How to Personalize the User Experience Across Channels

Consumers are multichannel mavericks, engaging you from a range of devices and platforms. Learn how to create, manage and optimize their digital experience.

A growing number of consumers today regularly use multiple internet-connected devices, from laptops to smartphones to wearables to voice assistants—and they expect a seamless interaction with your brand on each of them. Delivering a compelling and personalized customer journey across all these digital touchpoints has never been so important, or so complex.

To tackle this issue, we recently hosted a webinar in conjunction with the American Marketing Association. The webinar detailed how you can centrally manage your digital presence, use data to craft personalized content, and take advantage of Progress Sitefinity to create the kinds of engaging multi-channel experiences you’re looking for.

You can watch the entire webinar on demand right here or at the link below.

Watch the Webinar

We received a lot of great questions that we weren’t able to get to during the webinar, and we wanted to make sure we answered those for you here.

Q&A

Q: What process and tools do you recommend to capture and match customer data from different data sources?

A: The data integration module within Sitefinity Insight currently supports Sitefinity CMS, Eloqua, Saleforce and manual import through a CSV. To capture data from other systems, we have API endpoints that can be leveraged. These allow you to collect, query and manage data to personalize interactions and satisfy compliance needs, such as those from GDPR. I want to note that Sitefinity Insight can help you personalize for both known and unknown contacts this way.

As far as matching goes, you just need a common identifying piece of information. By default, we will use email address(es) for this because it’s generally the most common piece of unique data that is available.

Q: How are you creating personalized digital experiences on paid media (display, video, native) for prospects that have never been to the company site?

A: For a scenario like that, both Sitefinity Insight and the provider would have to know the identity of the prospect so that the Sitefinity Insight personalization API can be used to tailor the experience. Whether your provider knows this identity, and whether this can be used to query another system, will depend on the provider.

Still, if the prospect has never visited any of your channels before and is completely unknown, there’s little point in querying the Sitefinity Insight API, as it contains no information that can be used for tailoring (yet!).

Q: Does your platform support agencies building experiences for different companies and brands?

A: The Sitefinity Insight utilizes a concept called data centers. These are usually a bucket in which all the interaction and contact data, from all channels, is stored for a company based on their Sitefinity Insight subscription. An agency can access an unlimited number of accounts and data centers by being added to a company’s users list within Sitefinity Insight.

Q: Does this website personalization slow down page loading? That is, does the visitor have to wait a moment to see the content?

A: The Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight both offer personalization options, so let’s break this down.

In Sitefinity Insight, there are three types of personalization queries – Lead Scoring, Persona and Campaign. When these are used to personalize from an application like Sitefinity CMS, a service call is made to Sitefinity Insight. We’ve optimized Sitefinity Insight to return a response within milliseconds, but network latency can sometimes increase response time.

In Sitefinity CMS, there are two modes of personalization – Full Page and Widget-Based. Full page personalization constructs the whole page on the server and caches it for subsequent requests, so the only additional time required is to determine if the current user matches your personalization criteria. Widget-based personalization allows you to tailor each component of the page on the client side, and sometimes the personalized content is delivered to the browser milliseconds after the loading of the page.

Q: So does a customer have to submit a login to the website, in order to personalize the website experience for them?

A: Nope! There’s no requirement to log in. Sitefinity Insight records an anonymous user’s interaction data and stores the ID of their profile with a cookie, so the next time they interact their history will be logged and personalization can be adapted.

Personalizing for a user based on their interactions across a range of applications, browsers and devices does require them to be a “known contact.” This means Sitefinity Insight needs to have some common identifying information about them on each app/browser/device – which could mean a login, or a subscription process or form submission. There are other methods as well.

Q: Tracking PDF downloads in Sitefinity Insight – is this an automatic tracking event, or do you have to build and manage that in Google Analytics?

A: All downloads are tracked automatically in Sitefinity Insight when your documents are stored in the CMS. If the document is stored outside of Sitefinity, you can use HTML5 instrumentation to register the interaction.

Thank You

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the webinar and submitted questions. If you have any other feedback, we’d love to hear it, so please leave us a comment below or submit an idea in our feedback portal. If you’re new to Sitefinity and want to give it a try, feel free to contact us to set up a demo today.