5 tips for scaling digital personalization with Sitecore Personalize

By Vasiliy Fomichev, VP of Digital Solutions, Altudo

More than 63% of digital marketing leaders find customizing customer experiences challenging. In today's digital landscape, personalization isn't optional — it's a must-have strategy for brands to connect, engage, and retain customers. As customer expectations keep evolving, it's crucial to stay ahead of emerging trends to create exceptional customer experiences.

It's anticipated that 2024 is going to see an increase in hyper-personalization. This advanced form of personalization elevates the game by integrating data from various sources, including behavior patterns, demographic details, and transactional history. It’s not just scratching the surface but delving deep into understanding your customers.

Sitecore Personalize leverages data across every interaction with your customers, leading to seamless and engaging customer experiences. It empowers you to implement real-time decision-making, performance analytics across the web, interactive and triggered experiments.

Personalize makes it easy for businesses looking to implement personalization and split testing. The platform facilitates a swift transition from initiation to operation, enabling companies to progress from static pages to basic personalization in just four weeks!

However, over the years, we noticed that only the brands with agile and mature digital experimentation teams can scale it from there.

In this blog, we delve into five practical strategies employed by digital experts that we see time and time again to transform personalization and experimentation into a well-oiled, always-on engine.

By adopting these methodologies, businesses can not only initiate personalization quickly but also cultivate a continuous and adaptive approach, staying synchronized with evolving consumer preferences. Let’s have a look.

1. Use experimentation to power personalization

The early personalization use cases are usually the obvious ones that the business knows of, but sometimes businesses struggle to go beyond the known. Everything beyond the known is a hypothesis, or a theory for improvement.

Marketers usually have plenty of ideas, however, they are afraid of touching the website to avoid a negative impact. This is where experimentation comes in — it helps us validate and test our hypotheses to see if the idea was sound and, if so, turn that into a personalization use case.

Experimentation allows businesses to test ideas in a small sample, which would keep potential negative impact in control. In fact, the multi-arm bandit algorithm available in Sitecore Personalize for multivariate testing automatically reduces exposure to the experiments that start to produce negative results.

On top of that, Sitecore Personalize’s audience segmentation and bucketing features allow you to target the right audience precisely and run controllable multivariate tests, helping speed up the process of discovering new personalization use cases.

2. Make it easy and accessible to split test across channels

Making split testing easy and accessible across diverse platforms enables businesses to assess the effectiveness of different variations in real-world scenarios, not only on specific channels but across the entire spectrum of their digital presence.

There is a cost to running experiments — a cost to set it up, potentially develop new variations of components, monitor, etc. When scaling experimentation, this overhead will grow exponentially.

Make it easy to configure experiments with user-friendly tooling, so that it’s a breeze to decentralize it to allow individual marketers to take an idea to a live experiment in a matter of few days.

Preconfigure Sitecore Personalize’s decision canvas, a user-friendly visual tool, with a library of connectors and actions to help marketers easily construct new test cases.

3. Create a system to take an idea from a hypothesis to an experiment

Once you have streamlined the process, the next issue you will likely run into is picking the right hypothesis to test, or even having enough hypotheses to choose from. This is one of the critical steps in the journey to scaling personalization — creating a self-sustainable system within your company that continuously generates new hypotheses for experimentation and a system for selecting the right ones to implement.

The systems to be put in place will depend on the culture of each individual company, and it will need to be a system with checks and balances because it will require a behavioral change in the organization. Companies need to focus on motivating employees to consistently come up with new ideas, as well as ensure they have the right tools to gather insights to be able to come up with new hypotheses.

Once you have a steady stream of ideas coming in, you should define a framework that's clear to everyone for evaluating each idea in an unbiased manner. We are all individually biased, so an idea from a CEO should be treated the same way as one from an intern.

There are several frameworks that can be applied to pick the right hypotheses to test, here are a couple of tools:

• The ICE framework: Scoring each idea on the Impact to the goals, Confidence in the probability of success, and the Effort it will take to implement the experiment. Once scored, prioritize the lowest effort experiments with a relatively high confidence – the quick wins.
• The logical argument: Extensively described by Stanford professor Jesper Sørensen, this is a tool ideally suited for larger experiments because it involves creating a separate system for logical arguments. It is incredibly powerful.

4. Create a culture of experimentation

Imagine a culture where everyone's trying new things, asking questions, and getting better every day. It's like having a playground for ideas where your team is encouraged to test new hypotheses and learn from wins and failures alike.

For this, you have to provide the necessary resources, support, and recognition to incentivize teams to contribute to the culture of experimentation. This also involves rewarding people for the number of learnings, not simply positive outcomes.

A negative outcome should carry the same weight as a positive outcome for the participating teams. This will allow marketing teams to take more risks and focus on maximizing the number of experiments to provide more learnings to the organization. With that, positive results will inevitably follow.

5. Avoid redesigns, turn your channels into evolving digital products

Create an environment that encourages incremental changes, allowing for quick, small tweaks that keep things fresh rather than large-scale adjustments. This not only minimizes the risk associated with major overhauls but also ensures that your digital presence remains agile and responsive to evolving user expectations.

Use experimentation to evolve your digital experiences. Experiment with content, components, functionality and styling and use data from experiments to drive incremental changes. It has been proven time and time again that incremental changes to a working product bring the highest ROI as opposed to creating new things.

To learn more about Sitecore Personalize’s capabilities, schedule a discovery call with one of our experts.