How to deliver 1:1 experiences with Sitecore Personalize

Sitecore Personalize is a leading experimentation and personalisation platform that allows you to deliver 1:1 contextual personalised experiences for your users in real-time, leveraging smart targeting and triggered experiences.

What excites me about Personalize is that it can be easily implemented by your Sitecore Marketing Practitioners or technical development team.

Sitecore Personalise was built to help your business to deliver more business impact and is powered by your unified customer and business data married with Sitecore's intelligent decisioning and A/B Testing optimisation capabilities.

Sitecore Personalize and Sitecore CDP?combine?real-time behavioural insights and all your customer data so you can understand and engage every customer (and anonymous visitors) instantly. The future of marketing is real-time, and it is a capability in which modern Customer Data Platforms (CDP) excel. When choosing to invest in a Customer Data Platform make sure your CDP streams and ingests data in real-time so you always see your customers in the present moment and not how they were a week or more ago.

One of the principal benefits of a CDP is personalization on an individual basis. Your CDP should give marketers an access point to the known (personal identifying information or PII) and unknown (pseudonymous) data for every single customer. This allows for intelligent segmentation, personal preferences, and adherence to privacy and regulation standards.

Sitecore Personalize is a separate product that should be bought together with Sitecore CDP. Investing in Sitecore Personalize is for businesses that are digitally mature and want to hyper-personalise every customer interaction, orchestrate real-time next-best actions, and optimise through testing.

Sitecore Personalize?activates your data across all customer touchpoints to create seamless and consistent customer experiences. You can use Sitecore Personalize to power?web, interactive, and?triggered?experiments that provide real-time decisions, experimentation, and?performance analytics.

Web

Designed specifically for marketers, a web experiment facilitates personalization on website pages, without relying solely on your development team. An example of web experiments are promotions, offers, next best action and conversations, operational messages, or any other customer experiment that you want to run on the web or be deployed into a web-based application.

Sitecore Personalize helps you to optimise and double down on experiments that convert through some state-of-the-art testing and preview capabilities.?Web experiences are launched using the javascript library that’s loaded onto your site, and can display content over specified HTML elements.

Sitecore Personalize can provide you with web templates as a code-free alternative to web personalization. Or, if you are more technical and familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create these yourself.

When the web experiment is live, you can monitor its performance through operational metrics. If it is in an A/B test, you can see how it is performing against other variants.

Interactive

Interactive experiments were built for developers and technical product teams who create and run tests across their full technology stack. For interactive experiments, you can leverage APIs to serve dynamic data for maximum server-side personalization. Dynamic Data is information that is periodically updated, meaning it changes asynchronously over time as new information becomes available.

An interactive experiment gives you access to back-end systems for deeper personalization. In interactive experiments, you can target both a segment and a real-time audience in the same experiment. The difference is that Sitecore Personalize updates segments every 24 hours, but builds the audience in real-time taking into account real-time session information and other attributes that can change frequently between sessions, such as search behaviour.

Tests that I recommend you should test via an interactive experiment include:

• Subscription offers
• Offer bidding models
• Product discounts
• Pricing models
• Real-time inventory levels
• Delivery estimates
• Urgency widgets

How to increase your average transaction value (ATV) with an interactive experiment

A powerful eCommerce example of how you could utilise an interactive experiment to increase your average transaction value (ATV) is if a guest on your e-commerce store hovers their mouse over a linen shirt for more than 5 seconds, you have an opportunity to display contextual content to persuade the guest to see an image of the shirt on a different-sized model, view other colours, or add it to their cart. To extend this interactive experience you can leverage data from APIs to:

• Determine which shade of linen is currently selling the best in the guest's region and default to this shade when the guest selects the size and colour.
• Display images of models wearing the guest's shirt size based on previous purchases or, if they have not purchased, based on what size clothing is being viewed or added to the cart during the current session.
• Show images of similar shirts based on real-time recommenders and eliminate and narrow results based on real-time inventory levels and manufacturing timelines.

Like all Sitecore Personalize experiments, the product comes with robust analytics dashboards where you can deep dive and review the interactive experiment data once it is life, so you can monitor and measure the performance of the experiment and learn how it is performing against other variants.

Triggered

A triggered experiment enables you to send personalised offers and promotions in emails to an Email Service Provider (ESP) for distribution, trigger offers in push notifications (popup messages) on a mobile device, or send offers to a mobile device via SMS. Triggers have endless possibilities and have been used for cart abandonment tactics, VIP event reminders, category releases and event-based promotions.

Another example is that you could trigger the experiment when there is a data change or when an event is raised. Triggers have defined specific conditions which must be met to trigger the experiment.

The conditions and personalised content in the triggered experiment are sent as an HTTP GET or POST request against a webhook. A webhook is a connection to a predefined REST endpoint to an ESP, SMS/Push service provider, or other destination.

Decisioning

Sitecore Personalize provides a solution to decision management at scale across channels and in real time. Built on the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, Sitecore Personalize decisioning enables business users and Sitecore practitioners to model and run decisions using business rules. You can use the same decision model in different experiments across different channels.

Decision models run on Lambda architecture, a data-processing architecture designed to handle massive quantities of data by taking advantage of both batch and stream-processing methods.

A decision model is an intellectual template for designing, building, and managing the business logic behind a business decision. A decision model enables you to document your organization's decisions so that decisions can become consistent, automated, and optimized over time.

Each decision model has a conceptual lifecycle. The lifecycle of a decision model involves everything from creating your decision model variants to testing and placing them into production. It is recommended that you use the Sitecore guidelines when managing your decision model lifecycle.

Top Benefits of Sitecore CDP decisioning

Sitecore CDP decisioning enables your organization to:

• Manage complex decisions using business rules to return the next best action or offer.
• Provide better customer experiences by ensuring decisions are accurate, precise, visible, and managed.
• Use analytical models and data systems for maximum impact, through connections.
• Immediately test decision model variants from the canvas and see offers returned, with images, just as they display on your customers' devices.
• Access full revision history and easily revert decision model variants.

Need help understanding how your business could leverage the power of Sitecore Personalize?

As a 2022 Sitecore Strategy MVP I help businesses like yours to utilise the full extent of their Sitecore Digital Experience Platform investment so please get in touch.

As an experienced Director of Strategy, I have 8+ years of experience implementing Sitecore platforms and I am an expert in Inbound Marketing, Content Strategy, SEO, UI, UX, eCommerce, Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Personalisation, Campaign Management, Customer Experience (CX), Customer Data Management, Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), Digital Transformation and Sitecore Integrations.