Create Endless Personalisation Possibilities with Sitecore

What Is Personalisation?

Personalisation is a technique that allows you to display targeted and relevant content to your website visitors. You can choose to personalise based on your visitor’s characteristics such as location, gender, content preferences, or you can personalise based on their behaviour such as their level of engagement or their current and previous actions on your website.

Why Is It Important?

In today’s world where customers are flooded with an abundance of content, personalisation is the key to a better and more efficient user experience. Personalisation helps you gain insights and data about your website’s visitors to better respond to their needs and offer them tailored experiences.

According to a study by Instapage, 75% of customers feel frustrated when websites content is not personalised. This is not surprising as 91% of consumers surveyed mentioned being more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.

How Can You Implement Personalisation?

Using Sitecore’s Digital Experience Platform personalisation tools, marketers and content producers can easily personalise their offerings. However, before using the personalisation features of Sitecore, the most important thing to do is to define the purpose of your digital marketing efforts.

Once your purpose has been defined you need to create actionable marketing objectives. To do this, you need to consider "why" your visitors have come to visit your website?. What are they trying to achieve and how can you align this with your company’s strategic marketing objectives?

For example let’s say that you want to increase the number of forms completed by 30% - your actionable marketing objective would looks like this:

"Increase the number of form completions by 30%."

In another example, let’s say that you also want to personalise the content for your visitors that have watched a demo video. The next action would be to show a thank you page with your product and price plans.

Sitecore Goals

There are many ways to personalise in Sitecore however this example uses Sitecore Goals.

Sitecore’s digital goals are activities you want your website visitors to accomplish by the end of their visit, they act as key performance indicators. Sitecore goals have two main purposes; measure and track engagement or/and in this instance, as a personalisation tool. Some examples of Sitecore goals include:

• Download a brochure
• Watch a video
• Completing a form
• Visiting a particular page
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Completing an order

Let Us Show You How To Create a Personalisation Rule

In this example, let's say we want to show personalised content based on whether the ‘Contact Us’ form is completed on a website.

1. Create the Sitecore goal

   Head to the Marketing Control Panel, navigating to ‘goal’ in the content tree and select “insert goal”.

   
   

2. Insert the goal

   In this example the goal is for the Contact Us form. You can also assign an engagement value point for the goal being actioned. Learn more about engagement value points here.

   
   

3. Associate your goal with a content item

   Now that your goal is set and published, head to Content Editor or the Experience Editor to associate your goal with your content item. As mentioned, in this example we want to associate the goal with the ‘Contact Us’ form so the goal is triggered when the form is completed.

   
   

4. Now, it’s time to personalise!

   Head to the Experience Editor and select the component that you want to personalise. For our example, we want to remove the form for the visitors who have already completed it and show them personalised content. This happens when a visitor returns to the page, the form isn’t visible to them anymore, allowing for additional space to display other personalised content.

   
   

5. Create and set the personalisation rule

   Click on the personalisation icon to navigate to the personalisation editor. Because we are personalising based on a goal, we need to choose the Sitecore rule ‘where the specific goal was triggered during the current visit’ to ensure the correct rule and trigger is set. You can also add a second rule to include past visits to personalise if someone is coming back on your website on another day.

   As the final step you can then select what content you want to show and what content you want to hide when this rule is triggered.

   
   

6. Test, Test, Test

   Probably the most important step! Use Explore mode to test and simulate your personalisation or complete your testing manually in an incognito window once it’s all published.

As you can see the possibilities are endless when it comes to personalising content, there are hundreds of out of the box personalisation rules available in Sitecore. So don’t be afraid to get creative and engage your visitors in a totally new way.

If you want to learn more about personalisation or need our help to personalise your website, get in touch and book a consultation today!

- Esme Levi