I was delighted to speak at the 9th SMAC webinar on 1st November about Sitecore CDP and Personalize alongside the fantastic Peter Clisby and Vaishali Dialani.
You can check it out below from 19m 20s.
I was delighted to speak at the 9th SMAC webinar on 1st November about Sitecore CDP and Personalize alongside the fantastic Peter Clisby and Vaishali Dialani.
You can check it out below from 19m 20s.
Personalisation is hard. But as American educator, author and politician, Hamilton Holt once said, “Nothing worthwhile comes easily”. Most companies today are aware of the value behind understanding their customers better and showing them relevant content. According to Forrester, 89 percent of digital businesses are investing in personalization. But a study they conducted found that only one in five organizations are effective at personalizing content at-scale, despite personalisation being the top success factor for customer and prospect engagement.
So it’s clear that companies need a hand with personalisation. Good thing Sitecore is there to help. At a recent webinar on ‘Leveraging Automation and AI for 1:1 Engagement’ representatives from Horizontal Digital and Sitecore laid out how Personalisation can be made easier by Sitecore’s new Automation and Machine Learning solutions.
What Problem Are You Trying To Solve?
While there is seemingly constant innovation in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Automation, it’s important not to get carried away with the hype, and really delve into how exactly these technologies might help your business rather than simply engage in a box-ticking exercise. Whatever technology you are looking to utilize to improve your business, ultimately it’s a means to an end. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Automation is no different. Horizontal’s George Smith, Regional Managing Director MEIA elaborates, “AI is not a solution in itself, it is a way of solving particular problems. You’ve got to acknowledge what the business challenge that you’re trying to solve is. There is always some deeper problem that you are attempting to solve with AI”.
This is where Sitecore comes in, with a range of new tools that utilize AI, ML and Automation that can make Personalisation a whole lot more accessible and effective. Smith expands, “Sitecore AI’s objective is continuing to fulfill the promise that Sitecore has always had of real-time personalisation – that ability to orchestrate customer experiences around not just a generic user, but an individual in real-time, at that moment showing them the content and functionality and messaging that will convince them to purchase. Sitecore AI makes that process easier for any size of marketing department in any organization”.
The History of Personalisation in Marketing
If we think of marketing as having three stages – Strategy, Operations, and Learning – we can look at how the opportunities for Personalisation for each has really changed over the last few years:
Smith continues, “This is not about getting a robot to run your organisation. It’s about the division of labour – let machines do what machines do best, and let people do what people do best. You’re always going to need that human touch. Lets stop getting creative and innovative marketers to do CMS administration and figure out how complicated workflows in the back-end of a system work. Lets allow the system to do that. Lets allow machines to recognise patterns that humans can’t even see in terms of segmenting customers, and lets bring all that insight together so it can be used by humans in creative pursuits, in campaign creative and marketing strategy”.
Sitecore’s New Automation Tools
It’s an exciting time for brands that realise the importance of the Customer Experience on digital channels. Platforms like Amazon and Uber have raised the bar when it comes to providing customers with fast and tailored experiences and users now expect this type of treatment from any brand they interact with in a digital setting. As Smith outlines, “Fundamentally, these tools are for organisations that understand that their future competitive advantage, the thing that is going to differentiate them from their competitors, is no longer to be found in the way that they produce their products, but in the way that they can orchestrate consumption experiences. The moment you realise that your Customer Experience is your Competitive Advantage in a digital economy is the moment you should realise that you need Sitecore. It is the best digital experience platform in the world, from content to commerce”. These new tools from Sitecore can help your organisation make this a reality:
Biren Balakrishnan, Sitecore’s Sales Engineer Manager for Asia explains how to think about using Cortex in your organisation, “Think of the relationship between the left side of the brain, which is more analytical, and the right side of the brain, which is more creative. You need both sides to effectively engage with your customer so there is a balance needed. From an organisational point-of-view, the ‘left side’ is the Data Scientist, Analysts and Developers, and the ‘right side’ is the Marketing Department”. Sitecore Cortex can compliment both:
According to Balakrishnan, when it comes to the challenges of Personalisation, it typically boils down to resources, knowledge, and having the technical set-up to do this. This is where Sitecore’s AI tools can help, “What we’re looking to use AI for right now is to remove the heavy lifting and make it as easy as possible for organizations and individuals in the marketing team to get their job done, and to realize the potential of things like personalisation and excellent digital experiences. AI can be a tool to speed up your Go-To-Market strategy, lower the barriers to entry in terms of resources, structure and knowledge, and get you where you need to get faster”.
The Power of Auto-Personalisation
If you had to focus on the one thing Sitecore does better than any other system in the world, it is probably the real-time personalisation of content shown to the user. Traditionally this has been driven by a set of rules manually pre-configured into Sitecore, however this has now evolved to be possible using such Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The potential of Auto-Personalisation is so profound as it essentially democratises Personalisation, making it available even to organisations that do not have a data science division or the traditional resources to make this a reality. According to Balakrishnan, “Auto-Personalisation is about making Personalisation as easy as possible. The marketing team only needs to worry about the content variations and they can let Sitecore AI do the rest without having to do the heavy lifting themselves”.
With Sitecore Auto-Personalisation, reducing the workload for the Marketing Team is as easy as as one, two, three:
These features will save your Marketing Department a lot of time and effort on your Personalisation journey. As George Smith outlines, “Understanding the customer, being able to serve that customer what they want, when they want – that is the future. And what Sitecore will give you is a tool that will do the Operations and the Learning for you so you can just focus on the Strategy behind that”.
Find out more about how you can leverage Sitecore’s new Automation tools to enable Personalisation by watching the webinar video here.