Sitecore Personalize – Decision models for next best action
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Let’s dive into the world of personalized experiences through the next best action approach.
Personalization has evolved beyond merely targeting audience segments; it now extends to tailoring experiences for individual users based on their specific point in the customer journey. This targeted approach involves understanding and responding to users’ needs at various touch points along their journey, guiding them towards the next step that aligns with their interests or requirements.
The process of building such a personalized model starts with mapping out the customer journey comprehensively. From initial awareness to consideration, purchase, and advocacy, each stage presents unique opportunities for interaction. These touch points become pivotal spots where personalized offers can be delivered to influence the user’s next action. These offers then serve strategically to nudge users in the right direction of their journey.
What’s crucial to note is that this personalisation process is iterative. Achieving a complete understanding of the customer journey or behavior is an ongoing pursuit. Thus, the personalization model needs to continually evolves a insights are gained from user responses. It’s a journey of learning and adapting based on the outcomes of these personalized interactions.
Sitecore Personalize is a cloud-native platform that helps you build and implement these models of personalized experiences for your customers across your digital channels. It uses real-time data, intelligent decisioning, and A/B testing and optimization to deliver relevant content, offers, and actions to each user. You can use Sitecore Personalize to run web, interactive, and triggered experiments that provide insights and analytics on your customer journey. Sitecore Personalize also has a user-friendly interface that lets you design and manage your experiments and personalization strategies without complex coding or external integrations
The decision modeling feature in particular is a robust toolset facilitating real-time, scalable personalization. Decision models empower marketers to deliver experiences without the need for complex coding. Using a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, marketers can leverage decision models informed by a user’s behavior, identity, or previous actions to dynamically present each user with the best next action.
Note that developers are still required in most cases to create reusable programming logic for decision models. With these ‘Templates’ in place, marketers then have the ability to personalize user experiences without the necessity for intricate programming or external integrations.
Example use cases
Let’s consider some realistic use cases for decisioning and next best offers, for our fictional COVA Insurance brand website:
- Awareness Stage: Customizing the homepage imagery based on a user’s geographic location to enhance initial engagement.
- Consideration Stage: Prompting returning homepage visitors to revisit their last-viewed product.
- Consideration Stage: Display a customised prompt based on specific number of products in shortlist e.g. If 1, ‘Add another Shortlist to compare products’. If 2, ‘Return to shortlist to compare products’. If 3, ‘Need help deciding?’
- Purchase Stage: Recommending additional products based on the items already present in the user’s shopping cart.
By leveraging the power of decision modelling, we can deliver personalisation at scale that should optimize engagement and raise conversion rates. Not only this, but the outcomes for users is an improved digital experience, guided by personalized interactions, and prompts for the best next action at each stage of the customer journey.
Here’s a short video walking you through how to use these features of Sitecore Personalize based on a simple use case of presenting a specific offer to visitors based on their member status and geographic location.
