How to Plan Personalization with Sitecore Personalize

The key to executing personalization successfully is a solid strategy. Having a clear vision of how personalization can positively impact your audience’s journey and how you can use it for precision marketing will help you take your personalization program from idea to implementation. It will also enable your teams to measure your personalization’s impact and ensure it helps accomplish your organization’s business goals.

Developing a personalization strategy can be technology agnostic (i.e., you should initially think big picture and not tool-specific). However, as you define your requirements for implementing personalization, you should align your process to your personalization platform’s best practices.

As Velir helps more and more clients implement Sitecore Personalize, we’ve adjusted our personalization workshops, framework, and specifications process to align with what success looks like on Personalize specifically. We have several core pillars of planning with Sitecore Personalize; these pillars ensure proper implementation and educate our clients on best practices throughout the personalization planning process.

Our Pillars for Personalization Planning with Sitecore Personalize

• Objectives: As we mentioned, a solid, high-level strategy is key. At the start of every personalization engagement, we define the “why” for personalization to align stakeholders on what we’re hoping to achieve and how personalization contributes to bigger-picture business objectives.

• Audience: By nature, personalization is rooted in a clear understanding of audience segments and what unique needs different segments have. Leveraging “filters” in Sitecore Personalize, we break down the nuances of various audience segments to ensure we clearly define what criteria match someone to a specific audience. This also allows us to identify what audiences we can define with out-of-the-box filters vs. what we may need to create to identify audience segments.

• Location: One of the great features of Sitecore Personalize is the ability to configure personalization to multiple points within a single experience or across several owned experiences. When thinking about page targeting, we break down each audience segment's customer journey to know exactly where to surface personalization to be the most impactful.

• Content and Delivery: One of the biggest differences in personalization powered by Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) vs. Sitecore Personalize is that XP has historically been “content” focused, whereas Sitecore Personalize is more “experience” focused. What that means is XP is limited to just tailoring the content within content components, but Sitecore Personalize can leverage out-of-the-box or custom templates to deliver personalization in a variety of ways — through modals, sidebars, pop-ups, etc. in addition to content component personalization. When planning for Sitecore Personalize, it’s important to consider the best way to deliver personalization to ensure you leverage the right template to catch a user’s attention.

• Outcomes: It should go without saying, but when personalizing it’s critical to define your desired outcome when a visitor sees personalization in an experience. Do you want them to sign up for something specific? Click on a certain offer? Navigate to a certain page? Whatever the outcome, one of the great things about Sitecore Personalize is the ability to attach a unique goal to each personalized experience. While it may be the last step in the planning process, ensuring there are clearly defined and documented goals for all personalization is necessary to help your teams measure the impact that personalization is having.

As we mentioned, one nuance of Sitecore Personalize is that there are some limitations with the filters and templates available out of the box. That’s not a bad thing because ultimately the ability to customize means that the possibilities for what you can personalize are endless. If you follow our pillars, you can easily identify where to build customizations in your system to support personalization objectives and ensure that you meet your personalization program’s objectives.

Want to know more about how we can help you launch a personalization program? Contact us to learn about our personalization services.