5 Key Truths for Marketers Driving Digital Experiences – Paige O’Neil
Sitecore’s CMO, Paige O’Neil kicked the conference off with an opening keynote outlining common roadblocks to digital transformation. Three guest speakers from Volvo Cars, Carter Jonas, and British Red Cross presented success stories within their organization. Volvo echoed their 2018 Symposium keynote with the impact of a new disruptive vehicle subscription model that is driving solid results. Daniel Fullbrook (Head of Marketing at Carter Paige) explained his team’s strategic approach during website development that allowed for “personalization to be baked in, not bolted on”.
Paige introduced a new personalization framework categorizing the complexity of personalization into four “levels”. A recent report coauthored by Sitecore found that 23% of marketers polled are currently personalizing beyond “level 1″ personalization. Statistics from the new study made up the bulk of the keynote, but I thought the most interesting result was from a interactive mobile poll of the audience. The biggest barrier for personalization was Access to the Right Data (image above).
Building the Future – Jeremy White
As the Executive Editor at Wired, Jeremy White offered an unique and inspiring view of disruptive trends and technologies. He focused predominantly on the rise of artificial intelligence. A rapidfire showcase of futuristic Machine Learning applications was entertaining, but I don’t believe any companies he discussed were using Sitecore. I found a couple of stories about AI imaging particularly interesting. Jeremy outlined the evolution of AI Image Recognition where ImageNet is used to teach AI to recognize objects (object recognition -> contextual recognition -> image altering -> image generation). He also described BD for Travel and their AI recommended itineraries.
The Impact of Effective Personalization – Mike Shaw
Mike Shaw’s presentation blended a well executed demonstration of the familiar Habitat Home site with practical personalization advice for marketers. His demo showcased just how easy it for marketers to swap valuable page real estate based on a goal conversion. Marketers can feature the next CTA in a journey oriented personalization scenario. He also introduced yet another stage-based model grouping personalization (see: SBOS maturity model preview at SUGCON, Paige’s personalization complexity levels). Its a useful lens to consider personalization, and I’ll be including it in future Personalization Bootcamp workshops.
- Default
data – baseline rules based personalziation - Gathered
data – Clickstream or journey oriented paths; Page views and goal conversions - Inferred
data – Data based on content consumption for predictive personalizaitno;
Anonymous visitors that are segmented based on similar attributes - Zero
party data – Data explicity provided by the user; This could range from
preferences through a form submission to IoT data provided by a user - External
data – Open, exernal data that is not related to an individual; Often used to
enrich data from earlier stages
Mike diagnosed symptoms of “personalization paralysis” for marketers in the audience. I thought the medical analogy was clever. Teams often aren’t getting started with personalization because they are confused by a new process of optimization, overwhelmed by possibility, uncertain about next steps, and second guessing their planned tactics. His prescription – apply a personalization mindset to every day activities. Mike encouraged the Sitecore community to move beyond brand identity and build trust by improving the customer’s experience.
SBOS at SUGCON
For the first time in two years the entire SBOS (Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies) team met globally in London ahead of SxDay and SUGCON. We brought a draft version of an updated Digital Experience Maturity Model to SUGCON for a roundtable preview session. Feedback from the community was excellent. SBOS released a brand new UX4CX whitepaper and it’s available for download. The most innovative thing I saw this week was the Personalization Dashboard that Chris Nash and the Nodes team demonstrated in PowerBI. There were too many great sessions at SUGCON to list here, but I was surprised by the marketers in attendance. I’ve always imagined SUGCON as a tech-focused, developer-heavy event but there was a nice balance of sessions aimed at marketers this year.