Putting the personalisation journey into practice

Personalisation isn’t the end-goal. Instead it’s the aim which will enable your business to improve what it does by putting the customer at the centre.

That was the lesson from Dexus digital marketing project manager, Jo Gartner, who spoke at the Sitecore Experience 2019 event in Sydney and the rationale behind her company’s recent personalisation journey.

“We went on a journey in rebuilding Dexus with a view to having platform in place to embrace personalisation,” Gartner explained to attendees.

The ambition was to continue the strong sense of customer centricity by overhauling its digital footprint. Increasingly, Dexus had been creating microsites to utilise certain features and for new projects because of the limitations of its main site. However, this wasn’t building traffic to the main site and prevented the company from being able to create awareness between its different offerings.

“We needed a solution that would give scale and flexibility," Gartner explained. "What started as a challenge, soon become an opportunity."

Initial steps included understanding the customers, a content audit, identifying marketing objectives and simplifying the user journey. The content audit encompassed looking at existing and future content to showcase more of the business with rich media and interactive floor plans. To do this, Dexus looked at what’s relevant and how to personalise it, then made sure it’s embedded in Y frame, Gartner said.

Dexus then matched personalisation goals with its marketing objectives to ensure the result was simplifying the user journey, regardless of the page.

“There are multiple entry points to the site, but we treat every page like it’s a home page," Gartner continued.
"Different pages will have different needs in how they’re put out to the audience.”

Dexus formulated two checks for each page: How does someone navigate to a single page from the home page? How does each page sits as it’s its own microsite?

The results have been immediate and include an uptick in traffic and enquiries. For Gartner, the journey starts with questioning how personalisation will benefit the customer first. Then allowing time to listen and learn about what customers are interested in.

“Every page is a homepage. And the user experience is an extension of the customer experience,” she added.

Checklist: Personalisation in Practice

As part of the session, Sitecore senior marketing consultant, Alison Sainsbury, outlined a four-step process to achieve quick wins when putting personalisation into practice.

1. Define objectives and digital goals

• What are the strategic objectives?
• What are the marketing objectives?
• What are the digital goals?

2. Prioritise key customer segments for quick personalisation wins

• How important is each one in relation to traffic volume?
• What the potential business impact?

3. Identify available data inputs

• Default data: Device, date/time, campaign, location, source
• Gathered data: Visits, pages, forms, goals
• Inferred data: Profiles, personas, patterns, segmentation
• Third-party data: Contacts, orders, bookings, preferences, IoT data
• External data: Open data such as weather, location, transport

4. Map data inputs to content components

This is the start of personalising the customer experience

• Choose a key page and pick a component.
• Identify a goal and current default content.
• Check if personalisation message can be created with the available data.

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