Last night, we hosted our “Do you know your customer?” event, in partnership with Sitecore and Lead Forensics
With a predicted sales increase of 56%, offering a truly-personalised experience to customers is the holy-grail of online marketing. Our event aimed to help attendees understand how online personalisation works, and ways to deliver on the promise of personalisation.
The line-up for the evening included Sitecore’s Oliver March, Lead Forensics’ Michael Graham and Nemetos’ James Derry, who all came ready to present to a room of widespread Sitecore knowledge.
Oliver March, Sitecore: “The importance of personalisation on your bottom line”
First up to present, was Ollie. During his past 9 months at Sitecore, and previous employment at Oracle, he’s been witness to a recent change in market direction. Ollie confirmed to our audience that, like themselves, many companies are beginning to understand the importance of personalisation. This follows a shift in digital marketing focus from being customer-centric to relationship-centric. In fact, 90% of Sitecore’s customers last year said that personalisation was their primary competitive differentiator.
Bearing this in mind, Ollie showed our audience just how Sitecore’s experience platform makes the perfect basis for personalisation. Through Ollie’s demo, they were shown how the Sitecore CMS uses implicit recognition to create profiles of people that use a website, so that personalised content can then be displayed.
In addition, Ollie demonstrated the Federated Experience Manager and the ability to push content onto websites not running on Sitecore.
Business benefits include conversion rates increased by up to 50%!
You can see Ollie’s slides, here.
Michael Graham, Lead Forensics: “How IP identification works”
Next up, was Michael, who took the floor to explain what Lead Forensics had to offer to the personalisation space.
Lead Forensics is an IP tracking solution, that provides data about businesses that visit your website. This adds huge benefit to personalisation, as without explicit methods of visitor recognition, a large percentage of website visitors remain anonymous. That means a large percentage of potential clients or partners, that require your services, do not receive personalised content and encouragement to convert.
Lead Forensics offers the largest database in Europe. It tracked over 4 billion IP addresses tracked last year alone. Michael demonstrated how the platform provides information including business names, demographics, industries and addresses of website visitors – the kind of information that isn’t available on Google Analytics.
Why is visitor recognition important? Michael concluded his convincing presentation with the untouchable argument that intelligence from the tracking of anonymous data can help you win customers.You can see Michael’s slides, here.
James Derry, Nemetos Tanasuk: “Implicit & explicit visitor recognition; what’s next for personalisation?”
Finally, James Derry, CMO at Nemetos Tanasuk addressed the audience to how Lead Forensics and Sitecore were tied together. Whilst implicit recognition in Sitecore is great, as a long-term partner of Sitecore, Nemetos Tanasuk have been aware for some time of certain drawbacks of existing IP visitor identification methods within Sitecore. Sitecore currently uses IP-recognition technology, MaxMind, who’s database is strong in North America, but thinner in Europe.
James explained how Nemetos Tanasuk began working with Lead Forensics one year ago, and were so impressed with the depth of their data, that they wanted to integrate the platform with Sitecore. Yesterday’s event was one of the first occasions that we could show our integration, and its capabilities, to the public.
Using the Lead Forensics integration Nemetos Tanasuk can effectively provide zero-click-implicit-recognition. In other words, Lead Forensics will allow recognition of the visitor before they even start to click around the site. This can then be built upon using the Sitecore experience platform. This means that the data we get is more accurate, more certain and more targetable; without needing to ask visitors to give up their information. Our integration bridges the gap between implicit and explicit recognition on Sitecore, by making it possible to immediately recognise the potential client or customer.
As shown in Ollie’s demo, the Sitecore experience platform makes it possible to link detailed personas with personalised content. Of course, web personalisation is a big task, that requires an enormous amount of content. It’s worth considering how you take on the challenge, bit by bit, as a business – but as the figures show – getting it right gives great competitive edge.
You can see James’ slides, here.
The event was tied up with a lively panel discussion. Our speakers were joined by Nemetos CTO, Michael Haahr to answer audience questions ranging from where to start with personalisation to integrating WordPress and Sitecore.
Networking and drinks finished the evening and gave us a great opportunity to get to know our audience. We’d like to thank everyone that joined us – despite the rainstorms outside!
If you have any questions about anything you’ve read above, please feel free to get in touch with us.
How can Nemetos Tanasuk help your personalisation journey?
Nemetos Tanasuk, a technical agency specializing in Sitecore consultation and development, have been working exclusively with Sitecore for over 9 years. With one of the largest specialist Sitecore development teams in Europe, we pride ourselves on keeping up to speed with all technical developments in Sitecore – including personalisation.
