Personalization and Commerce in Episerver

I won't bore you with a ton of statistics on the impact of personalization on the user experience as I am sure you have seen a million stats. But, I would be remiss if I didn't set the context for this post with at least one statistic, so here you go:

88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization — with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%.

Now that we are on the same page about the power of personalization, let’s talk about getting started with your Episerver personalization plan. When it comes to building (and implementing) your personalization strategy, it is important to think about the entire customer journey and how individualized content best supports placement of content and products. Knowing that Episerver supports a full spectrum of personalization - from tailored hero images on the homepage to advanced machine learning and personalized search, it can be difficult to determine where to start.

One simple way to start with personalization is to think about whether you know something unique about your customer and if you want to show them different content or a different message?

Let's take a look at some information you may already have on your users that you can use to build your personalization strategy

How People are Getting to Your Site

Knowing how visitors are getting to your site will allow you to use personalization to guide them through their journey. Users coming into your site via a PPC campaign or direct traffic or email all have different levels of knowledge of your company and are looking for different content or products. Executing personalization based on "entry channel" will allow you to personalize content on your main site to support their journey OR guide them to landing pages with tailored content that will help drive conversions.

Categories of Pages People Have Visited

Using visitor segments you can deliver personalized content when you know a visitor has shown interest in a specific category of products or content. Take a car dealership website for example. If a site visitor has looked at several two-door cars with lots of horsepower, you can assume they are interested in something a bit sportier and fun, than say… a minivan. Knowing the category of products they have consumed gives you a great base set of data to power some pretty effective personalization

Previously Purchased Items

According to a Forrester study, over 15% of visitors admit to buying recommended products and because Episerver is so strong in the commerce space this should be a no brainer. Honestly, if you are reading this and using Epi today it's probably one of the driving factors as to why you purchased Episerver in the first place. Each item purchased by a site visitor gives you an additional piece of data to use for personalization. On your homepage or on product pages, you can start with product recommendations for complimentary items to their previous purchased (think Amazon's 'You Might Also Like' content).

So, what are you waiting for? It's time to get started on that strategy and implementing some personalization so you can show ROI. If you have any questions about getting started with Epi or want to discuss personalization, Epi commerce, or anything strategy HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.