In the dynamic digital realm, crafting personalised experiences has become a fundamental pillar of successful customer engagement. Brands consistently look for avenues to forge deeper connections with their audiences. Amid this evolution, how does transitioning from Sitecore XP to XM Cloud influence your personalisation strategy? And what are the distinctive capabilities within XM Cloud that can be harnessed without the need for investments in Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize?
XM Cloud personalisation feature is located inside the Pages tool. Comparable to the Experience Editor in XP, Pages offers a WYSIWYG editor that facilitates component integration, layout modifications, and the development of pages and their iterations.
The personalise feature of Pages includes an Audience Builder, which includes a variety of conditions that are out of the box. You can use these audiences to define what version of the page has surfaced to which users. These conditions can also be grouped, and you can define a “priority order” of your conditions.
While XM Cloud’s personalisation offering cannot personalise by pattern or profile, it does based on these condition templates within the audience builder:
These conditions can be combined using logical operators (AND/OR) for more intricate criteria. You can also define the sequence in which the conditions should be met by using the arrows to the right of the conditions.
The personalisation offering from XM Cloud is quick and easy to implement; personalisation strategies can seamlessly transition from concept to execution, circumventing the need for development involvement. Although the templates for conditions are not exhaustive and there is no customisation currently available, there is still plenty that the marketer can do by stacking, combining and grouping the conditions together.
Another point is that the personalisation feature works on an entire page version, even if you only change a single component. This will make page load speeds much more efficient than it was with XP. In other words, the more components of the page you personalise, the less the page load speed will be affected.
From my point of view, the missing element is the need for more ability to personalise based on profile or pattern as you can in XP. This could be better for a more mature personalisation strategy based on user behaviour and user profiles. A certain amount of this can be done using the Page Views templates; however, this differs from the XP level. There are other considerations, too, like the need for more ability to personalise by time of day, more specific locations and the lack of customisation.
While it’s true that Sitecore XM Cloud’s personalisation offering has its boundaries, the Pages feature serves as a compelling alternative for those who still need to be ready to invest in the extensive power of CDP and Personalize. In the fiercely competitive digital environment, the personalisation capabilities of Sitecore XM Cloud equip businesses to shine through by delivering customer experiences that resonate with each individual user.
If you want to enhance your personalisation strategy further, investing in Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize and incorporating them into your composable portfolio alongside XM Cloud will enable you to do so. Sitecore CDP enables the creation of secure and unified customer profiles using historical, transactional, and behavioural data for each user. Sitecore Personalize empowers your company to provide customised experiences to each user across various channels, all at scale, through a completely cloud-native, API-first platform.
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