Gene DeLibero, Customer Experience Evangelist from Sitecore, has walked through the building blocks of contextual marketing while discussing the importance of being able to shape every customer’s experience.
Start with data, heard the term context, data is the foundation of context
There is lots of it and its all over the place
Most companies start by complaining that they don’t have any data about their customers so they decide to fix that by: integrating, collecting, purchasing
All of a sudden they have what they think is too much – data flood
1993 New Yorker. Are there any anonymous cookies left?
Once we have all this data there are 3 challenges must be overcome to harness the flood:
1st
Comes the form of an individual, not a group or a segment, patterns must be defined
2nd
Data has an expiration data and it can go bad FAST
3rd
We need to do something with all this data. It must the in the context of the customer
There are many tools that address these challenges but I’m going to pick on 3
Helps with the individual view + one of the best tools we can use to address the data flood
Breaks data into manageable chunks
Segments are dynamic, people float in and out
Power of segmentation comes from data – there is theme here
Segmentation is traditionally fueled by explicit data but if you can introduce behavior-based data implicit, things get pretty interesting
Single platform benefits
Expiring data
People are not on your site 24/7 we need to poke them
Lets us reach out to people via email or even adserve
The true magic happens when we use those dynamic segments in automation plans, making them scale even more.
P13n, by far the easiest way we can take action with contextual data.
2 things to keep in mind with p13n:
Must be consistent between channels
Funny thing about a great experience is people expect more the next time
P13n can be over whelming, the management of conditional rules and content must be simple and central