Why Personalization is More than Just 'Dear (First Name)' - Your CMS Can Help

Your customers are demanding a better experience with your brand. They want to feel like you really care about their individual wants and needs - and if you don’t, they’re quick to turn to a competitor. However, personalizing your content and messaging needs to go beyond simply adding a “Dear (first name),” to your emails.

To really personalize your messaging, you need to know who your customer is, what they want, and what they need. This means getting to know their story, even beyond how it directly applies to your brand. Creating personas will help you really get to know your customers. These personas should go beyond age and gender and really think about a person’s wants and needs and how you can help address those. Try creating a quadrant for each persona to help answer these questions:

Once you’ve filled in this quadrant for your users, you can start to personalize your content and messaging in a way that adds value. Adding value is the key to keep users engaged and continually purchasing.

How your CMS can help

While a lot of personalization is about getting to know your users, having a platform where you can integrate that information into your website and digital marketing is vital. CMS platforms, like Sitecore, can help you customize your content and messaging based on a user’s profile. In Sitecore’s Experience Manager, when a user visits your site, you can optimize their experience by showing them content that is most relevant to them based on the content they’ve already viewed or shown interest in. You can also predict the type of content they might find valuable based on what other users similar to them have found valuable.

Sitecore’s Experience Manager also helps you segment your customers. This means you can segment your marketing messages and email campaigns with content that is engaging and valuable to each segment. This helps build up your brand reputation to these customers and reduce the amount of customers who unsubscribe.

For eCommerce companies, personalizing and segmenting your customers is key to keeping customers from churning (unsubscribing, disengaging, or stop purchasing all together) from your brand. When you can offer customers the right offers, products and discounts via personalization, you increase engagement as well as your bottom line.

In the end, personalization is much more than calling your customer by their first name. It’s about really getting to know them and what their needs are. Then, you need to utilize a CMS platform, like Sitecore, that helps you customize your site for each individual user.