Revolutionizing Your Digital Strategy with Sitecore Personalization

Personalization matters now more than ever. Gone are the days when consumers did not expect any personalized recommendations based on their purchases. Treating customer experiences as "one size fits all" does not work anymore and is counterintuitive for businesses looking to drive customer loyalty and bottom-line revenue. The era is followed by a personalization competition between brands when the customers expect elite experiences. That’s where Sitecore comes into play. Let’s look at how Sitecore impacts personalization and drives business growth.

The Power of Personalization

Business leaders and marketers looking to drive business growth, choose Sitecore as their Digital Experience Platform (DXP), due to its robust personalization capabilities. Sitecore XP, equips teams with the ability to deliver focused and relevant content to their audience by creating rules that cater to different goals, criteria, or engagement plans.

But how are brands harnessing Sitecore’s power to drive growth?

Targeting and personalization go hand in hand for digital marketers looking to elevate the customer experience. While content reigns queen, brands are now taking a deeper look into how to make content more relevant to each end user. From the layout of the page, to the images shown or products recommended, every part of the digital experience is created with a special focus on the consumer's preferences, based on two types of personalization.

Sitecore’s platform uses both an implicit and explicit approach to personalization. Lets understand these two first:

Implicit Personalization

Implicit personalization focuses on the visitor's behavior. This feature analyzes what pages they are viewing, what links did they click on and what links garner their attention? All these activities imply an interest. Implicit personalization makes use of these activity stats and uses the results to display relevant content that may be accompanied with a message such as 'You might be interested in this..."

Explicit Personalization

On the other hand, explicit personalization is based on definitive information such as a regional location, for example. Now you can dive deeper into personalization by continuous tracking of implicit and explicit user behavior. Sitecore delivers all the tools to create complicated personalization scenarios to drive your consumer to the path of conversion. With a simple model that evolves, you and your team can define the elements of your content and curate user journeys. Over some time, as you get more familiar with personalization and understand what works, you can create greater sophistication and align the right strategy and objectives.

Leverage Sitecore Personalization to Improve Customer Experience and Drive Revenue: Here’s how to do it.

Personalization is never one-and-done. It is about continuous experimentation and testing. It requires looking at quality and abundant data, being creative, and seeing the experience from the customer's point of view.

In 2010, NYRR, or New York Road Runners embarked on such a journey toward customer experience journey mapping for delivering more powerful and structured digital experiences. With well-planned digital business transformation journey, it succeeded to achieve 400% growth. Icreon assisted NYRR with a perfect blend of strategy, ecommerce, operations, and future thinking.

Here are some useful tactics to get started with personalization.

1. Begin with a Plan and Commit to it

Personalization is a long-term game that requires commitment. While you may be eager to jump right in, planning is a must. Be sure to determine and set goals; understand who you are delivering personalization to and why; and set measures of success.

2. Set Realistic Timelines

Setting realistic timelines for reviewing and improvising your personalization simultaneously is key. Know that one cannot achieve their end-goals with a single effort. When you’re personalizing, develop shorter milestones with realistic goals. Don’t forget to consider the situation if the plans don’t come out as planned. After making careful consideration and realistic goals, implement personalization in batches to keep a track of progress and success metrics.

3. Learn, and Learn More

Getting started with personalization requires a steep learning curve. Within Sitecore XP there are many nuances to consider. Fortunately, there are several resources available to help you out. To get started, consider connecting with a partner, or a Sitecore trusted agency who can supplement your team with the resources and knowledge to maximize your Sitecore investment.

4. Identify Impactful Use Cases

There are plenty of use cases available for personalization. As mentioned above, deciding who you are delivering experiences to and why, is a crucial step. Think about value for the end-user, always.

5. Re-evaluate and Do Better than Before

The journey to personalization is best performed through an evolving and reiterative process where you can introspect the triumphs of your past efforts and make any tweaks to improve further. Learn from your experience and start at it again. Sitecore's personalization is driven by explicit and implicit behavior. It allows you to design a unique journey for customers based on behavioral trends. It is best to start with proper planning and document the personalization journey.

6. Reinforce Personalization

Personalization itself is easy, but reinforcing the customization and continuous effort to deliver even better experience is a challenging task. Once the personalization is implemented, know how to keep the personalization momentum in pace, and reinforce the experiences to continuously deliver, prosper and evolve the business.

Driving Brand Advocacy and Growth with Sitecore

Successful companies have raised the bar for customer experience, starting with the very first interaction. But that is only the beginning. Post-purchase behaviors are usually where customers get to know about your brand and see if you are going to create relevant experiences to build trust. To maximize your efforts, Sitecore's broad set of capabilities can craft an impeccable CX and successful marketing campaigns. Meaningful engagement and strong customer relationships should be the focus of any e-commerce site.

When done right, this leads to an improved conversion rate and increased revenue and overall better customer experience. Explore Icreon’s Digital Transformation Services.