Episerver just made its first major acquisition since merging with Ektron a year and a half ago, and it has the potential to be a game-changer for their customers. And make no mistake, in acquiring Peerius, changing the game is exactly what Episerver has set out to do.
Peerius provides intelligent, omnichannel personalization in the cloud. They use data about website visitors and behaviors along with advanced, predictive algorithms to predict what any given visitor is most likely to find interesting or engaging. This addition will fortify Episerver’s existing offering for both marketing and commerce customers by allowing each individual visitor to receive an experience that is uniquely relevant to them.
Content personalization is a strategy that should be considered critical for any modern organization with a varied customer base. Once you realize that, you’ll actually start to enjoy the level of product tailoring Amazon provides its customers and start to get annoyed when you get emails or are presented with promotions that are completely irrelevant to you. You’ll want the tailored fit and it’ll make all the one-size-fits-all varieties of content presentation less valuable.
Amazon is just one example. If you use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, or just about any other online application with massive amounts of data, you’re experiencing personalization - usually done well. They also offer their guests opportunities to improve that experience for themselves. Don’t want to see that ad anymore? Let them know and it’s gone. They’ll take that into account for your personal interests and make adjustments to show you only those things that are predicted to be more meaningful.
And those are the top two factors to successful, autonomous personalization. Data and prediction based upon that data.
I joined Ektron about seven years ago, just as they were introducing their Targeted Content feature to the world. Even though I might argue that there were usability issues, it was pretty great for its time. You could show different content to different people based on behaviors, demographics, and circumstantial information.
To build an example, an insurance company who sells through independent agents would like to know whether a visitor has arrived from an agent’s own site versus, for example, Google. If the visitor is from an agent website, then personalization would allow them to showcase that agent along with a supporting quote from an existing customer, thereby boosting the potential buyer’s confidence in them. In contrast, a visitor arriving from Google might see a list of agents based on their geographic location, easing in the transition from browser to buyer.
Along with the site’s valuable content, such personalization would result in delivering that business right back to the agent to close the deal!
Ektron’s Targeted Content could do that and do it well.
When Ektron merged with Episerver, we found similar capabilities but somewhat enhanced. Instead of adding layers to the interface to achieve personalization, each page component is natively ripe with offered opportunity. More than that, Episerver separated the conditions that define a persona out into Visitor Groups, making it even easier to apply personalization over and over throughout the site.
In spite of these advances, and also in spite of these features consistently being requested from nearly every customer and prospect, the adoption of personalization remained somewhat low as a percentage of the total customer base. Even more unfortunate is the fact that this is not in any way limited to Ektron and Episerver. I’ve spoken with representatives from Sitecore and other vendors, as well as some of their partners, and I’ve heard similar feedback across the board.
In nearly every case, Personalization as a strategy is moved from “phase 1” of the project into “phase 2.” The client celebrates the successful launch of phase 1, and the boost in search rankings, traffic, and conversions it carries. Meanwhile, phase 2 never seems to materialize.
Like most technologists, I don’t particularly care for the term “big data,” but bear with me on this. Because we all know the problem with big data. It never gets used. For years, companies have collected and collected and collected - storing terabytes (or more) of data about everything their customers are doing - and let the information sit relatively dormant. To paraphrase the character General Sline from 1985’s Spies Like Us, “Data unused is useless data.”
When you look at the differences between what Amazon et al., are doing with personalization and what Ektron, Episerver, and most other CMS platforms provide, it really boils down to how data is gathered and employed. The CMS platforms tend to rely more on human involvement while the aforementioned major players in the online advertising and product sales space rely on automated interpretation of massive amounts of data to automatically define personas and finally automate the selection and delivery of content they predict will be relevant. That’s a lot of automation!
The barrier between desire and adoption mentioned above really isn’t due to the technology, which, at least in Episerver’s case, is so easy as to become yet another opportunity to insult a caveman. Instead, the problem comes in the form of the necessary culture and process shift required to generate audience-driven content and to run multi-faceted campaigns.
While no system is likely to ever automate the production of content, introducing a predictive analytics engine into the equation will certainly help drive those campaigns - with each user receiving and experience that is uniquely relevant to them.
The value of making your content more relevant is incontrovertible. I’ve heard from multiple sources - and have seen results first-hand that support this - that personalization can yield, on average, a 60% increase in conversions. And that’s without any automation; just good, old-fashioned human effort being put to the task. Getting started usually means choosing no more than five personas to target and then focusing only on key pages on the site. Automating this process has the potential to expand in both directions and driving conversions to the max.
The full integration between Episerver and Peerius may not be immediate, but that’s no reason to hold off on benefitting from personalization today. If you’re running Episerver or Sitecore, then you already have personalization available. Brightfind’s User Experience (UX) team can help you identify your key personas using both anecdotal and analytic information to make sure you’re writing the right content and putting it in front of your visitors in the right place at the right time.