your server, and then it will work.

Yeah, that sounds— it's a very quick in and out in terms of implementation. In terms of technology and how difficult it is to use, is this something that your average entrepreneur SME can use, or do they have to have a CTO or CIO to understand how this all works?

We're developers ourselves, right? So we basically built something that anybody can use. Now, our typical audience for selling this is either people who are very interested in optimizing the user experience of their own website very quickly, or marketers and salespeople who do account-based marketing or conversion rate optimization themselves. The idea is that if you have a little bit of knowledge about, qualitative knowledge about how you want your website to look and behave, you should be able to use it.

And in terms of the content then, you talk about all these blocks of different content and different pop-ups. From a practical point of view, would I as a user log in and pre-enter and build like a catalog of different assets that are triggered by Unless's understanding of the user on the website? Is that how that works?

That's a very good question, and it's more or less how it works. But before you start thinking that that makes it a lot of management and work, that's— we thought about this, right? So it's actually not so much work, and how we pull that off is something that could be called personalization at scale. It means that you can, without a lot of work, you can create an almost unlimited amount of variations of your own website catering to specific people. And it works like this because our system works with audiences, right, and audiences are typically not even very large. They can be very small subsections of your traffic, for example, people belonging to a certain industry or coming from a certain location or behaving in a certain way. But people, like real people, they can fit within multiple audiences at the same time. So if you fit multiple audiences at the same time, it may well be that on the page that you're visiting, multiple experiences that are only suitable for those audiences will trigger at the same time. So that means that, you know, if you only have one specific audience with one experience, you need to make one experience. But if you have, for example, 10 different audiences with 10 experiences on your homepage, it's already a million different perturbations in theory, because it's 2 to the power of 10, right? So with only 10 experiences, you can create an almost, for most people at least, almost unlimited amount of different variations already. Because it's not like you need to create an entire page variation. It's a single experience that fits in the page and will be shown or not depending on your audience definitions. So it's very easy to create a highly personalized website without a lot of work.

And what about integrations, Sander? This sounds amazing. Can you just talk about the integrations with people's kind of ecosystem of digital channels? Because the website doesn't stand alone anymore. or SMS, for example?

No, we see, we see, um, we entirely focused on, on web user interfaces, right? So that means that other, um, you probably are even already using other tools for, for example, personalization of your email outreach or something like this. This is a specialization in itself, so we, we're very glad to leave it there. So we consider the, the personalized outreach in other platforms, we integrate with it in the sense that that we will give you tools to make sure that a personalized outreach will also lead to a personalized website funnel. So for example, if you send out an email to a specific person, you can add a dynamic code in there, which will allow us to recognize this person specifically, which means you can hyper-personalize your narrative towards this single contact if you like to. You don't have to, of course, but you can. So especially if you have very high-profile customers, it becomes worth it to create a specific funnel for them. So for example, I can imagine if you cater to really high-level companies, you may want to create like a jumbotron picture on your website that shows their office and only highlights a specific product that's actually suitable for them and not the other products that you have that are maybe not suitable for this particular company.

Are you doing any work, Sander, in kind of the COVID preparedness notifications area for health facilities, for example?

It's funny that you say that because it's actually how we became really popular this year at certain big companies of ours. What happened is that, of course, for example, in the Netherlands, the COVID situation got out of hand in March somewhere. And some of our customers had to implement COVID notifications depending on the local situation, as you say, and add those notifications to their websites, to their checkouts, to everything they have online. And really the fastest way to do that was to simply use one of our add-on components or inline blocks with notification blocks to just add it to the website in an instant. And that's how they suddenly saw that they could use our product to actually quickly do those things. And now they're using it as their primary way of releasing new features or notifications in general, test the efficiency of that, and then maybe add it to the structural roadmap or not if they want to, but they have the feature immediately. It's for a lot of people to increase the time to market of any change on their website, including COVID notifications.

Yeah, interesting. So you almost sort of prototype either features or content using Unless and then maybe build that into the bigger content management system, the parts that are working. In terms of the kind of clients, Sander, you're in Holland, so are you working locally, regionally? Does the platform unless.com worry about language? Is it globally available? Tell us a little bit about that too.

We figured that we needed a lot of, you know, testing customers really quickly in the beginning, right? Because you want to make the best product possible. So what we did is we did a couple of marketing campaigns about 2 to 3 years ago for people who would be willing to be early adopters and they would be given a lifetime deal. So they took the plunge even without a product, they just believed our blue eyes, so to speak. And we sold about 5,000 accounts in a couple of days. And these people came from everywhere. So currently from this initial batch, over half of the companies are American. And then it's more or less normally distributed as you may expect. So behind the US, which has 50%, there's about 20% UK and then 10% Germany, 5% Russia, something like this. And all these people, they use our system, and we've been building our system based on this initial customer base to make sure it's available equally anywhere in the world. So we distributed our computing capacity across 75 endpoints across the world to make sure it's equally fast everywhere. And also use Russians and Chinese people they use our systems. So it's safe to say that it works in different languages.

Okay, so truly global. And Sand, if people wanted to use the system, what sort of packages and prices are companies or healthcare organizations, local governments looking at?

We normally have a plan structure, right, that comes with a monthly subscription. And the prices start at €500 per month for the business package. Then we have a premium of €999 and enterprise of €1,499. And the difference between those plans is mostly determined by a couple of features, but also by the number of page views that you do. So for example, if you're a B2C retail company, typically you fit into the enterprise plan because they have a lot of page views per month. I think it's 6 million that's included in that package. And if you're a B2B company, typically it's much less. So usually you can fit one of the lower plans. And specifically for the people who listen to this podcast and who mention your name, we can give them a 3-month trial. To make sure that they're actually buying something that works.

Sander, that's very kind. Thank you very much. I'll absolutely make sure to share this with as many people as I can to make sure that happens. And Sander, if people want to find out about you, you're in Holland, you do martial arts and also running a company. So you're an interesting and obviously a visionary entrepreneur as well. How can people find out about you and contact you?

You can do 2 things. It's either my LinkedIn, which I'm sure you will mention, or you can just go to unless.com itself. My direct email address is sonder@unless.com, which is also easy.

And Sander, I think I might have butchered your surname, so perhaps you'd like to say it for us properly, because my Dutch is— although it's in my genes, I'm a quarter Dutch— it's certainly not in my language skills. So give us your surname properly.

My last name is Nachtegaal, and it means nightingale in Dutch.

And, and it seems like you're bringing, like Florence Nightingale, great salvation to many people who need it. So you've been listening to the Speak PR podcast, and I'm sure that you found this interesting. And I'll put this in the show notes. And in the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on personalizing at scale and looking at a great solution like unless.com to help you do that with your website.