Petal

Kontent.ai loves: Personalization

Personalized experiences help you build better relationships with your customers and show you care about them, so let’s personalize the content on your website. All we need is Kontent.ai combined with a marketing automation tool. Ready to begin?

Jozef Falis

Jozef FalisUpdated on Sep 18, 2023Published on Apr 21, 2021

Personalization & Headless CMS

Personalization is another popular marketing tactic. In the headless CMS environment, you can personalize your messages across all communication channels, devices, apps (everything that’s connected to the headless platform) from one place. This helps you avoid irrelevant communication and unifies the customer journey. In the world of microservices, Kontent.ai plays a central role in personalization, together with the marketing automation tool of your choice.

Visualize your personalization tactics

Creating personalized experiences is very challenging—at first, you may feel overwhelmed because you won’t know how to begin your personalization efforts. That’s why I always recommend thinking about the flow of your communication and visualizing your ideas using a tool such as Miro or Lucidchart. And, of course, we need to have data to personalize the experience. In our team, we use Pardot to collect and aggregate data about users and, based on various parameters, personalize content at various locations on the website, e.g., on the sign-in or sign-up page.

Personalized sign-in page

Data, data everywhere

We personalize our content based on the type of user (customer, partner, etc.), buyer/user persona, and region (or a combination of these). That means we have a pretty complex personalization scenario that could easily confuse anyone, so it’s essential to use Miro Flow to check its consistency. Kontent.ai, with its content operation capabilities, will help you enormously when enabling personalization on your website. To be more specific, we use the Schedule content publishing/unpublishing functionality and leverage content item elements that we have already created to change messaging for a given segment using only the headless CMS. 

There’s no doubt that personalization is a time-consuming operation. However, thanks to the ability to reuse content, we have optimized our processes, and—despite having 12 versions of one page—we’re able to keep the information up to date everywhere.

Personalizing content using Pardot
Personalizing your content in Pardot

How it’s done

Basically, it works this way: we create multiple versions of a new page in Kontent.ai, one for each scenario, and with the help of our web developer, we embed Pardot dynamic content in the page so that we know what we should display to each visitor, and Kontent.ai delivers the preferred version of the page. As a result, Kontent.ai will provide each user with the most relevant content based on the data we have. If you want to learn more about our personalization process from a technical standpoint, read Ondrej Polesny’s article Personalizing static sites using Kontent.ai and Pardot.

Our communication is now relevant in the regions where we operate and makes it easier for users to access materials that can help them streamline their work with Kontent.ai. Moreover, we can target the people the way we want, e.g., invite them to a webinar.

As you might expect, the personalization needs in B2B and B2C industries differ. The B2C sector will undoubtedly offer way more scenarios, as you can target a large number of different segments. And perhaps you have several personas defined in each of them, so that’s a lot of messages. However, you can easily manage all of them using Kontent.ai.

To give you an example, if you’re a travel agency, it doesn’t matter whether you’re targeting a family who plans their trip months in advance, a young couple who buys a last-minute holiday, or your loyal customers—it’s easy to reach everyone and offer products and a personalized tone of voice that will engage them.

However, we mustn’t forget that we need to get data from all these versions of a page into our analytics tools to see if the personalization works well. It’s necessary to pay attention to each segment separately and observe each customer journey on its own.

Personalized variants of the sign-in page in Amplitude

Conclusion & bonus tip

If you plan to personalize your content with a headless CMS, then I can only recommend it. Thanks to the microservices architecture, we can use the collected data without the hassle of managing the displayed content, and the analysis of its performance is also simple. Nevertheless, it’s always essential to check that our Miro board with personalization info is up to date so we don’t get lost when communicating with our users.

Check out other articles from this series:

Jozef Falis
Written by

Jozef Falis

I’m managing the Demand Generation team here at Kontent.ai. I love creative ideas in the technical world and making communication to customers as relevant as possible.

More articles from Jozef

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