There is a lot of discussion about how Personalize can benefit your company’s digital strategy. Rightfully so, it’s scalable, flexible and can fit into your tech stack with ease. In a previous blog, I discuss the roadmap to success for Personalize and an operational model to support the best methodology. Now, I want to focus on the library your developers will be building out. The library will contain templates that your marketers to reuse to increase the time to market for your experiences and experiments.
Here are the templates your developers will begin to focus on for your marketers:
Web templates:
Web templates are the “components” you would like to add to the page. It can be alert bars, pop-ups, features, etc! Your developers will be building a library of templates (over time) for marketers to reuse, design and publish on the site and other channels. Personalize does come with OOTB templates that can get you started such as a notification widget, sidebar, popup takeover and more.
Audience templates:
Audience templates define the audience segment you would like to target for the experiences or experiment. You can segment out first-time visitors, visitors based on language, and visitors coming from a particular referral source – your options are expansive. However, if you have more complex requirements for an experience or experiment, yo u might want to leverage a decision model.
Decision Models:
Decision models are for experiments or experiences that require a bit more complex logic. Decision models can use guest data, knowledge sources (offers), external systems and decision tables to determine the output of the experience and experiment. A great example of when to use a decision model is if you would like to personalize for multilingual visitors. You can leverage offers, connections, and decision tables to help segment audience members, determine the correct translation, and output the translated content to an offer. Below is an example of a Sitecore Decision template for a multilingual experience.
Sitecore Decision Table
Offer Templates:
Offer templates are utilized to create offers. Your mind might instantly go to discount codes or offers for an eCommerce shop but it’s not just for that! Offer templates are the structure of the data for offers. If you are familiar with XP, think of offers as data sources and offer templates as the structure of that data e.g. a component. Offer templates can be made up of string text, numerical values, links and more.
You create offer templates so your marketers can go in and create offers specific to an experience or experiment.
Fun fact: If you are an eCommerce company, you might be managing offers such as discounts with a third-party system. Managing offers in Personalize is an option. If you have a third-party system already managing offers, you can still utilize that system and Personalize together (Thanks to connections!)
We will continue to explore the building blocks of Personalize and what makes a successful optimization model to increase revenue and improve user experience across all your digital channels.
Looking for a partner to walk this journey? Contact Perficient today to talk to our technical and strategy experts.
