Key points:

• Personalisation works, and must be on your digital roadmap
• When starting out with personalisation many marketers are fearful of commencing because it can be complicated
• How can you measure the effects of personalisation with minimal effort?
• Start simple - test one example
• Analyse the results
• Learn from that test and set up another one
• Over time you will have a body of personalisation that is validated, and will be generating greater value from Sitecore

Marketers have long known that connecting with their audience on a more personal level works. It generates higher engagement, leading to greater conversion rates and creating brand advocates.

When it comes to digital marketing, personalisation becomes even more powerful due to the amount of data now available on individuals, segments and their behaviour. Driving this forward are powerful Digital Experience Platforms like Sitecore, with a multitude of features enabling organisations to use the information they already have about a person and/or segment to create a more meaningful experience.

But if you’re new to digital personalisation, where do you start? With so many options available it can be a daunting task that it gets put off - thrown in the “too hard basket”.

The good news that even basic personalisation can generate significant increases in engagement and conversion rates. I always recommend to any digital marketer beginning their personalisation journey to start small, test and learn:

• Begin with one hypothesis around one data point and implement that in isolation.
• Ensure that there are enough visits to the personalised content to give a statistically relevant result.
• Analyse those results to validate whether your hypothesis is correct.

A basic example I recommend is personalising content based on a website visitor’s location. Then deliver relevant content to those visitors based on their location. Sitecore XP comes with GeoIP location detection out of the box, and is simple to set up. One thing to note before attempting this is to ensure that your instance of Sitecore is configured correctly to use this feature. For more on this see the blog I wrote on Sitecore Optimisation Readiness.

Once confirmed that GeoIP detection is working correctly, here is one simple example that can be used to test the effect of personalising one small piece of content.

In this example (based on one of our clients), we will use an Australian company that has an audience mainly on the east coast. Visitors to its website are mostly from Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

They have recently released a research paper that is of interest to the vast majority of its audience. In order to get business outcomes from this valuable content, they require users to complete a registration form capturing basic information: name, email address and postcode. Upon completion of the form, they are provided with a link to download the paper.

On the initial registration page with the form, an image is shown next to the form. A generic version of the image is shown when a visitor’s location cannot be detected, or is outside Australia. If the visitor’s location can be identified, a different image is shown that is relevant to the state in which that visitor resides.

This is a relatively simple piece of personalisation, and only requires four different images to fully function – a generic image, and three images relevant to the three states.

By configuring a personalisation rule on that image component in Sitecore, results can be tracked to see the effectiveness of that personalisation.

One of our clients implemented a very similar campaign, and the results clearly showed that the personalised content outperformed the generic version by at least 40% in each personalised state.

This shows that any Sitecore user with relevant training on authoring and marketing in Sitecore could implement such a test and achieve improved results. This in turn, shows your organisation the value of Sitecore and its features, which can lead to further investment in digital marketing campaigns.