Sitecore Personalize Features: A Deep Dive

Sitecore Personalization Overview

Sitecore offers powerful personalization tools designed to help businesses deliver highly targeted experiences to their customers across various digital channels. It enables brands to create personalized content, offers, and recommendations based on real-time customer behaviour, preferences, and demographics. Let’s consider the two personalization approaches that Sitecore offers:

• Traditional: Explicit Component & Page Level Personalization — Sitecore Experience Platform, or Sitecore XP
• New: Experience Personalization — Sitecore Personalize

Traditional: Explicit Component & Page Level Personalization

Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is a best-in-class, all-in-one solution for content management, marketing automation, analytics and a solid set of personalization and testing tools. Traditional Sitecore personalization through XP is limited only to component-based or page-based personalization. Marketers must configure personalized content and individual tests (be it on a page or component) on each specific page they want it to appear on. This means delivering personalization on a very narrow scale and at singular parts of their user’s experience.

Sitecore XP stores visitor information in xConnect, offering marketers the ability to track user interactions with multi-session personalization. This allows you to deliver highly targeted content for segments of visitors at specific times and on specific pages, and offer longer-tail personalization.

New: Experience Personalization with Sitecore Personalize

Sitecore Personalize (formerly known as Boxever) is a powerful SaaS solution for experimentation and personalization, driven by real-time customer insights. It allows for seamless experience optimization across all inbound and outbound channels, helping you deliver personalized marketing, e-commerce, and customer experiences throughout your entire technology ecosystem. Personalize is a composable, standalone product that can be easily integrated into any tech stack.

The advantage with Sitecore Personalize is the ability to trigger personalized experiences at scale on any website, mobile apps, or experience outside of the Sitecore platform. This provides greater flexibility in delivering personalized content across various channels and the ability for marketers to personalize experiences at scale. Sitecore Personalize is experience-centric. Not only can you target a user at a website, page, or component level, but you can trigger and consume APIs to measure everything through valuable A/B tests across any digital property for a connected customer experience.

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Here’s everything we’ll cover in today’s blog:

Why Sitecore Personalize?

Sitecore Personalize key features

Is Sitecore Personalize right for your business?

Solving pain points with Sitecore Personalize

TLDR: Summary of key features

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Why Sitecore Personalize?

This cutting-edge cloud-native solution seamlessly integrates with existing tech stacks, offers a comprehensive suite of testing and personalization features, and leverages real-time data and AI-driven insights to maximize engagement, conversions, and overall customer satisfaction. By choosing Sitecore Personalize, businesses can significantly elevate their digital marketing strategies and stay ahead of the competition in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Sitecore Personalize can also help to:

• Increase conversion rates
• Increased average order value
• Boost profit margin
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase customer retention
• Increase clickthrough rates

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Sitecore Personalize Key Features

Interactive Personalization

Instantly customize experiences for any segment, group, or individual, offering a more relevant and engaging customer journey. This approach enables you to personalize various aspects of your digital properties, including navigation menus, forms, search results, and checkout processes, providing a more tailored experience for each user. The flexibility of interactive personalization means that there are virtually limitless possibilities for how you can adapt your digital properties to better serve your audience. By using this approach, you can deliver highly targeted content and experiences in Sitecore Personalize that resonate with your users, ultimately resulting in more impactful experiences and engagement.

A/B Testing

Conduct experiments on various experiences across multiple inbound channels, such as websites, apps, chat systems, and contact centres. This feature also enables testing of outbound content, allowing users to compare the effectiveness of different communication channels, like email vs. web push messages. By conducting A/B tests in Sitecore Personalize, businesses can gain insights into which experiences or strategies work best for their audiences.

Web Browser and API Integration

Experiment and personalize across both web browsers and API integrations of your digital properties. This comprehensive approach lets you optimize customer experiences across various touchpoints, such as websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels. By using APIs to integrate your personalization efforts, you can enhance various aspects of customer experiences, including search results, web design, email campaigns, and dynamic pricing. This holistic approach ensures a seamless and tailored experience for your users, leading to increased engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.

Web Design

Craft personalized experiences by utilizing pre-built templates or modifying existing designs and begin testing. The platform caters to a variety of users, including businesses, web developers, and agencies, by providing a unified user interface (UI) that is simple and easy to navigate. This feature in Sitecore Personalize enables you to experiment with different design elements and layouts to find the most effective and engaging experiences for your target audience.

Testing Across the Experience

Move beyond traditional component-based testing, and enable A/B testing of any element throughout the user journey. Whether it's a conversion page, a new feature, or an algorithm, experiment with different aspects of the experience and gain valuable insights into what truly drives user engagement and conversion. This comprehensive approach to testing in Sitecore Personalize helps you identify the most effective combinations of elements, allowing you to optimize the overall user experience and achieve your business goals.

Understand Impact of Optimization

Measure the success of your experiences, optimizations, or tests against key business KPIs, such as conversion rates, engagement, and revenue. By tracking these metrics, you can gain a clearer understanding of the return on investment (ROI) for your personalization efforts using Sitecore Personalize. This data-driven approach enables you to continuously refine your personalization strategies to maximize your personalization spend.

Visualize Success with Embedded Analytics

Crystal clear visualizations and data representation allow you to quickly and easily understand the results of your personalization efforts. This instant access to performance metrics enables marketers to make data-driven decisions and act promptly on the insights gained from their personalization strategies. By providing a clear view of success, embedded analytics in Sitecore Personalize empowers marketers to optimize their campaigns and continuously improve customer experiences.

Goals

Set up and monitor both primary and secondary metrics for tests and personalizations. By defining standard goals such as conversion, revenue, and engagement, as well as custom goals tailored to specific needs, users can track and measure the performance of their experiments and personalization efforts. This flexibility allows marketing teams to better understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize their customer experiences in Sitecore Personalize.

Analytics

Evaluate the performance of your tests and personalizations by comparing them to predefined goals and metrics. With clear and reliable reporting, users can easily understand how well their experiments and personalization strategies are performing. This valuable insight in Sitecore Personalize helps marketers make data-driven decisions and optimize customer experiences.

Clear Winners

Determine the winning test variants based on their primary goals and the associated improvement in performance (uplift). This feature makes it simple to implement the best-performing content or experience, ensuring that visitors are engaged with the most effective content. By quickly identifying and deploying the winning variants, businesses can optimize their user experiences and drive better results using Sitecore Personalize.

Increase Conversions

Understand the effects of tests on primary goals and conversions. By analyzing the impact of different experiments, users can make data-driven decisions to refine and improve customer experiences in Sitecore Personalize. This process not only boosts conversions but also supports revenue growth, contributing to overall business success.

Democratize Data

Make test results and reports accessible and easy to understand for everyone in an organization. By streamlining reports, Sitecore Personalize allows teams to dive deeper into data analysis and incorporate test results into key performance indicator (KPI) and return on investment (ROI) reporting. This increased visibility in Sitecore Personalize helps promote a data-driven culture across the organization and facilitates informed decision-making.

Visual Decisioning Canvas

Provide a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface for building business rules. The visual Decisioning Canvas in Sitecore Personalize makes it easy to design decision models and map customer journeys, guiding visitors towards their next best actions. By visually laying out the decision-making process, you can efficiently create personalized experiences that lead customers through the most relevant and engaging pathways.

Intelligent Decisioning

Using intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality, marketers can easily create next-best-actions for their customers. By combining live business data such as inventory levels and pricing, integrated with AI models for predictive insights, marketing teams can deliver highly personalized and relevant experiences to their customers. This data-driven approach in Sitecore Personalize helps you tailor an omnichannel customer journey, ensuring that each interaction is meaningful and optimized for better engagement and conversion.

Connect to Data Anywhere

Access external data from various web services, such as weather information, translations, and more. This feature in Sitecore Personalize allows you to enrich and contextualize personalization for every customer, even for first-time or anonymous visitors. By incorporating external data into the personalization process, you can create more relevant and engaging experiences for your customers, regardless of their previous interactions with your digital properties. This helps improve customer satisfaction leading to higher conversion rates and engagement.

Unleash and Automate with AI

Integrate and utilize any existing AI models within your business for more customized and targeted personalization experiences. By incorporating your organization's unique AI models, you can create highly tailored and specific personalizations that cater to your specific business needs and audience preferences. This automated approach in Sitecore Personalize not only improves efficiency but also enhances the relevance of the content and offers presented to your customers.

Trigger Messaging

Instantly send targeted notifications, sliders, and modals to users based on their behavior across digital channels. By tracking and analyzing consumer actions, Sitecore Personalize can identify the most appropriate moments to engage with users, delivering personalized content and offers that align with their preferences and needs. These triggered messages can be sent through various channels such as emails, web push notifications, and mobile messages, ensuring that users receive relevant, timely, and engaging content wherever they are.

Manage Offers

Efficiently organize and manage various offers, promotions, and incentives. By utilizing decisioning capabilities, Sitecore Personalize can determine the most suitable offer for each customer based on their unique context, such as browsing behavior, preferences, and other relevant factors. This tailored approach helps to encourage conversion and purchase by presenting customers with offers that are most relevant and appealing to them.

Quality Assurance

Ensure that personalization and testing are set up appropriately and targeting the right audiences. The QA tool enables users to explore and validate experiences and test decision models before they are deployed live. This helps ensure that the right message is delivered to the right audience, improving the effectiveness of personalization strategies. Users can also preview and quality-check experiences across devices and browsers before going live, using Sitecore Personalize's in-browser QA tool, ensuring 100% accuracy. Overall, the QA feature helps improve the accuracy and effectiveness of personalization and testing efforts.

Live Monitoring

Get instant feedback on live experiences. This feature generates operational monitoring reports that are updated every 15 seconds, allowing users to closely monitor the performance of their personalization efforts in real-time. By closely tracking the performance of live experiences, users can quickly identify any issues or opportunities for improvement, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and optimize customer experiences.

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Is Sitecore Personalize Right for Your Business?

Determining whether Sitecore Personalize is the right fit for your business involves examining key aspects of your digital strategy. Consider the important metrics and KPIs you currently track on your website and other digital properties to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your current approach to personalization. Some key questions worth asking:

• Are you currently testing content or page layouts to learn what works best in your customer experience?
• Are there currently any strategies for helping progress your consumers through their customer or purchase journey?
• Which channels does your business engage with your clients and prospects?
• How you are building relationships and loyalty with customers through the customer lifecycle?
• Do you have any current web optimization solutions implemented right now?

Solving Pain Points with Sitecore Personalize

Sitecore Personalize addresses various pain points to enhance your brand's performance, optimize customer experiences, and boost business outcomes. Here are some effective strategies you can implement using Sitecore Personalize to solve the following common business pain points:

Low Conversion Rates

Homepage Personalization: Sitecore Personalize can tailor the homepage experience to individual users based on their browsing history, preferences, and location. For example, it can showcase products or content that the user is most likely to be interested in, increasing the chances of conversion.

Social Proofing: By displaying relevant customer reviews, testimonials, and ratings on your website, Sitecore Personalize helps build trust and credibility for your brand. This social proof can encourage new visitors to make a purchase, ultimately increasing conversion rates.

Engagement Boost: Sitecore Personalize enables the use of targeted messaging, such as web push notifications or personalized emails, to re-engage customers who may have abandoned their cart or left the website. This can help bring users back to the site, leading to higher conversion rates.

Low Customer Retention

Page Lingering: Sitecore Personalize can analyze user behavior to determine when a visitor is spending an unusually long time on a particular page. It can then suggest relevant content or s special offers using a personalized pop-up or banner to keep users engaged and encourage them to continue browsing.

Exit Intent: The platform can detect when a user is about to leave the website and present them with targeted offers or content to entice them to stay, improving customer retention.

Low Profit Margin

Product Recommendations: Sitecore Personalize uses AI-driven algorithms to recommend products that are most likely to appeal to individual customers. By promoting higher-margin items or upselling related products, it helps boost overall profit margins.

Low Average Order Value

Intelligent Cart Recovery: Sitecore Personalize can identify abandoned carts and send personalized reminders to customers, offering incentives such as discounts or free shipping to encourage them to complete their purchase. This helps increase the average order value and overall revenue.

Low Customer Satisfaction

Voice of Customer: Sitecore Personalize enables businesses to collect and analyze customer feedback, through surveys or reviews. By understanding customer pain points and addressing their concerns, you can improve overall customer satisfaction and foster long-term loyalty.

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Summary: Sitecore Personalize Key Features

Sitecore Personalize Key Features	Description
Personalization Beyond Pages	Allows for omnichannel personalization, expanding the scope of personalization to include any digital property.
Interactive Personalization	Instantly personalizes experiences for any segment, group, or individual and offers limitless possibilities for adapting digital properties, including navigation menus, forms, search results, and checkout processes.
Web Browser and API Integration	Allows for experimentation and personalization across various touchpoints, enhancing various aspects of customer experiences and increasing engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.
Web Design	Provides pre-built templates or the ability to modify existing designs for testing purposes, accommodating businesses, web developers, and agencies with a unified user interface (UI).
Testing Across the Experience	Enables A/B testing of any element throughout the user journey, optimizing the overall user experience, and achieving better results in terms of engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.
Understand Impact of Optimization	Measure the success of experiences, optimizations, or tests against key business KPIs such as conversion rates, engagement, and revenue. This data-driven approach helps refine personalization strategies to maximize customer engagement, drive conversions, and increase revenue.
Visualize Success with Embedded Analytics	Offers clear visualizations and data representation, providing instant access to performance metrics for personalization efforts. Marketers can make data-driven decisions and act promptly on the insights gained from personalization strategies. Embedded analytics empowers marketers to optimize campaigns and improve customer experiences continuously.
Goals	Allows users to set and monitor metrics for tests and personalizations with standard and custom goals, enabling teams to track and measure experiment and personalization performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences.
Analytics	Provides clear and reliable reporting, allowing users to evaluate test and personalization performance against defined goals and metrics. This valuable insight helps teams make data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences and achieve better results in their digital marketing efforts.
A/B Testing	Enables users to conduct A/B tests on various experiences across multiple inbound channels, allowing businesses to gain insights into which experiences or strategies work best for their audience, ultimately leading to improved customer engagement and conversion rates.
Clear Winners	Users can easily identify winning test variants based on primary goals and associated uplift and push the best-performing content or experience live. This feature allows businesses to optimize user experiences and drive better results.
Increase Conversions	Helps users understand the effects of tests on primary goals and conversions, allowing them to refine and improve customer experiences. This process boosts conversions and supports business growth across marketing and other teams, contributing to overall success.
Quality Assurance	This feature allows brands to set up personalization and testing accurately by targeting the right audiences. It enables users to validate experiences and decision models before going live, ensuring effective messaging. The in-browser QA tool provides accurate previews and quality checks across devices and browsers, enhancing personalization and testing efforts' success.
Live Monitoring	Sitecore Personalize's Live Monitoring offers real-time feedback on live experiences with updates every 15 seconds. This enables users to quickly identify issues or opportunities for optimization, enhancing customer experiences and improving personalization strategies' performance.

In Closing

If you're ready to test and personalize across outbound (email, mobile messages, etc.) as well as inbound (web, mobile app, contact center, etc.) channels and integrate server-side personalization, give us a call. Sitecore Personalize will help you continually learn from digital customer interactions and deliver evolving experiences that provide the best value to the customer and your business. Reach out to our friendly marketing team and we can help get your business started with an all-in-one SaaS omnichannel personalization solution!

Until then, happy personalizing!

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