I wrote this article for the Sagittarius blog.

Being able to show your customers relevant content is a must in today’s eCommerce environment. Not just because customers expect to be treated like individuals, but because showing them content and products that are relevant to them ultimately ends up improving your engagement and conversions in the long run too. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

That’s why tools like Sitecore Personalize are so useful for brands who want to make a splash when a customer interacts with them on digital channels. But how can you get started?

When considering how to use a new tool it helps to understand the platform and the different elements you need to consider to get a proof of concept up and running.

So, what is Sitecore Personalize?

Well, it does exactly what it says on the tin – it lets you show personalised content to your customers, across channels – based on what you know about them or how they interact with your digital properties.

It’s important to make the distinction between the current Sitecore personalisation features that Sitecore XP offers. First off, Sitecore Personalize is a SaaS product – part of the composable suite of tools – and can be bought as a standalone product, as opposed to the traditional Sitecore personalisation features which are baked into XP.

Also, the type of personalised experiences that you can enable with Sitecore Personalize are a little more explicit with pop-ups and alert bars rather than the sometimes more subtle personalised components that you see being implemented in XP.

One of the really great features of Sitecore Personalize is the templates that you can set up so that marketers or strategists can manage things themselves without the need for a lot of development work. So it’s really a quite useful and exciting tool.

Important to know

Sitecore Personalize lets you set up Experiences (which are the personalised moments that can be shared with users based on certain rules) and Experiments (a way to test these Experiences).

Web Experiences render on the website itself as a user browses, and ‘Interactive’ Web Experiences are based on certain interactions on the website that are then rendered on the website, for example, a pop-up on the Homepage when a user adds a product to their Cart.

There are also ‘Full Stack’ Experiences which are API-based and can connect an Experience to other channels. ‘Triggered’ Full Stack Experiences happen when a specific Event has occurred, so something like an Abandoned Cart on the website can trigger an Email to the user with a discount to persuade them to complete a purchase.

Web Experiences are one of the most exciting and accessible elements of Sitecore Personalize and there are some important sections to consider when thinking about how it might work for your business.

The Who, What, Why, Where, and When of Sitecore Personalize

When you open the Sitecore CDP & Personalize dashboard, you are met with a number of sections in the left-hand sidebar including Customer data, Decisioning, and Experiments, but it’s Experiences that we’ll focus on right now, in particular, Web Experiences.

Web Experiences are made up of five components, some of which are optional, and these are Audience (the ‘Who’), Content (the ‘What’), Goals (the ‘Why’), Page Targeting (the ‘Where’), and Decisioning (the ‘When’).

Content

This is where we pick what we want to show to our visitors when some conditions are met. One of the really great features of Sitecore Personalize is that there are a bunch of pre-built templates which you can use to create Experiences. Things like a Pop-up takeover, an Alert Bar that appears at the top of the page, and a few different types of boxes and notifications are available.

Here we can put whatever content we want – we can talk about offers or discounts, or push recommended content, or prompts to sign-up to your newsletter etc. You can also make your own custom content here if you want to get a bit more creative and you can save templates for future use. All-in-all, it’s very easy to use and accessible, even for someone non-technical to get started.

Page Targeting

This is how you set where you want your Experience to appear. You can set it on one page in particular or on multiple pages. For example, you can set it on your Homepage if you want to make it widely seen, or on specific Category pages or Product pages depending on what the Offer or message is.

To select the page or pages – once the CDP and your website have been linked via API – it’s as simple as adding in the URL into the box in this section. There’s also some Advanced Targeting options if you want to use JavaScript to add a bit more complexity.

Audience

This is where we set who we want to see our personalised Experience based on what we know about the visitor, and this can be set in two ways.

One is from our customer database, which is the ‘Segments’ section in Sitecore Personalize, and here we can set our Experience to appear for any of the customers we have information for based on things like product preferences, purchase history, and demographic aspects like region, age, or gender etc. If we’re using Sitecore CDP as well as Sitecore Personalize this gives us a huge advantage in the level we can target Experiences to our visitors. Segment data is updated on a daily basis.

The other way we can target is by ‘Real Time Audience’ which is more circumstantial from the visitor perspective, and this can be based on the visitor’s country, the traffic source, the day of the week it is, whether it’s their first time on your site or if they’re a return visitor, or if they visited the site via a campaign tracking code.

Decisioning

Decisioning is a way for users to model and run decisions using business rules. Whereas the Audience section focuses on who the visitor is (based on what we know about them), the Decisioning section focuses on their behaviour on our site. When they meet certain criteria, we can show them an Experience. For example, if a visitor puts a product into their Cart and keeps browsing the site, you can give them a discount code to help them complete the purchase, or maybe recommend a complimentary product to them.

The Decisioning section lets you build Decision Models which tell Sitecore Personalize when to show an Experience to a visitor. Here there are three elements to consider: 

1. There’s the ‘Inputs’, which is how you want your Decisioning to start, either based on the Guest (who the visitor is), the Order (the products they’re interacting with), or the Session (what they’re doing on the site).
2. Then, there’s the ‘Decisions’ themselves, the calculations behind what you want to happen. Here you have the Decision Tables and Templates, as well as the Programmables which let you use JavaScript in a decision.
3. Then there are internal or external authorities where the information comes from, such as Knowledge Sources like an Offer Catalogue.

Together, these let you build out complex frameworks for when to show certain Experiences and Sitecore Personalize has a really nice, visual Decision Model builder to help you build out these frameworks.

Goals

Goals are how we measure how successful the Experiences that we are running are and there are three ways to measure this:

1. Page View – This is by using a ‘Success’ URL, for example, a particular landing page or purchase confirmation page.
2. Custom Events – This could be something like a button click or a brochure download.
3. Revenue – You can link Revenue to Experiences (by Session or by Guest) to see how much revenue your Experiences played a role in generating.

Now go and get started!

So that’s a quick look at the Who, What, Why, Where, and When of Sitecore Personalize Web Experiences. Now all that’s left is to get started on thinking how you can go about using it for yourself. If you need any help in getting your business onto Sitecore Personalize, you know who to reach out to! Sagittarius are always here to help brands supercharge their personalisation capabilities on Sitecore.

I was delighted to speak about Sitecore Content Hub today at the latest Remarkable User Group Forum with some other great speakers including Christine Bookless and Matthew Dunn. Looking forward to the next one in January!

Check out my slides below and get in touch if you have any questions about Sitecore Content Hub. We are currently rolling out Content Hub for one of our clients and pitching it to others so it’s exciting times!

In 2022, consumers expect to be treated like an individual regardless of whether it is at their local cafe or corner shop, or on the online stores they visit.

According to McKinsey’s ‘Next in Personalization 2021’ Report, 76% of consumers get frustrated when companies don’t use personalisation.

Personalisation enables you to deliver targeted content to your visitors, helping customers find what they are looking for, as well as to discover relevant products or services that they might not have even known about.

Read the full article on the Sagittarius blog.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last ten years or so, you’ve probably heard the term “Content is King” more times than you care to recall. It might be a well worn trope, but there is truth behind it.

These days, organisations face a huge challenge in managing their assets across channels, storing and organising content that is used across websites, social media, email, point of sale, packaging etc. This is a challenge that’s compounded when aiming to personalise content at scale.

Many organisations use a DAM, or Digital Asset Management solution, to manage all of their assets. But many DAMs are clumsy to use or don’t genuinely unlock the potential of the assets they store.

This is where Sitecore Content Hub comes in.

While many people might simply think of a DAM when they hear about Content Hub, it really is much more than that. A DAM is certainly an integral part of the platform’s offering, but Content Hub’s superpower lies in the added functionality and extendability of the system as a whole.

Read the full article on the Sagittarius blog.

You may have recently heard the term ‘headless’ used in conversations around the future of travel commerce, but it’s far from just a buzzword. This exciting new evolution allows for quicker turnarounds and a more unified vision when building your travel site and ensuring its efficiency.

Moving from the monolithic past to the composable future is something that all travel brands should be thinking about, and Sitecore’s suite of composable tools are well positioned to help you be ready and stay flexible for whatever the future brings.

What exactly does headless commerce mean, though? And how can it help your business? As the travel industry grows more interested in newer techniques to improve customer experiences on their sites, we explore why answering these questions could unlock the full potential of your travel businesses’ ecommerce capabilities.

Read the full article on the Sagittarius blog.

Whatever your business, be it a regional or global brand, the content you produce plays a vital role in your success. You know that… hence you’re reading this.

A well formulated and executed content strategy not only drives more traffic, at the core, it defines what your business is and helps build a strong connection between you and your audiences.

So let’s quickly look at why developing a coherent content strategy is important, how setting clear goals and understanding your audience will elevate your online performance, and how your content strategy can be given wings by using a tool like Sitecore Content Hub.

Read the full article on the Sagittarius blog.

After an exciting 2021 spent working on some great projects and having a talk accepted to Sitecore Symposium, I was delighted to be named a Sitecore Strategy MVP for 2022 in their annual announcement. I look forward to working to some even bigger and better projects this year. Bring them on!

It’s that time of year again when we look towards the next twelve months. It’s been a tough couple of years but some companies have embraced the changing landscape and prospered as a result. 

This year there has been a lot of talk about blockchain technology – especially around crypto-currencies and NFTs – as well as the “Metaverse”, AR and Web3 in general, but if you really want to make meaningful change to your business in 2022 you’ve got to be doing the basic things right – letting potential customers know about your products and services in an unintrusive way, making it easy for them to buy, and facilitating repeat purchases.

Rather than play a game of buzzword bingo with some of the latest flashy trends, let’s look at what you can do in the next twelve months to supercharge your business, and find out how Sitecore’s composable offering can help.

1. Connect the dots between your online and offline channels

The pandemic obviously changed how a lot of people shopped, pushing many, especially in this region, into e-commerce for the first time. But e-commerce penetration in the UAE still remains comparatively low at 8.1 percent of total sales in the country.

Despite brick-and-mortar stores in many parts of the world taking a beating in recent years as e-commerce has grown, in the Middle East, malls are seen as a social place to bring family and meet friends as opposed to simply a utilitarian place to make a purchase. As such, stores have remained a solid customer touchpoint in this region, as well as a convenient place to pick-up something you may have bought online from a retailer.

PwC’s 2020 Covid-19 Pulse survey found that the pandemic strengthened online shopping habits of consumers, particularly semi-digital options such as click and collect. Shoppers want flexibility and 35 percent of online shopper respondents said they intended to pick up their purchase in-store. For brands, this is a unique opportunity to offer a great, personalized experience to delight your customer, and maybe even make an additional sale.

But to truly win at this you need to have your brick-and-mortar retail locations and online store playing nice with each other. Being able to tell that an online visitor has bought from one of your physical stores in the past, or that a walk-in visitor to your retail store has an online history with your brand is invaluable. And being able to take advantage of that information with an Omnichannel approach is critical.

Having a single source of truth about your customers is key to being able to pull this off, and having a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Sitecore CDP can get you where you need to be to walk the Omnichannel walk.

2. Use your own first-party data

It’s never been more important to control your own first-party customer data than it is today. A host of updates from Apple and Google over the last couple of years, as well as consumer privacy legislation like GDPR, has meant that it has become more difficult and more expensive to reach customers in a targeted way through digital advertising.

The onus is now on brands to make an effort to bypass the adtech middle-men and own their own customer relationships. Some ways in which this can be done is through a robust loyalty programme or exclusive discounts, offers, or perks like free delivery for customers signed-up to your website. Many brands in the region are utilizing this like Majid Al-Futtaim, Noon, Alshaya Group, Landmark Group, Al Tayer Group, and many more.

When you control your own customer data it lets you connect with your customers on your own terms via email, SMS, or app push notifications etc. with personalised recommendations and offers. Keeping a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one, so why not make it worthwhile for customers to interact with you directly through meaningful incentives and a well thought-out loyalty programme. It’s a win-win for both of you.

Using a platform like Sitecore can help you collect, manage and action on all the first party data you have on your customers.

3. A Personalised customer experience

So ideally you’ll have all this data. But now what to do with it? Online platforms like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook have raised customers’ expectations for how they should be treated online offering a hugely personalised experience. Nowadays, customers expect the brands that they shop with to be able to treat them as individuals. If you shop with a certain brand regularly but you visit their website or app and they don’t offer you personalised content or recommendations this creates a disconnect. 80 percent of frequent shoppers surveyed in a 2019 report from Smarter HQ said they only shop with brands who offer a personalised experience.

While data privacy can be a concern for some, for many as long as the data we share gives us some value in return, it’s generally seen as a fair trade. In fact, nine out of 10 consumers in that same Smarter HQ report claimed they are willing to share their behavioural data if it makes their online shopping experience cheaper or easier.

For brands, achieving this can be easier said than done. According to Forrester, 89 percent of digital businesses are investing in personalisation. But a study they conducted found that only one in five organizations are effective at personalising content at-scale. It is clear that this is an area that the C-suite needs to take more seriously. If you aren’t treating your customer as an individual, you can be sure that your competitors are only too happy to take their custom.

Sitecore’s suite of personalisation tools, as well as Sitecore Personalize itself, can help you treat your customers like individuals.

4. Getting your product to your customer

With more people than ever shopping online over the past couple of years, getting your product from your warehouse or store to the end consumer has become a real point of differentiation for shoppers. Customers are spoiled for choice when it comes to getting their hands on the things they buy quickly. Platforms like Amazon or Noon offer next-day, or in some cases even same-day delivery, as well as platforms like Careem or NowNow offering grocery delivery within 30 minutes.

This so-called “Last Mile” is key, and brands are faced with the choice of investing in their own robust delivery system or using a third-party. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen stores like Spinney’s roll-out their own delivery channel for online orders, which of course comes at a cost, but also offers much-needed reliability and flexibility for customers. Retailers like Namshi rely on such a network not only for offering fast delivery, but for quickly picking-up and processing returns. It’s this level of service that can set you apart from your competition. Today’s customers are time sensitive and getting your product to them quickly is table stakes.

Taking the next step

Sitecore’s revamped Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and suite of composable tools such as Content Hub, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Personalize can send you well on your way to putting your best foot forward in 2022.

I originally wrote this article for the Horizontal Digital blog.