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Reach New Audiences with Sitecore Send
Nowadays, customers have come to expect highly relevant content delivered across every channel. Personalization is the key for companies to cut through the noise of today’s competitive and fast-paced digital world. Sitecore continues to help make brands future-proof with a composable digital experience platform (DXP) capable of delivering personalized, omnichannel experiences to their customers.
Sitecore Send is a valuable piece of Sitecore’s DXP, by automating personalized email engagements and marketing automation. Previously known as Moosend, Sitecore Send is an AI and data-powered email marketing platform with smart audience tagging and precise segmentation. Identifying new audiences, dynamically organizing segments, and targeting them with relevant content becomes second nature with this next-generation marketing automation tool.
Today’s blog will focus on Audience Discovery, Sitecore Send’s newest feature and how it helps brands discover and delight their customers with 1:1 marketing.
Here are the topics that will be covered in this blog:
- What is Audience Discovery?
- Benefits of Audience Discovery
- How does it work?
- Audience Discovery segmentation criteria
- Enabling Audience Discovery
- Audience Discovery use cases
What is Sitecore Send’s Audience Discovery?
Marketers need to be able to quickly identify their audiences, organize segments, and target customers with the relevant content they need, when they need it.
That’s where Sitecore Send’s Audience Discovery comes in.
Sitecore Send announced its latest feature, a powerful AI segmentation tool called Audience Discovery. It combines the behavioural and demographic attributes of your website visitors and dynamically tags them based on the products and services they interact with. Audience Discovery allows for more targeted interactions and richer customer experiences using Sitecore Send’s automated marketing engagement tools.
Benefits of Audience Discovery
- Hyper targeted campaigns with specific brands / product categories
- Tracks the popularity of your products / brands
- Identifies new opportunities in targeting / segmentation
- Builds brand awareness
- Identifies and targets loyal customers
- Increases cross-sell or upsell opportunities
How Does Audience Discovery Work?
Sitecore Send email lists consist of a collection of subscribers that have opted into your email marketing campaigns. You can have an unlimited number of email lists, but its important to optimize your targeting as much as possible. Audience Discovery’s dynamic segmentation capabilities help you improve your targeting and deliver contextualized content to your customers no matter when they are in your sales funnel.
Audience Discovery uses powerful machine learning and filtering to support Sitecore Send in creating specific audience segments. It combines automatic tagging and hyper-relevant content to personalize customer experiences in your email marketing campaigns. This allows marketers to easily identify audience segments based on real-time data, such as customer behaviour and preferences.
Audience Discovery Segmentation Criteria
Audience Discovery uses machine learning to automatically detect purchase probability and interest for product category information to refine your email lists. It also identifies where in the sales funnel your customers are based on interactions with your site. Let’s go over these built-in segmentation criteria in more detail and how Sitecore Send uses them to categorize contacts into more specific segments.
| Description | Segmentation Criteria | |
|---|---|---|
| Interest in products or brands | The Sitecore Send machine learning algorithm predicts a customer’s interest in a specific product category or brand on your website. Creates a cluster of contacts with common interest in certain brand or product category. | Identifies contacts based on:
|
| Purchase intent for products or brands | The Sitecore Send machine learning algorithm predicts the probability to purchase for each contact. Creates a cluster of contacts with interest in certain brand or product category. | Identifies the categories contacts are more likely to buy based on:
|
| Funnel stage | This uses a filtering model to identify where in the sales funnel contacts are, based on their website interactions. Model based on assumptions that:
|
Identifies the contacts using the following funnel stages:
|
How to Enable Audience Discovery in Sitecore Send
Once you’ve connected your website to Sitecore Send, you’re already benefiting from visitor tracking based on their interaction with your products and services. Enabling Audience Discovery is super simple and these X easy steps will have you up and running in no time.
Step 1: Navigate to your Settings in the top right corner menu
Step 2: Select Advanced ecommerce features in the left Settings menu
Step 3: Click the toggle to enable Audience Discovery. Your settings will be automatically saved!
Once Audience Discovery is enable, here are two ways you can implement it on your Sitecore Send platform:
AI Coloured Tags
Audience Discovery uses AI coloured tags displayed next to a contact in your email list. These coloured tags are used to represent the three segmentation criteria we covered earlier:
- Interest in products or brands
- Purchase intent for products or brands
- Funnel stage
New Segmentation Criteria (Rules)
The AI tags are turned into segmentation criteria that allows you to define and create hyper personalized email list subsets for marketing campaigns.
A Use Case for Sitecore Send’s Audience Discovery
Let’s assume your company sells bikes. Visitor A is browsing your website and is interested in the latest range of mountain bikes. The Audience Discover tool in Sitecore Send will use Visitor A’s browsing behaviour and include them in the next mountain bike email campaign. They will be automatically tagged based on their interest in the mountain bike product category. The next email engagement they receive will contain highly relevant information necessary for them to make a decision on a potential mountain purchase. This not only creates an opportunity to delight you customers, but it may increase conversion with more targeted and relevant content.
Other use cases for Audience Discovery in Sitecore Send:
- Identify and reward your loyal customers by sending them a loyalty gift
- Target people interested in a specific product category with information about new arrivals
- Identify contacts with high purchase intent on a specific product category with a promo code
- Trigger automatic campaigns within specific brands/product categories once a contact has been identified to have high purchase intent
Want to Know More?
Email marketing is a vital tactic for companies to increase conversion, build engagement, and nurture customers through carefully crafted campaigns. Sitecore Send opens the door for marketers to deliver hyper-relevant email marketing campaigns using AI-powered segmentation and dynamic tagging. Audience Discovery takes smart email campaigns to a new level.
If you’re looking to learn more about the benefits of adding Sitecore Send to your composable DXP, reach out to our team of Sitecore MVPs at [email protected]. We can help your marketing teams take your email marketing automation to the next level, with Sitecore Send.