Personalization Quick Start Creating a Unique Digital Experience for Every Consumer By John Carione, Acquia
Personalization Quick-Start Creating a Unique Digital Experience for Every Consumer Table of Contents Introduction.... 3 Tools of Personalization... 4 Innovative Taxonomy... 5 Drupal Modules Take Site Personalization to the Next Level... 7 Introducing Acquia Lift... 9 Conclusion... 11 2 Personalization Quick Start
Introduction In the days before digital, marketing used a blunderbuss approach and often missed the mark. A single campaign was created and sent out to the world to consume, whether that was direct print marketing or even email. With the growing sophistication of consumers and the hyper competition of today s digital marketplace, the one size fits all approach no longer works. Personalization on the web isn t a new topic. When visiting Amazon.com or a handful of other B2C retailers today, you are getting a personalized experience. There are a lot of tools out there today. What many organizations seeking to personalize their digital experience don t understand is that Drupal has the capability to provide advanced personalization. What is required today is the right message, to the right customer (segment), at the right time (context). Personalization on the web can be split into several categories, and we will review each, including an overview of what is required for implementation. This ebook will serve as a best practices guide for leveraging personalization to build your brand and customer experience. John Carione is the Senior Director for Solutions Product Management at Acquia focused on helping customers create amazing digital experiences delivered on the Drupal platform. John is responsible for understanding and crafting customer requirements for delivering unified web experiences in the cloud that span content, community, and commerce along the full spectrum of the customer journey. Prior to Acquia, John held a variety of Product Marketing and Corporate Development positions at both Adobe Systems and EMC. John holds an Engineering degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. 3 Personalization Quick Start
Tools of Personalization There are a number of tools required that must work in concert to ensure the right message gets to the right consumer at the right time. Some are automated and some manual. Let s take a look at a few of the more popular types of tools in use today: Testing. Before you begin your personalization effort, it s important to test elements on your page to understand which ones are performing well. Tools such as Visual Website Optimizer allow you to run tests with ease for messaging, banner ads, forms, videos, images, and so on. There are two main ways to test content, messaging, or offers. One is A/B testing, which allows you to test two or more elements by swapping them out to see which is more successful. You can even test two different designs or layouts for a microsite campaign or product launch. You might test different advertising images, videos, headline messages, promotional offers, or even two different forms. The second, Multi-variate testing (MVT), is even more advanced and offers multiple elements on a page to determine which permutations or combinations of different elements offer the best result. Using these personalization tools together can help transform your business. User Profiling. With this tool, you can create extensible customer profiles that include offline data, such as product holdings, credit score, time on file, and nonpersonally identifiable information. You can import external customer profiles in real time for heightened relevance. Site traffic can be directed automatically in response to visitor behavior, factoring in variables such as time of day, email communications, or product promotions. You can also connect to Business Intelligence (BI) tools, data warehouses, and other third-party systems, such as CRM and marketing automation. Specific actions taken during a visit include click history or frequency and monetary value of previous purchases. Segmentation. This is the art of grouping together customers who have similar tendencies, interests, and purchasing habits. Segmentation can be delivered out of the box, detected automatically using machine learning, or created and refined manually. Segments can come from information, such as demographics and weather, or proprietary data, such as customer IDs, geolocation, or product reviews. Targeting. This is the ability to take a piece of content and map it to the right user or segment. Content targeting can also be predictive (automated) or manual using a rules engine. For manual targeting, digital marketers can create rules that expose particular pieces of content within the users context (who are they, what are their interests, what have they purchased). Automated or predictive targeting can be combined with testing so that it s easier to determine the most effective content for different offers and to mine data from visitors behavior (demographics, click throughs, weather, locations, referring sites, big data, and more) to identify the best targeting opportunities by segment and then apply variations. Using any one of these capabilities on its own as a digital marketing tool can be effective, but using them all in concert can be transformational for your business 4 Personalization Quick Start
Innovative Taxonomy Precise, innovative taxonomy can be effective in converting new viewers into returning visitors. Simple taxonomy-based personalization is available using Drupal. President Obama s donation page surrounding his presidential campaign in 2011 is a great example of this. This page was able to determine if you had been to the site previously, and if you had, it recommended that you show your support through a donation of your choice. This brilliant use of personalization led to successful campaigning because of the resulting funds his team received by this site s clear execution of simple taxonomy. If your organization is just starting to dip its toe into the water on personalization in Drupal, one way to get started is by leveraging metadata about a particular user to deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time. By tapping into users stated personal attributes (their interests, skills, and so on), digital marketers can decide what content should be shown and increase online engagement. Let s take a look at a fictitious travel interest community, World Travel Nexus. WTN is a site that uses community and rich content to drive travel package sales. Below is the default view of the homepage for someone s initial visit to the site. Next, if we log in as an authenticated travel site member, we see in the image to the right that the layout and content mix of banner ads on the page change. This page is now tailored to a particular user who has offered 5 Personalization Quick Start
explicit attributes about herself when filling out her user profile. In this case, she prefers travel to warmer climates, so the items about Europe have been removed and replaced with more engaging content. The result is that this visitor will be more likely to take action (watch a video, fill out a form, make an online purchase, and so on). Drupal automatically reacts to this contextual information and presents optimized content to the user. Since Jennifer has listed tropical as one of her areas of interest in her profile her experience on the site reflects that preference. This is considered explicit personalization, which uses the user s personal information, in this case a particular travel interest. Drupal, with its node-based architecture, is a great system for delivering dynamic, personalized content that allows brands to generate new demand for their product and services by serving up highlytargeted content to individuals. Drupal has also displayed a contest promotion automatically on the page based on the personal interests Jennifer explicitly expressed. In this case, the promotion is for a featured vacation package. Once Jennifer clicks on the contest and fills out the form, that list can be used as a segmented group for targeted messaging, specific content, or other promotions. This was a very simple example, but sometimes that is the key to success. Overall, for some organizations, the simple taxonomy-based personalization shown here may be enough as a first step into the world of improved engagement. 6 Personalization Quick Start
Drupal Modules Take Site Personalization to the Next Level If you ve already taken advantage of Drupal taxonomy terms to increase engagement on your website, you may be ready for the next step of more advanced targeting and segmentation using personalization modules. In the following two examples, large organizations have used Drupal modules to identify like users and then present them with targeted content. These customers have also integrated with best-of-breed technologies, such as Google Analytics for web tracking and email automation to send targeted email correspondence. Humana, a Fortune 500 healthcare company, contracted with Digital Bungalow to deliver a Drupal microsite with personalized content for its customer base at MyWell-Being.com. The website goals were to self target content that would bubble up to users on the site, based on their interests. The first level of information gathering is the registration of users and their profiles, the second is an interactive assessment to find the members interests. The third level captures how the registrant interacts with content: reading, bookmarking, sharing, and so on. Based on prior research, Humana believed that members of the site were much more likely to become and stay Humana subscribers. Deeper analysis showed that a number of distinct user groups were coming to the website, each with their own needs and interests. The existing website and content marketing strategy were tailored to the average user. To execute website personalization, Humana drove existing users to a personal wellness assessment, which gave Humana information on the users needs and interests. Humana hypothesized that personalizing website content for users based upon demographic and click data would enable them to increase website relevance, user engagement, and frequency of visit. When users register for the site, their demographic data is used to predict what their interests will be. Finally, users can manually edit their settings to change the type of content they see on the site. 7 Personalization Quick Start
Ultimately, this enables Humana to map visitors to others with similar demographics and behavioral profiles. The Drupal Web Experience Management (WEM) module, built by Digital Bungalow, offers personalization controls throughout the site, not buried in a user profile page. Each personalization component is a configurable block and can be rearranged based on context. As Humana creates segments with the segment builder, visitors are identified within raw segments such as Health, Finance, Retirement Activities, and so on. Initially visitors are given default content, which targets new visitors to the site with no click activity or users who have yet to be modeled. Next, once visitors have been identified as part of a predetermined segment, such as healthcare, based on segments attributes: Demographics. Male or Female, Under 60 tracked Site Activity. Users who have predominantly clicked on health-related content. both web and email (via Mailchimp integration) featured content is weighted toward new health content. Drupal is an excellent system for integrating solution completer technology for personalization, such as marketing automation, email campaigns management, or web analytics. This type of segment building personalization is a good next step for those looking to create segments based on rules and then map specific content to those segments returning to the site. 8 Personalization Quick Start
Introducing Acquia Lift The days of one-size-fits-all marketing are over, and hyper-personalization is the new norm. Digital marketers and site owners are being asked to do more with less to engage customers, segment their audience, and offer highly tailored content. Acquia Lift provides the right content, at the right time through automation that serves the most relevant content to the site visitor. Today s sophisticated consumers, thanks to personalized sites like Netflix or Amazon, are accustomed to a new level of engagement that seems to have been built with them in mind. Being able to deliver this personalized digital experience has been a difficult challenge, and even harder to scale. Acquia Lift has arrived to simplify personalization, empowering marketers and site builders to build immersive and automated personalized digital experiences from the ground up with adaptive virtual learning, new and engaging campaigns and content, increased conversions and revenue, and improved engagement. Specifically, Acquia Lift accomplishes this by understanding the context of the user at a particular moment in time and providing the most appropriate content for that site visitor. There are a variety of different testing and targeting options at the site owner s disposal natively within the Drupal interface. These options enable the site owner to do both simple A/B and more complex multivariate testing and then report back the results to aid in establishing the most effective content. Digital Marketers can test different options randomly for content on various marketing offers, such as videos, forms, banner ads, articles, or hero images, and mine visitor behavioral data to identify the best targeting opportunities and apply testing variations. Marketers can also choose to employ random testing or run tests in adaptive mode. User contexts can be applied to the tests to allow machine algorithms to learn which segments are responding positively to which content. Once site owners have decided they want to graduate from pure Testing to more advanced Targeting techniques they can choose to employ either Explicit Targeting, Automated Targeting, or both in a hybrid deployment. Explicit targeting is rules-based targeting that offers a site owner the ability to display specific content to specific users. Automated targeting uses the adaptive mode during the iterative testing phase to match user contexts with specific winning content and then map that content or page to new users coming to the site for the first time. To close the loop, integrated reporting offers real-time uplift and conversion statistics over baseline metrics to help understand which of your projects are performing, or underperforming, and where to double down on success. Perhaps most importantly, it offers deep insights into campaigns that aren t performing so you don t have to continue to spin your wheels creating offers that aren t resonating. 9 Personalization Quick Start
Acquia Lift achieves all of this through deep integration with the Drupal platform and repository so there is no need to recreate content in a shadow content management system. The site owner has fewer maintenance requirements since the JavaScript tagging doesn t have to sync between systems; the presentation layer is entirely cached and rendered in Drupal. Since this interface for creating a personalized experience is native to the application, content options for testing and targeting across the full spectrum of the customer are at the marketer s fingertips. This means there are fewer obstacles to speed and success. The benefits for marketers and site owners are far reaching. Acquia Lift puts marketing on autopilot at the appropriate times. Marketers can create content for their target market and post it to their site, and Acquia Lift applies user-based knowledge and virtual learning, based on the visitor s behavior and profile, to continuously improve personalized experiences. By tracking users and attributes, Acquia Lift builds intelligence over time, understanding what content types convert for which user profiles. Marketers design content and sit back while Acquia Lift drives relevant interactions that convert. Acquia Lift also provides analytics so that marketing can learn which content types drive revenue by audience, and then accelerate development of similar content types while retiring those that don t work. Acquia Lift always selects the winning content that will increase conversion. Acquia Lift lets marketers scale the 1:1 conversation, so they can get back to creating great content and let the proven statistical techniques and data drive individual experiences. Marketers recognize the unprecedented opportunity for benefitting from data, but manually mining and interpreting is impossible at scale. Acquia Lift automatically optimizes the data to improve and maximize contextual relevance. Acquia Lift gives marketers more time for creativity, freeing them from time spent as a data jockey. 10 Personalization Quick Start
Conclusion Personalization is rapidly becoming a staple of every brand s digital strategy. Getting the right information at the right time to the right customer or prospect is the best way to ensure an effective digital experience. As technology continues its rapid evolution, your brand also will require continual reinvention to recognize and present personalized choices. Examine your brand strategy and your vision for customer success. Are these the same as they were 10 years ago before any social media platform was created? Do you understand what customer segments you re serving and what you can do to engage them individually and more effectively increase conversions? Use analytics and customer feedback to build your brand, creating personalized experiences so that new visitors will follow. Continue to innovate and think about how you can personalize your content using some of the methods described in this ebook to improve the way you connect with your consumers. If you re engaging with each visitor as if he is your only visitor, you ll be on the path to success. Call us and let s talk about how we can get your first site up and running today! 888-922-7842 Learn more acquia.com LETS TALK 11 Personalization Quick Start www.acquia.com SKU 0388-140218-EBOOK