Personalization? It s Easy!

Transcription

1 white paper Personalization? It s Easy! How Sitecore Allows Digital Marketers to Create Personalized Web Experiences, Painlessly

2 Table of Contents The Promise of Personalization 1 Sitecore Breaks Down Barriers to a Personalized Online Experience 1 Predictive Personalization 101: A Quick Overview 2 Why Tags, Click Stream and Page Categorization Can t Scale 3 Spotlight: Patterning 4 Building a True 360-degree Customer View 4 Personalization in Action 5 Painless Personalization 5 Extending the Conversation Across Channels 6 Summary 7 About Sitecore 7 Copyright Copyright 2011 Sitecore. All Rights Reserved. Restricted Rights Legend This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore. Trademarks Sitecore is a registered trademark of Sitecore. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

3 The Promise of Personalization With an average conversion rate at just 2.2% 1, and an industry-average acceptable bounce rate of between 20% and 35%, approximately 97.8% of the visitors to any given website are leaving unsatisfied some immediately, others after a moment or two. Are these all the results that the $25.8 billion spent on online advertising in the US in delivered? These statistics indicate that companies spend most of their online marketing budget on attracting visitors just the very first step of what can be a long path to conversion. Should online marketers accept a 2.2% conversion rate as, indeed, acceptable? Increasingly, digital marketing professionals are demanding more. They are adopting personalization solutions to: Save money by focusing on attracting the right visitors, and improving the relevance of the content presented when they arrive at the site. In doing so, savvy digital marketers are measuring relevance by shifting their focus from the quantity of online activity to its quality. Grow revenue by increasing the website s efficiency, by improving the visitor experience. Clearly, most websites have a low persuasion rate. This presents significant room for improving conversions, repeat visits and revenues by making website content more relevant to each unique visitor. Sitecore Breaks Down Barriers to a Personalized Online Experience The Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform merges web content management with digital marketing capabilities, enabling relevant 1:1 conversations that nurture the prospect toward conversion across channels, while personalizing the experience to serve relevant content on those channels. Sitecore Optimizes Personalization and More The Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform helps digital marketers achieve online business goals, and deliver a personalized user experience, by: Providing the flexibility to address unanticipated and evolving requirements Serving up a more personalized and targeted content, features and offers Easily testing, measuring and optimizing website content and features Enabling non-technical content contributors to quickly add and edit key content Effectively managing and standardizing localized versions of the website Easily integrating with external web services and data sources. The latter includes customer relationship management (CRM) system and other databases that function as warehouses for storing customer information, accumulated across various channels throughout the customer lifecycle. The Sitecore solution recognizes that the website is core, but it s part of a larger ecosystem of communication methods. Sitecore s approach allows marketers to shift their focus from getting visitors to the site, to how to meet their needs immediately when they arrive and after they leave, by continuing the conversation thread seamlessly across other channels, such as and mobile. 1

4 This whitepaper explains how the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform allows digital marketers to achieve their goals by effectively leveraging Predictive Personalization, with easy, intuitive tools for non-technical users that scale to accommodate for site growth. Predictive Personalization 101: A Quick Overview Sitecore s Predictive Personalization is based on three tenets: 1. Delivering a relevant experience for each unique visitor on a website 2. Remembering and targeting each visitor in real-time with relevant messaging, according to their specific browsing path 3. Obtaining a better idea of what visitors want based on their implicit and explicit site behavior. Implicit behavior is defined as what visitors are doing on the site, such as the type of pages/categories they are looking at, or the site path they follow. Explicit behavior is demonstrated when visitors take action or submit data, such as voting in a poll, searching for a specific keyword, or filling out a form. Predictive Personalization uses a visitor s implicit behavior to predict what interests he or she may have, and what phase of the buying cycle the visitor may be in, and then presenting relevant, compelling content accordingly. Predictive Personalization also incorporates explicit on-site behaviors to fine-tune the experience. For example, if a visitor chooses I snowboard every weekend in an online poll, that visitor will be targeted with avid snowboarder content. These personalization capabilities start with the moment a visitor arrives on the site; the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform immediately catalogs key digital fingerprint information including: Figure 1: Sitecore immediately recognizes key digital fingerprint data, which can be used with Predictive Personalization based on keywords, location, visitor identification, referrals, campaigns and goals. By creating a relevant experience for each visitor on a website, the possibility and likelihood of conversion automatically increase. Predictive Personalization therefore helps to remove two important obstacles that 2

5 prevent users from making a desired action: 1. It alleviates the need for visitors to consciously think about how to navigate a website, making it easy to return to information they ve previously browsed 2. It builds trust and credibility by using relevant content to show that visitors are understood. Why Tags, Click Stream and Page Categorization Can t Scale Personalization rules can be built using data other than profiling, such as tags on pages, click stream, categorization, etc. However, this method is very difficult to maintain and keep up to date; digital marketers will be constantly adjusting to newly added or modified pages. On a large or global site, the complexity can quickly spiral out of control. For example, if a personalization strategy is based on click stream, the rule may be: If visitor has viewed page X, then show content Y. It s a very simple rule, but if page X is changed to address another target group or a better page is added to the site, all related rules will require adjustment. More rules mean more adjustments; lots of rules translate into a maintenance nightmare. By basing the personalization strategy on profiling, Predictive Personalization offers a far more flexible approach. As new pages are added, they are profiled and immediately begin contributing to real-time personalization. How Predictive Personalization Works: Easy as The visitor is identified. 2. The visitor is classified according to which target group or persona he or she most closely matches. 3. All or part of a web page on the site dynamically changes to show relevant content, bringing the visitor closer to the desired action or response. For a more complete exploration of how Predictive Personalization is implemented, please see the document Profiling and Predictive Personalization with the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform, available online at or by scanning the QR Code to the right. The Profiling and Predictive Personalization guide details an easy seven-step process for getting started with Predictive Personalization: 1. Identify 2. Classify 3. Present Content 1 Identify the WHO and the WHY 2 Configure Profiles 3 Configure Profile Cards & Personas 4 Profile content 5 Configure predefined visitor patterns 6 Create personalization based on patterns 7 Adjust & optimize 3

6 Spotlight: Patterning Particularly when coupled with digital fingerprint information, visitor behavior patterns on a website present a way to both learn about users and their interests, and also to guide content developers to create relevant content. A pattern is predefined in the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform, and is an easy way to recognize how similar a particular visitor is to other typical visitors. The Sitecore system matches a visitor profile in real-time with its closest pattern, making it easier to show relevant, personalized content based on similar behavior or interests. In the Sitecore system, content editors create profile cards, preset collections of profile key values that can be applied to content attributes with patterns. This makes it easier for editors to profile content as part of the content creation process. When Sitecore recognizes a pattern in a visitor based on the content consumed, it can start to personalize the content to that pattern. If a visitor shifts and starts to resemble another pattern, the content can shift also. For example, a car website uses Sitecore to create three user profiles, or personas, called Handyman, Boaster and Family. As a visitor consumes content, the Sitecore system starts to recognize the visitor s pattern. A visitor who matches a Family pattern, for example, will be shown family cars. Profile cards may be used a second way, in which content editors assign profile cards to pages and content items, giving authors a guide that tells them for whom they are creating the content. Building a True 360-degree Customer View Using the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform, companies can gain a much clearer, more complete view of what a specific visitor is doing, and how he or she is consuming content across channels: website, mobile, and social. By creating a consolidated view of customer conversations across channels, the Sitecore system continually builds up its knowledge base, and uses that information to serve relevant and personalized content in all channels. As the system learns more and more, it creates a virtuous cycle that drives more relevance, which drives better engagement and ultimately conversions. The continuous learning can be applied to proactively map out the customer conversation across channels, automating and personalizing the interactions, and catalyzing even more conversions, faster. Push dialogue through newsletters Website behavior Behavior is stored in Sitecore or CRM Figure 2: The Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform allows digital marketers to continuously learn how to better engage visitors at the website, and across all online interaction channels. 4

7 Personalization in Action Sitecore s Customer Engagement Platform combines the best of Sitecore s core Web Content Management product with the power of an advanced digital marketing system. Together, these capabilities allow marketers to create an ideal user experience that is personalized in real-time based on preferences and unique engagement history. The experience starts with Sitecore s automatic geographic IP (GeoIP) lookup, which quickly identifies where a visitor is located. A Sitecore-powered website automatically surfaces content with the right language based on that visitor s location. Predicated by sales history, it then displays hot products that any first-time visitor may be interested in, no matter what country they are from. Painless Personalization Sitecore s intuitive tools help online marketers to easily implement personas distinct user profiles that encompass needs, personality characteristics and online behaviors on web properties. Content editors can instantly apply persona profiles to any given piece of content, right on the page, with Sitecore s easy Personalization Editor. These content values and persona cards are defined within Sitecore graphically, with a series of intuitive sliders and wizards to help match visitors to typical visitor paths and interests. Figure 3: Sitecore s graphical approach to personalization allows digital marketers to quickly create compelling experiences for website visitors. 5

8 As a visitor browses, real-time insight into his or her persona grows such as the type of content the visitor is looking for, and the reason for visiting the site. As the visitor browses the site, Sitecore determines if his or her actions fit a pre-defined persona in the system, such as the Handyman, Boaster and Family personas referenced in the automotive example in Section III. By surfacing an offer that was successful in the past with similar visitors, the likelihood of the visitor completing a targeted action such as requesting a brochure increases. Often visitors like her are just looking and not quite ready to buy. But if a visitor signs up for a newsletter about a specific car model, that indicates active prospect. This action further influences the offers this individual sees, and when they are presented. Extending the Conversation Across Channels Sitecore s advanced digital marketing capabilities put marketers in a better position to provide targeted outbound campaigns. With Sitecore s marketing tools, business users can create and manage nurture campaigns to communicate on a personalized basis with potential customers until they are ready to buy. With the car-buying prospect (a woman who fits the Family persona), the first step is to initiate a pre-defined engagement plan. It starts with sending a targeted newsletter, as she requested, promoting the company s new line of minivans. From there the marketing team can observe any web actions the prospect takes, continuing to nurture her as a prospect through triggered responses that sense and adapt to her behavior. Throughout this process data collected on the visitor is conveniently stored with the CRM system or other customer database, maintaining a record of every interaction. As she clicks schedule a test drive on the mobile version of the nurture campaign, the Sitecore system alerts the sales team at her nearest dealership. And when she arrives to test drive the new minivan, the sales team is informed and ready to help the prospect, providing a positive retail experience and information about financing. Still, the woman isn t quite ready to buy but over the coming months the insights logged by the sales person during the in-store experience enable increasingly personalized engagement with this prospect, raising the likelihood of a sale. This vignette illustrates how the Sitecore solution remembers and builds on the interactions that a company has with each person. It handles the complexity behind the scenes, allowing marketers to focus on growing their business. With Sitecore, anyone on the marketing team can easily fine-tune the cross-channel digital experience to provide each visitor with the right content, at the right time. 6

9 Summary As consumers and businesses increasingly conduct all aspects of purchasing from awareness to transaction, and beyond online, the current 2.2% conversion rate of web visitors into customers urgently requires improvement. The Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform presents an ideal, and readily attainable, remedy. The Sitecore solution merges web content management with digital marketing capabilities, enabling relevant 1:1 conversations that nurture the prospect toward conversion across channels. It leverages Sitecore s unique Predictive Personalization capabilities to improve the experience and serve relevant content across all digital communication channels. For marketers on the front lines of day-to-day online operations, Sitecore s exceptional Predictive Personalization capabilities allow them to: Easily change website design and technology to support the user experience and business strategy best practices Better support business stakeholders to achieve their web project requirements Connect the value of web initiatives and leads to sales, revenue and profit. Together, these benefits improve not just digital initiatives strategic results, but their tactical operations, as well. About Sitecore Sitecore redefines how organizations engage with their customers online, powering experiences that can sense and adapt to a customer s needs to increase revenue and customer lifetime value and satisfaction. Sitecore was the first Web Content Management system (WCM) to incorporate marketing automation, intranet portal, e-commerce, web optimization, social media and campaign management technologies into a cohesive, integrated open platform. Sitecore s software makes it easy for businesses to identify, serve, engage and convert new customers online. Sitecore s broad choice of capabilities enable marketing professionals, business stakeholders and information technology teams to rapidly implement, measure and manage a successful website and online business strategy. Its powerful development platform, integrated marketing automation tools and intuitive editing workspace enables successful websites of all types. Thousands of public and private organizations have created and now manage more than 30,000 dynamic websites with Sitecore including ATP World Tour, Computer Associates, ISS, Lloyd s of London, Microsoft, Omni Hotels, Siemens, Thomas Cook and The Knot. For more information about Sitecore, please visit 7