Effective personalization for better consumer experiences

K E E P S P O I L I N G Y O U R C O N S U M E R S

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

To stay in the game, you’ve got to provide a

frictionless experience everywhere, one with zero

learning curve. That means every action must be

glance-at-your-phone intuitive.

You’ve also got to be available wherever your

consumer is whenever your brand name crosses

their mind — at work, on the subway, even in bed.

At every touch point, your brand must greet them

with a consistent face that’s memorable and

engaging.

Why is this critical to business success?

Consider that 86% of customers who have a great

experience will repurchase, and customers with

the best experiences spend 140% more than

those who have poor ones. That’s a huge bottom-

line difference for your business.

And it means you’ve got to deliver to consumers:

• The products they favor before they ask

(but not in a creepy way)

• The prices they want (and they will compare)

• The buying options they prefer (or they’ll drop)

And on top of that, the whole journey must be

flawless. If all those stars don’t align, then you’re

losing business. And, by the way, consumers don’t

care if you’re a small, mid-sized, or multi-national

enterprise. It’s the experience that matters.

Fortunately, in the past 10 years cloud computing

has advanced to become a place where these

goals are easier to achieve. In this e-Book, we’ll

show you the strategies that have proven to

deliver personalized experiences at scale with

consistent and reliable management of content

across any media.

Consumers are spoiled. And it’s your job to keep spoiling them.Just glance down at your phone and you’ll see it. The quality of

consumer interactions has increased exponentially in the last 10 years.

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

What’s keeping you from advancing to a complete consumer experience?

There are any number of things keeping businesses from achieving a new level

of consumer engagement. From board rooms to creative drawing boards,

everyone in business is dealing with some version of these consumer challenges:

Content is all over the place

If you have more than one person working on your content, then you must

manage how it gets delivered. Multiple systems make it difficult to manage and

deliver content at scale, from copy versions to imagery, and beyond.

Uncoordinated content management can lead to lost efficiency, and even lost

revenue. For instance, does your pricing system integrate with your image

library? If it does, then a new promotion is much simpler to launch.

Too much data — not enough insight

This is the quandary of the big data age. Everything can be recorded, but

nothing can be considered. You’ve got tons of data, but no way to efficiently

aggregate it from its myriad sources. And further, how do you make it visible

for your experts to organize, and distill meaningful analysis? And do it all in

real time?

Customers get treated like you’ve aggregated them, not like you know them

Your consumer who’s standing on a street corner with a smartphone expects

consistent, outstanding, and relevant interactions every time. It’s the new

standard. You need to be there for them as the same partner who spoke with

them before and knows what they want this time.

That means serving up relevant offers and products based on that knowledge.

This is no longer a “nice-to-have.” Contextual knowledge is now competitive

table stakes.

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

You don’t act the same on every channel

It’s simple. Consumers expect the same brand experience wherever they

encounter you. You must be providing something relevant to their needs, in a

fresh way that uses the channel seamlessly.

When consumers don’t get these things, many companies see above-average

drop-off rates in their digital channels; but they can’t figure out why because they

also don’t have visibility into holistic customer journey metrics. That’s precisely

because they’re having difficulty managing, delivering, and tracking content at

scale across all channels.

And because they can’t see the outcomes, naturally they can’t measure them.

When you can’t measure, you can’t analyze and adjust your response. That

means you’ll continue to fail to meet consumer expectations for personalized

experiences, particularly in the digital realm. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.

Digital experience marketing: Every touch is part of something bigger

What is digital experience marketing? It’s an approach that accounts for every

interaction the consumer has had with you. When digital experience marketing

is done correctly, each touch builds on the last, providing greater meaning

and better results.

Doing that requires three basic elements:

• Contextual intelligence: Gives the information you need about consumers

• Content management: Ensures the content you manage is more relevant

• Omni-channel automation: Enables automatic delivery of the right message

to the right person in the right context

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

Inbound sources

For those consumers visiting your websites, you’ll want to

consider where they’ve clicked, but more important, why. If it’s

in response to a paid search that’s promoting a specific product

or service, chances are they are interested in that product or

service. Base your response on that.

Make your response consistent with the offer the consumer

expects — upsells should be complementary. If your site’s visitor

came from an outbound email, you know they’re likely an

existing customer — or a prospect you’ve had some interaction

with. Treat them like you know them—because you do.

Anonymous data

Even if someone appeared on your site out of the blue, they

came with a wealth of information you can use to personalize

the interaction. You may know their location data, and that can

drive everything from mapping to weather personalization.

You’ll know when they arrived — time of day, day of week,

season, and more — which can lead to all kinds of opportunities

for personalization.

On-site behavior

Even if you have no other information from a consumer’s past,

you can gauge their activity on your site to determine what they

want and how you can satisfy them.

How they travel through your site can reveal a lot. What did they

search? Did they search? Which content interested them? If they

converted, what led to the action? From all this information, you

can create an implicit profile for better service on the fly.

Integrated information

If your data systems are siloed, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

Being able to cross-reference your online and mobile data with

your CRM system can result in extremely powerful insights and

more sales. You can also use your contact center’s help and

support system as a source of information.

Also, consider enriching data with third-party data sources. For

B2B companies, it may be company IP addresses or programmatic

or data management platform data, such as the profiles you can

get from the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB).

Making the most of your four data sourcesIt’s impossible to analyze the success of your marketing programs without knowing

where your information is coming from. When you’re evaluating incoming data, ask

yourself: “What is the source?” Then treat that data appropriately based on its origin.

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

The 9 steps to deliver individualized experiences at scaleWhen putting it all together into a system that improves marketing

and sales results, we often recommend a 9-step approach

1. Define your objectives

Before you begin looking at your data, you need to be clear on your business goals. Identify your key

metrics and what success will look like for the program.

2. Identify each segment by potential, importance, and ease (PIE)

We use the PIE system to prioritize segments: potential, importance, and ease. Potential is the

upside to personalizing their content — the size of the opportunity. Would it revolutionize your business,

or just maybe add an incremental tweak? Importance is the size of the segment — are they 10 records or

10 million? Ease is how easy it is to identify that segment. For example, is the criterion as easy to isolate

as income, or would it require a psychographic study? In addition to PIE, consider each segment’s needs

and life-cycle stages. These are critical.

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

3. Connect segments to personalization goals

Speaking of needs and life cycle, you’ll want to capitalize on them as well. You

can do this based on needs and life-cycle stage. Then map each segment to the

key metrics you want to achieve; for example, matching the size of purchase to

the purchaser’s income.

4. Examine existing data

Ensure that your data is real-time. What a consumer needed yesterday is not

what they need today. Sitecore generates a great deal of data about each one

of your customers, right up to their behavior in the moment — that is, in real time.

And don’t forget to look at other data sources for customer insights to get the

full detailed picture. Once you have all that, match your key segments to their

specific behavior.

5. Determine key insights

The “why” is very important here. Look specifically at insights about how the

segments arrive at your site. Focus on specific sources that can help you identify

the segment. What key content and pages are they engaging with and where

are they?

Beyond that, look at which paths to conversion are most successful, and which

provide an opportunity for optimization. This can be valuable for determining

where to optimize and which content offering would be most appealing to

the segment.

6. Map the customer’s journey

Using your key insights as a starting point, you’ll need to determine how your

customers make their way through your site. It’s crucial to identifying the pages

you want to target for personalization.

Use the key insights you find to identify common paths that are most successful

for nurture. Then, determine which have the most opportunity for improvement

from personalization, for instance, those that are highly trafficked but less

valuable in terms of outcomes. Don’t spend resources where the payoff isn’t

likely to be worth it.

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

7. Target page components for personalization

Determine which personalized elements will move the needle, then focus

resources on those to personalize effectively and efficiently. You’re looking for

the biggest improvement for the lowest effort, so identify specific content blocks

for personalization (for example, the hero carousel on a home page can have

a big effect, but require low effort).

8. Apply personalization rules

You can set very specific rules and parameters for your personalization effort

with tools like those that Sitecore provides. The rules you establish should

determine what content is delivered to whom and when.

9. Select, deliver, and optimize the content

Match your content carefully to the segment and the goals you’ve set to achieve.

The content should emphasize the most relevant message based on visitors’

contextual situation and in-the-moment intent. For instance:

• For those at the top of the buying funnel, deliver content to build

trust and develop intent

• For those closer to the bottom of the funnel, deliver content more

centered on conversions

Once you’ve begun delivering content, monitor the effects of personalization and adjust your tactics accordingly to optimize the experience.

Remember to try different approaches that you think will achieve the highest effect for the lowest effort (test shouts, not whispers).

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

Simply put, L’Oréal is the largest cosmetics company in the world. Their

offerings range from iconic brands such as Garnier and Maybelline New York to

African Beauty Brand (ABB) and China’s Magic Mask.

The ambitious digital goal this global powerhouse set for itself is to refresh and relaunch 600 websites for 15 brands in just three years, all in an effort to

become the No. 1 digital beauty brand in the world. Easy, right?

The challenge

To meet that ambitious company goal, L’Oréal had to overcome a number

of barriers within the company’s online and digital systems, including:

• Lack of innovative new services on new channels — such as

e-commerce — and inability to deliver them as quickly as needed

• Inability to deliver personalized experiences based on customer

interaction data

• Absence of a single core marketing model that delivered a globally

consistent online brand experience while providing cost-effective

localization for each country

• A siloed organization that included external partners with varying

technology capabilities

600websites

60countries

15brands

3years

#1digital beauty brand in the world

Industry: Retail • Founded: 1909 • Employees: 80,000+ Headquarters: France • loreal.com

Putting the best faces on a global brand

C A S E S T U D Y

E-BOOK • Keep spoiling your consumers

The solution

After a worldwide search, L’Oréal chose Sitecore to provide their digital marketing

platform. Sitecore was the only platform offering both rich personalization

capabilities and speed of deployment for global scale with Microsoft Azure.

The solution L’Oréal launched is built on multiple Sitecore products, including

Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) and Sitecore xDB. Using them, L’Oréal

developed a “website factory,” a marketplace of reusable web templates that

allows individual brands across 60 countries with widely varying needs to create

and deploy websites quickly and easily.

Through this program, we have now built a common platform, a marketplace of functionalities so every brand and country can concentrate again on providing the best experience for our consumers.

Lubomira Rochet Chief Digital Officer, L’Oréal

“

The results

Sitecore’s suite of products enables L’Oréal to quickly and cost effectively

deploy globally scalable solutions that allow brands to offer unique experiences

to the country subsidiaries and consumers.

They’ve achieved:

• A unified digital platform that gives L’Oréal brands the speed to

market and flexibility they need

• Customized product offerings based on specific consumer profiles

• Lower capital costs and technology administration by consolidating

10-plus technologies into a single Sitecore solution

• A consistent digital presence across all brands

• Over 55% improved page load times

Unifying the brand, customizing the journey

Sitecore works in partnership with Microsoft

Azure to help modern marketing organizations

realize the power of data — at any scale. Sitecore

helps you not only know your customers more

intimately but also serve them in a way that keeps

them coming back.

From AmerisourceBergen to IHOP, our 3,600

worldwide clients depend on us to maximize the

data, unify the content, and drive the revenue

through digital experiences tailored to the

buyer’s deepest needs.

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