Recently, Switch sponsored the Sitecore Trendspot Event in Sydney. This event was an exciting opportunity for Switch to demonstrate our capabilities and how we focus on customer experience optimisation. Largely, our team wanted to take our learnings and experience from our digital transformation projects and demonstrate new, cutting edge technology - presenting to the marketing and technology community the features and techniques which can help maximise the adoption of key Sitecore features that support content and page optimisation.
Data is at the forefront of a customer optimisation strategy. Data is essential to every marketer in order to optimise their digital activities. We knew when we begun our brainstorming for Trendspot that attendees would want to visually see and interact with data. Path analyser in Sitecore was a great way to interface with analytical data as it collects visitor behaviour data and aggregates it into a single interface.
If you’re new to Path Analyser, you can view more information on the Sitecore website.
Path Analyser was selected to be at the forefront of our showcase for the event but without data, Path Analyser is an empty shell. It was easy for us to create dummy data on a demo site but we knew this wouldn’t hit the mark. Rich, real-time data is what attendees want to see. Marketers are already overloaded with meaningless data, why would we show them more? The team looked at collecting and presenting meaningful data for the event across different data touch points - turns out there are a lot! In our world, the simplest solution is often the best. Everyone has a smartphone and everyone has an email, so we landed on the idea of building a responsive designed website built on Sitecore’s Habitat and run a competition!
A competition of skill was the name of the game. The mobile web app would ask a series of questions which Sitecore would track with goals and value for correct answers. As attendees answered the questionnaire, their data would be aggregated into path analyser where we could see the path of questions most frequented, and from the highest value path, the winner would be selected. Behind the scenes, we would set this up on a scalable instance, running on Azure PaaS and the data from each attendee would be represented in (almost) real-time.
Finally, you cannot have all of this rich data and not showcase it on the biggest screen you can fit in the building! Our good friends and client Ricoh delivered an 80 inch interactive touch screen for us at the event. This was a spectacular way to interact with the path analyser data and demonstrate the optimise customer paths to the audience.
Lessons
- Marketing: Create the contact details page at the end of a questionnaire for an attendee to submit - we had very high bounce rate on the first page requesting contact details.
- Tech: Web Form for Marketers (WFFM) can take a bit of custom development for handling questionnaires, so custom web forms were a faster approach in this instance.
- Tech: We had to modify the website config session timeout to collect the data - Lars Petersen at the event mentioned that in-session data (realtime) would be available in Sitecore 9.
Thank you Sitecore for an amazing Trendspot event in Sydney, Australia.
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