The need to personalise your enterprise site is well-known, as is the need to keep things simple to start with. From there, everything tends to get a little less specific. Where should your business start with personalisation? How can you keep things simple but still drive results? Let’s review how we approached website personalisation while working with travel-tech giant Amadeus.

All personalisation starts with the segmentation and collection of data. For the sake of this article we will simplify this process slightly, beginning with splitting website users into known and unknown visitors.

Unknown visitor: A first time visitor of whom we don’t know anything yet but can gather info like country, device type, referral source and preferred language. All this information is based on IP, browser and other info we can read once it lands on the website.

Known visitor: A visitor who has been to the site before and saved preferences, browsed around or has filled in a form.

For Amadeus we also segment by industry, country and language as separate groups. Though these are all somewhat low-level segmentation criteria, they can be developed further and enhanced in future for CXX roles, marketeers etc and plotting user journeys or even customer lifecycles.

Let’s see this in action:

First time visitors to Amadeus.com will be prompted by a wayfinder, where you can see the language and location are already filled in. The language is based on the browser preferences and the location is derived from the IP the user is accessing the site from. The site loads in English as standard in the image above, but as you can imagine, it would load in any language from the first visit according to the upfront data is gathers. For example, when visiting from France for the first time, it would load the site in French.

Users can select their industry from a dropdown menu in the wayfinder. This will then be used to deliver personalised content based on industry.

Once you close the wayfinder by clicking continue, your chosen preferences are saved and used for personalisation. The user is always able to change their preferences. This is relevant because many users want to find content they’ve seen before again later on, so it’s important to make sure all content experiences can be accessed at any time.

 So now we have some data we can work with. We know the user’s preferred industry, the country the user is from (or the preferred country) and their preferred language. Now it’s time to use this data to tailor the user’s experience. Here’s a couple of scenarios that are very easy cases to start with.

The first thing that is now possible is to start pre-filtering search result pages. In the below screenshot the products are loaded according to the pre-filled industry set via the user’s chosen preferences.

The banner with the offer of the season is based on industry but can be time limited (for example only this week). To do this you can either use Adobe Target or create a custom AEM component capable of reading user preference settings on industry, country or language to show different content for each or restrict content to only show during a set time frame. 

A more advanced step would be to use the data to start building user journeys. A very common journey to start with is based on return visitors to the site. As we know the user’s preferred industry, we can make certain components display industry specific content:

First visit (anonymous) homepage vs Industry focus (return visit) homepage

The idea is that you measure these personalised content fragments and start building from there, gain experience and get comfortable with what works and continually optimise.

And there you have it, a few very simple examples of where to start with content personalisation. To recap:

1. Analyse your audiences or segments, which can be as easy as unknown and known visitors or based on industry, country or language.
2. Make sure you have the data to start recognising these segments.
3. Create the personalised content and start measuring the results.
4. Adapt according to results and continually create more advanced user journeys for improved results.

Of course, this is a simplified version of a full personalisation program. If you need any help starting your program or have more advanced questions on personalisation, our consultants are ready to help. Contact us.