A strategic approach to achieve personalization with Sitecore Personalize

What's all that buzz around Personalization?

So you want to buy a product at a store and you visit the specific products section.

When you are trying to find the product of your fit and size and everything is clogged up with no way to determine the sizes without looking into each product individually! What would your experience be? I would be annoyed with the experience!!!

Now imagine that your details were already known to the store owner when you visited. They would showcase products as per your liking, fit, size, etc. Consider the same with an application.

Businesses these days want to personalize their users' experience by providing the right information, products, content, etc. as per the needs, tastes, and preferences of the user.

That's what Sitecore Personalize as a product provides you with.

Personalize lets you define rules and decision matrices based on which a user's experience on the application can be personalized to the extent that the user is provided with an optimized user experience that would in turn enable the business to achieve its organizational goals.

What's the strategic approach to achieving the right personalization strategy for your brand?

Personalization lets you enhance the capabilities by doing experimentation on the go within a strategic user base or providing real-time experiences to the whole user base as per the predefined rule sets or an AI/ML decision model that would trigger based on the User segmentation, behaviors, journey, and so on.

Implementing a personalization would mean defining a rigorous strategy for the application. The following steps need to be considered when defining the personalization strategy:

1. Define the Personalization Goals and Objectives:

It is essential to determine the Goals and Objectives for personalization before performing the implementation.

Defining the goals and objectives for Personalization plays a crucial role in identifying a personalization strategy. This in turn leads to defining the directives for implementing the personalization strategy.

Some examples of Goals would be:

• Increasing conversion rates
• Enhancing user engagement
• Improving customer satisfaction
• Boosting average order value

Once we have identified the goals, we need to ensure that the goals are measured by setting KPI-driven objectives.

For Example:

• Increase conversion rate by 10% within the next six months.
• Enhance user engagement by 5% within the next two months.
• Reduce bounce rate by 15% within the next quarter.
• Increase average order value by 20% within the next year.

The goals and objectives can be useful in determining and measuring the overall scope and outcome of the Personalization strategy.

Goals are directly tied to your brand, business model, area of operations, and field of business and should be strategically aligned with the business.

2. Determine your Audience (Segmentation)

For a successful personalization strategy, it is necessary to determine the audience segments that allow you to tailor content and experiences for different audiences based on their characteristics, behaviors, and preferences.

Some examples of segmentation of audience based on different criteria:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, etc.
• Behavioral Data: Page views, clicks, purchase history, etc.
• Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, etc.
• Technographics: Device types, operating systems, browsers, etc.

3. Create Personas for segmentation

Creating Personas for the user segments is essential in determining the key audience segments along with their preferences and behaviors.

The personas can help in setting up rules based on different preferences and behaviors to support the personalization engine.

For Example:

• New Visitor Persona: Interested in deals and trust-building content.
• Returning Visitor Persona: Interested in personalized product recommendations.

4. Define Rules and Scenarios for personalization

The User personas and business goals help us in determining personalization rules to achieve the goals by targeting the user preferences and behaviors, etc.

Following are some of the methods of defining personalization rules/scenarios:

• Content Personalization: Display different content based on user segments (e.g., new vs. returning visitors).
• Behavioral Targeting: Show relevant products or articles based on browsing history.
• Geo-Targeting: Customize content and offers based on the user's location.

For Example - create rules for different personas:

• New visitors see a welcome message with a discount code.
• Returning visitors see a list of recently viewed items.
• Cart abandoners receive reminders and special offers to complete their purchase.
• Frequent buyers get loyalty rewards and exclusive previews of new products.

5. Implement Personalization (Experimentation or Experiences)

Sitecore provides built-in tools to implement personalization. It can be handy to utilize the built0in tools to implement the personalization strategy:

• Profile Cards and Pattern Cards: Use these to categorize visitors and match them to personas.
• Engagement Plans: Create engagement plans to track and guide users through their journey.
• Rules-Based Personalization: Use Sitecore’s Rule Set Editor to define conditions for displaying personalized content.
• Testing and Optimization: Continuously test and optimize your personalization efforts using A/B testing.

6. Integrate with other systems to enhance personalization

As Sitecore personalize is part of the composable architecture, it is necessary to ensure Sitecore integrates with other systems and leverages data from other applications such as CRM, email marketing, and analytics platforms. This would allow us to get a more comprehensive view of user data and enhance personalization.

For Example:

• Sync with CRM to track customer data.
• Integrate with email marketing to send personalized emails.

7. Monitor and Analyse your Personalization objectives

Use Sitecore’s analytics to monitor the effectiveness of your personalization strategy:

• Engagement Value: Track how well your content is performing in terms of user engagement across channels.
• Path Analyzer: Understand user journeys and identify drop-off points.
• Experience Analytics: Get insights into how different segments interact with your site.

For Example:

• Track engagement value and conversion rates.
• Use a path analyzer to see user flow.

8. Refine, Optimize and Improve

Personalization being an ongoing process demands regular reviews of analytics and data to make adjustments to the personalization strategy. The latest trends and technologies should be used to continuously enhance your strategy.

For Example:

• Analyze data monthly to identify trends.
• Adjust personalization rules based on performance.

9. Training and Governance

Training and Governance play a crucial role in the long-term success of your personalization strategy. It is essential to:

• Regularly train the marketing team on Sitecore updates.
• Establish guidelines for content creation and personalization.

Conclusion:

Sitecore Personalize as a tool provides opportunities to leverage personalization capabilities but needs a proper strategy and data model to provide the best experience models to cater to the needs of businesses and enhance customer experience.

By following this comprehensive strategy, you can effectively leverage Sitecore's personalization capabilities to enhance user experience and achieve your business goals.