[Progress News] [Progress OpenEdge ABL] What is Personalization

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Aaron Arney

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Wondering what personalized marketing is, or how it can work for you? Read on to learn what personalization is and how you can easily implement it in your organization.

Personalized marketing is an increasingly popular trend in marketing, and for good reason. It’s effective for building a bridge for a brand-to-consumer relationship. Despite the tools available to use personalization in marketing, including the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC), many brands still have not adopted this way of marketing in their emails, websites, direct mail pieces, etc., believing it is too complex or too difficult to implement well.

Personalization has played out on websites through hyper-relevant targeting. Instead of static content shown to everyone, certain pieces of content are swapped, based on persona information, so they resonate more with each user.

Consider Amazon's homepage, where there are typically a few sections that give the user products that may be of interest to them, based on their recent searches and orders.

While this as just one example, you can perform many other personalized-based actions in the Digital Experience Cloud—it’s easy to quickly implement personalized content on your website. Some examples include:

  • Personalized pages
  • Personalized templates
  • Personalized widgets
  • Personalized dynamic widgets
How Personalization Works in Sitefinity DEC


Personalization works by considering the available information, and aligning that with the criteria that the marketer defines as part of a targeted persona within the Digital Experience Cloud. When a user visits a webpage in which you have defined a section to be personalized, the DEC decides which piece of content that user should see on their screen, based on which targeted persona that they matched in the DEC.

These personas can be based on information such as:

  • IP Address
  • Location
  • Referral URL
  • Time of Day
  • DEC Persona
  • DEC Lead Scoring Type
  • and many more

The tricky part is understanding how to utilize these segments of information to target your users. Luckily, Sitefinity CMS collects and analyzes a combination of demographic, behavioral and contextual data to help brands craft segments more accurately.

How the DEC Looks in Reporting


For each personalized page created, the DEC will create a report that summarizes which segment of users are visiting the page.

In the Sitefinity documentation, personalization reporting is explained:

"In the Personalization reports screen, you see an overview of all reports and a summary of the number of visitors to personalized versions of each page. If you have a bigger list of reports, you can sort them by date or impressions type. You can also choose the time period for which you want to see a reports’ summary, for example just for yesterday or as far back as 6 months. For each report, you can edit the name and redefine the goal, to which the report measures attribution."

Here's how it looks in action:

Sitefinity DEC Reporting

How Different Industries are Using Personalization


We've already learned Amazon heavily uses personalization in order to offer relevant products to users, but how do other industries utilize personalization? With a quick look around the web, it’s easy to get a sense of the effectiveness of the kind of personalization that Sitefinity DEC provides.

1. Netflix


Netflix uses personalization to display recommendations to users, as well as offer suggestions to content they may enjoy based on their previous watch history. This is a good example of how a company can utilize behavioral and contextual analytics in order to personalize content.

2. Facebook


Facebook uses tons of analytical data in order to decide what posts to show a user at any given moment.

3. Any Digital Ad Network


Most digital advertising services, such as Google AdWords, use complex algorithms to display relevant advertising to users. We all hate ads, but there is a lot of work that goes into putting the correct ad in front of a user that they will be likely interested in!

Personalized marketing provides an opportunity to make consumers feel remembered by a brand—their digital experience can pick up right where they left off on their last website visit, they can be called by their first name and pointed in the direction of exactly what they’re looking for by a simple Google search. The Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud allows brands to turn their consumers into loyalists.

Curious to find out more about how the Sitefinity DEC can help you master personalization? Check out the top reasons to start using DEC today, or dive deeper with a personalization webinar:

Top 5 Reasons to Use Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud

How to Tailor Personalization to Drive Engagement

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