Tactic 3 Personalise inbound experiences in Sitecore
A huge number of companies allocate enormous marketing budgets to email campaigns, social posts, display ads and PPC campaigns. They also spend copious amounts of money on SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), all with the intention of driving large swathes of traffic to their website...and many succeed!
But what kind of experience does the customer receive when they arrive at those websites?...Is it personalised, or is it the same experience everyone else receives when they visit?
As you’re probably well aware by now, 3chillies build high-performing websites. What you might not know, is that we build high-performing websites for all sorts of companies from a broad range of industries: Legal, Shipping, Waste Disposal, Property and much, much more. So is it really possible to make the customer journey relevant when you cater for such a broad spectrum of customer types?
Well...yes!
When a customer ends up at the 3chillies website, they’ve usually visited for a purpose: perhaps it was a lucrative offer contained within an email campaign, an industry relevant tweet, or a PPC link that seemed relevant to that particular visitor. We usually have a pretty good idea as to what their intentions are, purely based on the type of ad text they clicked on to arrive at your website.
Maybe they found a link which says “Website development for Law firms”. In such a case you might send them through to a landing page that is built especially for the Legal industry, which holds relevant case studies and relevant headings. But what happens when they click away from that page onto the other informational pages….the experience probably becomes a lot less targeted, and all of a sudden there is very little relevant information to be found anywhere. It also seems like quite a lot of work to create dedicated landing pages for each industry. Perhaps it would be better to personalise smaller segments of a single landing page in order to lighten the workload whilst keeping the content relevant! The good news is, that's possible in Sitecore.
To map the inbound source and the intent of the customer, you’ll need to have a token, or what we call a “Campaign ID.” (It’s also known as a Unique ID, or UID). You attach the unique ID to the tail end of the inbound URL that you set up, so the link will look something like this:
www.websitename.com?sc_camp=UID
Now we can personalise the customer journey using the rule “Where Campaign ID equals UID”, and when the customer clicks on a PPC campaign which is targeted towards Law Firms, they’ll arrive on a single landing page that displays a relevant case study and relevant title.
If you’re interested in implementing this type of personalisation, here’s a step by step guide on how to generate a unique campaign ID within Sitecore. We also made this video tutorial on how to use the personalisation feature within Sitecore.
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Get in touch today by calling 01189 314 196, or emailing us via our contact form.
