Introduction To Personalization With Sitecore

There are thousands of large brands and organizations currently using Sitecore Experience due to the broad choice of capabilities that enable marketing professionals, business stakeholders and IT teams to rapidly implement, measure and manage a successful website and online business strategy.

The main benefit of using Sitecore is the ability to personalise the content shown to your visitors which can be beneficial for both parties.

The main aims of Sitecore Personalization are:

1. To deliver a relevant experience for each unique visitor to the website,
2. Remembering the user and targeting them in real-time with relevant messaging according to their browsing path,
3. Obtaining a better idea of what visitors want based on their implicit (what users are doing on the site — what type of pages are they looking at etc) and explicit (actions they take such as voting in a poll or searching for a keyword) site behaviour.

Sitecore Personalization allows you to use the visitor’s implicit behaviour to predict what they would be interested in seeing and presents that relevant information to them. It also allows you to use the explicit behaviour to further fine-tune the experience. For example, if a user chose “I cycle daily” in a poll on your site they could be targeted with cycling equipment content. This could be done many ways for example dynamic content or the homepage banner changing.

By creating a relevant experience for each visitor, the possibility of conversion automatically increases as you have made the experience easier for the visitor and you have created trust and credibility by showing them the personalized content.

How does this work?

In simple terms:

1. Set up Sitecore personas to represent visitor types
2. The visitor is identified
3. The visitor is classified according to which persona they most closely match
4. All or part of the page on the site dynamically changes to show relevant content

As a visitor browses, their persona grows and Sitecore learns more about them like the content they are looking for and the reason they are visiting the site. If the visitor fits into a known persona such as “handyman” or “family”, we can show them offers or content that was successful in the past with similar personas. This will increase the likelihood of the visitor completing a targeted action such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a brochure.

This personalisation would be a great addition for any business from a university site, to an ecommerce site — relevant information will keep the visitor browsing!

Stay tuned for a number of other Sitecore blogs relating to marketing, technology and content.

Are you interested in finding out more about Sitecore? Are you looking to change your CMS? Contact us today.

Originally published at arekibo.com.