Wondering what personalized marketing is, or how it can work for you? Read on to learn what personalization is and how you can easily implement it in your organization.
Personalized marketing is an increasingly popular trend in marketing, and for good reason. It’s effective for building a bridge for a brand-to-consumer relationship. Despite the tools available to use personalization in marketing, including Sitefinity Insight, many brands still have not adopted this way of marketing in their emails, websites, direct mail pieces, etc., believing it is too complex or too difficult to implement well.
Personalization has played out on websites through hyper-relevant targeting. Instead of static content shown to everyone, certain pieces of content are swapped, based on persona information, so they resonate more with each user.
Consider Amazon's homepage, where there are typically a few sections that give the user products that may be of interest to them, based on their recent searches and orders.
While this as just one example, you can perform many other personalized-based actions in Sitefinity Insight—it’s easy to quickly implement personalized content on your website. Some examples include:
- Personalized pages
- Personalized templates
- Personalized widgets
- Personalized dynamic widgets
How Personalization Works in Sitefinity Insight
Personalization works by considering the available information, and aligning that with the criteria that the marketer defines as part of a targeted persona within Sitefinity Insight. When a user visits a webpage in which you have defined a section to be personalized, Sitefinity Insight decides which piece of content that user should see on their screen, based on which targeted persona that they matched in Sitefinity Insight.
These personas can be based on information such as:
- IP Address
- Location
- Referral URL
- Time of Day
- Sitefinity Insight Persona
- Sitefinity Insight Lead Scoring Type
- and many more
The tricky part is understanding how to utilize these segments of information to target your users. Luckily, Sitefinity CMS collects and analyzes a combination of demographic, behavioral and contextual data to help brands craft segments more accurately.
How Sitefinity Insight Looks in Reporting
For each personalized page created, Sitefinity Insight will create a report that summarizes which segment of users are visiting the page.
In the Sitefinity documentation, personalization reporting is explained:
"In the Personalization reports screen, you see an overview of all reports and a summary of the number of visitors to personalized versions of each page. If you have a bigger list of reports, you can sort them by date or impressions type. You can also choose the time period for which you want to see a reports’ summary, for example just for yesterday or as far back as 6 months. For each report, you can edit the name and redefine the goal, to which the report measures attribution."
Here's how it looks in action:
How Different Industries are Using Personalization
We've already learned Amazon heavily uses personalization in order to offer relevant products to users, but how do other industries utilize personalization? With a quick look around the web, it’s easy to get a sense of the effectiveness of the kind of personalization that Sitefinity Insight provides.
1. Netflix
Netflix uses personalization to display recommendations to users, as well as offer suggestions to content they may enjoy based on their previous watch history. This is a good example of how a company can utilize behavioral and contextual analytics in order to personalize content.
2. Facebook
Facebook uses tons of analytical data in order to decide what posts to show a user at any given moment.
3. Any Digital Ad Network
Most digital advertising services, such as Google AdWords, use complex algorithms to display relevant advertising to users. We all hate ads, but there is a lot of work that goes into putting the correct ad in front of a user that they will be likely interested in!
Personalized marketing provides an opportunity to make consumers feel remembered by a brand—their digital experience can pick up right where they left off on their last website visit, they can be called by their first name and pointed in the direction of exactly what they’re looking for by a simple Google search. Sitefinity Insight allows brands to turn their consumers into loyalists.
Curious to find out more about how Sitefinity Insight can help you master personalization? Check out the top reasons to start using Sitefinity Insight today, or dive deeper with a personalization webinar:
Aaron Arney
Aaron Arney is a Front-End Developer at LEAP Group. He has spent the last 8 years developing websites and digital solutions for brands of all industries. His development work is fueled by cats and sandwiches.