Customers continue to be more demanding, wanting seamless experiences that take into account personal locations, anticipating preferences and even accounting for digital footprints of a customer. The pressure to convert customer engagement into sales continues to rise. This can only mean that the modern marketer has to work on a multi-pronged approach to handling interactions, leading to conversions.
Personalization is the Key to Effective Digital Marketing
The pairing of Sitecore Experience Manager and Salesforce Marketing Cloud has enhanced efficiency and personalization, clearly indicating that digital personalization is the future for effective marketing. Advancements in big data as well as marketing technology have further enhanced the efficacy as well as potential of personalized digital marketing. Take a look at how the Sitecore Experience Platform’s dynamic content personalization has helped companies become better marketers:
Contextual Intelligence with Interaction Data: Bringing contextual intelligence into play, Sitecore makes use of the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) to coordinate smart personalization. It works as a repository for multiple marketing channel data as well as real time customer interaction data. This helps in creating efficient strategies for existing as well as new customers. Data includes details pertaining to digital fingerprints, origin point of individuals and activity data among other details.
One-stop Email Marketing Solutions: With the data collected, Sitecore EXM and Email Cloud come together to help you create a personalized email campaign that matches subscriber requirements. Features within this segment allow for personalization of individual components thanks to a specific personalization rule set.
Read More: Why Personalization is Central to Your Digital Marketing Strategies
With Sitecore’s ability to provide for personalized experiences, you can be sure of showing your customer targeted and relevant content that is specific to their characteristics related to location, gender, or even previous visits. It also takes into account online purchase patterns. With this information one can choose to display or withhold information based on customer profile. This would mean that content specific to customer location will be displayed; forms once filled online will not be displayed again among other features.
How to be Future Ready with Personalization Strategies
That personalization will continue to be the prime driving force for marketing success in the years to come is of no doubt. Here is how it can be done:
Create a Reliable Customer Data and Analytics Foundation: An important end is constantly being able to understand the needs of high-value customers. What is needed is a system that brings together data, both structured and non-structured for analysis. It will require an interaction with all forms of customer channels – voice to visual. All of the information will need to be analysed and then placed into organized dashboards for easy access. This can be achieved when marketing and technology departments work together. As a company, investing in Martech as well as cyber security teams will become critical to ensure that personalized experiences are not compromised through the constant analyses.
Include Advanced Tech Talent in Marketing Operations: Creating personalized eco-systems will also require talent that goes beyond the skills needs for a marketing operation. From data scientists and engineers to analytics translators, there is a need to strengthen the marketing team with such skill sets. Going forward the focus will be on AI talent – both with core abilities as well as creative problem solving. There will also be a need to improve on training capabilities for constant evolution and growth of these teams.
Work on Enhancing Agile Capabilities: With efforts towards personalization being a constant cross-disciplinary effort, it is natural that the traditional segregation within a marketing team will not work. What will be needed is agile management as well as cross-functional teams that can execute rapidly. There will be a need for increased collaboration and integration of teams across several departments. Company budgets will also have to be flexible to accommodate new initiatives based on marketing priorities that are constantly evolving.
Expect a Heightened Focus on Data Privacy: With data security concerns at an all-time high, proactive management of customer privacy has to take precedence. Transparency will be key, with limitations on data processing to extract only the information necessary. Measures to protect against data theft and ensuring that customers have the right to be forgotten must be a part of the strategy.
Sitecore helps you do all of this in a structured manner. It gives you the ability to start small and scale up across all of your brand channels, at a rate of implementation of your choice. You can choose to deploy personalization where you believe it will have the most impact. The added advantage is that Sitecore allows you to simply make a beginning and removes the need for months of development to suit your business. With the insights that it constantly provides your team, you will be able to tailor it to your specific needs.
Along with building on digital personalization strategies, it is important to also keep a track of the trends in the field to be able to stay ahead of the curve. Here are some of the trends for 2020 that you should know:
Anticipate the Need for Balance between Human and Automated Interaction: Chatbots have been useful to businesses, yet studies show that customers still are a bit wary of them. The need for a balance between automated and human interaction is a must.
Work towards Increasing the Presence of Bots in Interaction with Customers: Though contradictory to point one, it is a natural way forward in the digital experience for a customer. Speed and the ability to handle more questions than a human would in the same time frame being key factors. Again, the quality of data that the bot uses will be key.
Be Prepared to Deal with Increased Demand for Hyper-Personalization: We have said it before and will say it again – the consumer will continue to demand more and more personalized interaction. This will lead to an increase in conversions. Investing in refining digital customer experiences will be key.
Be Prepared to Cater to Customers Demand for Transparency and Data Protection: This is something that a company will have to work towards including in their digital personalization strategies on a constant basis.
Overall there is a need to focus on being future-ready with a personalization strategy that ensures not only brand loyalty, but what every marketer wants – increased conversions. And Sitecore can help you make that difference.
About Suyati Technologies
Founded in 2009, Suyati Technologies partners with clients to engineer great experiences for digital customers. We collaborate with businesses to strategize and implement impactful digital initiatives that position our clients ahead of the competition. We are digital-first and focus on delivering great customer experiences that accelerate exponential growth.
Our approach to customer experience can be summed up in one phrase – Buyer Rhythms (BR). BR is the deep understanding of your customer by focusing on, and learning from, the repeated patterns they create while interacting with your business. It offers you detailed insights, delivered in a seamless manner within your existing IT ecosystem.
With our niche and rich expertise in CMS, CRM, e-commerce and Marketing Automation, we help companies across the globe leverage their best on web and cloud through our platform integration, data analytics and customer engagement services.
Learn more: www.suyati.com
Get in touch: services@suyati.com
