Sanjeev's Sitecore Blogs

Category: CDP

  • Sitecore CDP vs Sitecore Personalize

    Sitecore CDP vs Sitecore Personalize

    Mostly asked question is, What are the key differences between Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize? I will try my best to simplify in this article. Before that few pointers

    • To Personalize we need to make certain decisions (real-time) using Customer Data.
    • Customer Data needs to be collected/gathered from various channels, analyzed and an interface and sites to A/B Test a concept and want to deliver a product that works. Justify a style, user experience (UX) or a Campaigns driven by a business Model

    Most organizations might have already had the data part of the CDP, however the actioning part is what the Sitecore Personalize is for. So Sitecore CDP is all about getting data from multiple channels and storing for further analysis and processing. Personalize is the actioning part where you take decisions in providing a great experience to the customer interacting via omni-channel.

    Sitecore CDP

    Is a rich set of tools for Data Ingestion from various methods like streams, batch and APIs

    • streams collect transactional data of guest which is transactional and behavioral in nature
    • large batches of data can be uploaded from enterprise systems using Batch APIs
    • A rich set of REST APIs provide CRUD operations
    • Creating profiles of visitors with or without Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

    Sitecore Personalize

    Sitecore Personalize

    Is a set of tools to power the interactive experiments in real-time like triggered experiments, decisioning on the fly and performance analytics

    • to power an interactive customer experience
    • transaction and behavioral data is used to trigger personalization
    • similarly the data is used trigger experiments and A/B testing

    There are few important aspects of Personalization

    • Decisioning, the rules engine used to determine what Personalization is rendered to the customer. While making decisioning external data can be used consuming REST APIs. Could be an AI Model some business data in real-time
    • Instrumental in providing the Next Best Action
    • Ability to send trigger a 1:1 message via Web Push or email
    • Imagine someone spent enough time but are exiting the site, basically abandoning whatever they have been shopping for. Called the Abandon Cart action, so an email can be sent
  • Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform)

    Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform)

    Abandon Cart a very common scenario we experience on all the sites these days, this feature can be implemented using Sitecore CDP and it is a breeze.

    A lot of templates available and this is one of them, while you are in a journey of choosing some best products for your customers to present, keep in mind that they need to be dealt with care. Sometimes customers get drifted so you can notify where they are in their thoughts.

    Sitecore CDP Stream API provide a great set of well defined API Services that is very easy to implement, faster to publish and efficient in performance. With few basic JavaScript tricks up your sleeve you are in your comfort zone.

    Remember when your guests are set to ABANDON the Cart rescue them following this How-to-configure Sitecore CDP to handle Cart Abandonment.

    Create Abandon Cart Experience

    • Create a Full Stack Triggered Experience
      • There are multiple options to configure your mail service provider. So create a Connection
    • Create a Decision Model
    • Connect the Decision Model to the Full Stack Experience
    • Create a Segment with few Business Rules ahead of time

    Conclusion

    The CDP Stream APIs provide simple steps to integrate and quick results of Sitecore CDP functionality. Online Data Capture, Site Personalization and Behavioral information from Events capture guest behavioral data in real time.

  • Introduction to CDP

    Third party cookies will be eliminated, and so will device IDs, so reaching your customers will be impacted. To enable the use of the Data across all the departments of any organization’s marketing effort will be challenged. Hence the solution is Customer Data Platform (CDP).

    We build a lot of websites, mobile applications and interactive kiosks with one goal, to understand our customers needs and leverage all possible technology to deliver an engaging personalized experience.
    What we all know that our customers have access to all the channels and they do engage with very unique expectations. But, when we don’t know who the visitors are, where they come from when they seek for services and products.
    How can we deliver the anticipated experience?

    We need to know our customers visitors at scale and speed! We need to segment the visitor’s information and analyze the data we collect about them.

    The need is to have the data at one place, analyze it and get a meaningful understanding of the data. The goal is to make that identified visitor engage with our products and services, we need one unified source of reliable data to personalize the visitor experience.

    A “Customer Data Platform” (CDP) is the solution.

    Sitecore CDP

    Sitecore CDP is one such reliable and powerful product from Sitecore. It helps by intelligently consuming data from multiple sources and provide a singular contextual profile for a visitor on any channel.

    Definition

    From the Gartner’s Glossary CDP is a vendor-neutral organization dedicated to help marketers manage customer data. It is a packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.

    This software should build customer profiles by integrating data from multiple sources, e.g. transactions of users in a “Customer Relationship Management” System (CRM), any interactions or activities on web and mobile apps, interactions with kiosk in marketing hotspots, etc.

    Some Details explained by various presenters can be viewed on the Sitecore Discover Channel on YouTube.

    CDP is not CRM

    They both collect data. CDP creates Profiles with the collected data from omnichannel platforms, while CRM tracks customer interaction. The data in a CRM is mostly collected manually.

    CDP Provides the capabilities to experiment with the collected and curated data. It consolidates all the data from omnichannel platforms and prepares the dashboards to visualize the customers profiles. This is a great tool for business users!

    CDP helps in an easy way to model decisions in real-time.

    CDP Unifies Profiles

    Sitecore CDP, unifies by merging the user data to one targetable profile. With this major part of the process taken care of the Applications can use the data and start the marketing efforts.

    Intelligence

    Decision Tables, are being used to deliver methods to map data to experiences and actions to start delivering experiences.

    But a strong Analysis needs to be done before hand to with good Reasoning and then prepare the data to Act upon. Sitecore CDP performs all this smartly and provides a unified Identity, by merging the data collected from multiple sources.

    This supports your business users to create a hypothesis and make informed decisions to deliver personalized experience to the customers. That too with reliable guidance and no-code templates. That’s intelligent!

    Experiments

    Marketers can provide next best action tailored to individual customer profiles based on the experiments conducted before hand. Emails, SMS and online experience of the customers can be carefully crafted. Fulfilling customer needs and their business goals is a great win-win situation. Sitecore CDP enables the business to experiment and leverage the results to personalize on one interface.

    Next

    This is a series of blogposts and articles as mentioned in my previous blog post. Please stay tuned and follow. Feel free to share your opinions and ideas.

    1. [This article] Introduction to CDP
    2. How is Identity Resolution, How is it done in Sitecore CDP?
    3. AB Testing & Personalization
    4. Performance Measurement & Segmentation
    5. Analytics & Beyond

    In addition, there will be a YouTube video with more details on every topic. Here is the link to my Sitecore Sanjeev YouTube Channel.

  • CDP Series

    After acquiring Boxever Sitecore has really built the product into its Platform to Offer a Powerful and Unified experience for customers to take advantage of Customer interactions on omni-channel.

    It is actually designed to propel the experience of configuring and deploying various aspects of Digital Marketing like decisioning, predictive analytics, experimentation and orchestration. Using very intuitive toolset for Developer Experience.

    After attending the Deep Dive provided by Sitecore, I have gained a lot of insight about the product. And with the experience of using the Product I am very excited to share this with all of you.

    Overview

    I will be touching on the Theory a little bit and cover some configurations with examples scenario in this series. I think it will be good to break them down to smaller chunks, following will be the topic breakdown

    1. Introduction to CDP
    2. What are the differences between CDP and Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize?
    3. Understanding Sitecore CDP Data Model
    4. How is Identity Resolution, How is it done in Sitecore CDP?
    5. AB Testing & Personalization
    6. Performance Measurement & Segmentation
    7. Analytics & Beyond

    I will be adding the topics and notifying you too, but stay tuned for the Video series.

    Happy to share my thoughts and Learnings in Sitecore CDP, I will be presenting a series of Youtube Videos on my Brand New Youtube Channel.

  • Sitecore CDP & Identity Resolution

    Sitecore CDP & Identity Resolution

    Sitecore CDP powers the developers, marketers to take control on the data available. But what are the key pointers to keep in mind to resolve the customers who visit us from different channels.

    Scenario: Visitor uses a mobile phone and visits your site and browses over some products and shows some interest, looks around and jumps out. The browser on the phone is stopped.

    Resolution: No action, a lot of data related with visitor interaction is collected, but nothing conclusive. Once the visitor jumps out (kills the browser) session ends, the data could be used for other analytical purpose may be.

    Scenario: Visitor shows interest in a session and provides email address to subscribe for a newsletter.

    Resolution: If the Organization setup has the email as a filed to be used for Identity Resolution then the CDP logic behind will create a Customer

    Setup Choices

    When you setup your Organization in CDP you determine which files should be used for the Identity Resolution purposes, and those are the only fields used to match Visitors from different sources of data and merge

    • Example: An Email Address or a Loyalty number can be a good candidate too. Sometimes First Name and Last Name…
    • Sensitive data is not stored in CDP
    • CDP will be using the field as set to Merge Profiles, if there are more than one but only the “Exact Match” method is used not Probabilistic matching
    • Hierarchical fields can be configured too, this provides more powerful Identity Resolutions
    • CDP assigns an ID to every visitor session
      • CDP looks for a matching key resolution field to merge multiple sessions data
      • Batch imported data will also trigger an Identity Resolution activity
      • First Party Cookie are set and a Browser ID is assigned by CDP

    Conclusion

    With great power, comes great Identity Resolution

  • Boxever

    Boxever was acquired by Sitecore recently, and this is going to complement the Developers and the Marketers leap to the next level and configure/compose and publish/manage the content in a very interactive and entertaining way.

    I have tried to get to a point where I can say I am more comfortable using and actually putting the knowledge to best use. So the https://learning.sitecore.com/ was my always goto place and got the completion certification. I think there is great sense of accomplishment here