Getting Started with Sitecore Personalization
Jul 23, 2018 • 1 Minute Read
Whether you’ve just recently hopped onto the Sitecore Platform or you’ve been on it for years, I'm willing to bet one of its selling points was the ability to use many of the tools within the Sitecore Experience platform – personalization in particular. Before getting starting with personalizing each visitor’s experience, there are a few things you should consider.
Consideration #1
What do you hope to achieve with those changes? Determining how your personalization initiative is meant to help achieve a specific business goal or objective – whether that be driving users to move through a specific funnel, fill in a form, or simply to engage at a higher rate with a piece(s) of content – will help to better measure the success of said initiative.
Consideration #2
Second, try to remember that when it comes to personalization, you should start with crawl. Move to walk when you have an effective strategy in place, then run when you find a strategy that is working.
Getting into the platform and making changes so that every visitor experiences the website differently will make it impossible to know what is and isn't effective – and it may turn off many of your customers from coming back to your site. Make sure you plan how you will measure your personalization scenarios, implement the necessary tracking measures, and create the necessary reporting to understand what is working and what scenarios need to be updated.
Consideration #3
Finally, keep in mind that there is no silver bullet for personalization. Sitecore on its own can’t personalize experiences for you (at least not until machine learning and artificial intelligence remove the need for marketers!). You need to understand that it will take some dedicated thought, effort, and know-how to create a personalized experience for each user that comes to your site.