Helping Play by the Rules Build a Case for Personalisation

Personalisation is now the standard that customers expect. It not only tells your customers that you are listening to them, but you care about them. So how do you deliver an exceptional experience that keeps your customers engaged and interacting with your site with the resources you already have?

Play by the Rules used the Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) to do just that. Play by the Rules (PBTR) is an interactive educational website operating to coordinate and support fair play in sport throughout Australia. As PBTR operates nationally, there is a labyrinth of content to navigate, especially when dealing with state-based laws and regulations. Therefore, PBTR wished to personalise the ‘Child Safe Sport Laws’ page that listed all State laws in alphabetical order rather than personalised to where the user was located.

PTBR’s General Manager, Peter Downs’ vision was to develop a method of presenting the most appropriate data to each visitor. PBTR engaged Switch, who devised a plan to incorporate ‘out of the box’ personalisation tools. These tools include the ‘In Session’ personalisation functions such as; Device Type, Browser Size and Time of Day. However, as PTBR’s needs were specific to the site visitor’s geography, the Switch team captured the user’s GEO IP location.

This personalisation ruleset’s overall aim was to improve the user experience. The implementation resulted in the correct state-compliant content appearing at the top of the page depending on the user’s geographic location.

How did this make a difference to PBTR?

Switch analysed some key metrics two months before and after the personalisation implementation to determine improvements in site visit duration and successful exit page percentages. As shown in the table below, audiences responded positively to their personalised experience with visit durations improving dramatically on PBTR’s ‘Child Safe Sport Laws’ page and exit rates increasing from the user’s states relevant child law page.

*When combined with visit duration an increase in the exit page percentage identifies that the visitor has successfully located their desired content.

It is clear that by implementing minor personalisation using content already accessible there can be a significant impact to a visitors online behaviour. To go even further and deep dive into user data, employing Sitecore’s Experience Database (xDB) allows for utilisation of a rich personalisation toolset. Therefore, using Sitecore XP and a connected Experience Database (xDB) implemented by the Switch Team, there really isn’t anything that can’t be personalised. Now with proven metrics, the use of personalisation on the website will continue to evolve and help PBTR support their customers no matter where they are, and what support they need.

Want to learn more about personalisation? Contact us to learn more about what Switch and Sitecore can do to help you modernise your digital future.

— Harry Hillis