The Benefits of Personalisation & Visitor Groups in Episerver

Hi and welcome to the Maginus guide to personalisation and Visitor Groups in EPiServer [CLICK] Before I show you how easy it is to set up visitor groups in EPiServer to give your customers a targeted experience, I want to present a couple of slides explaining the benefits of personalisation on your site [CLICK] Firstly, targeted content is proven to be more effective. There is little point offering products and services to customers to whom it isn't relevant, or (worse still) isn't available. If your site sells, for example, fresh food, but it can't be shipped to certain parts of the country, you may want to replace any advertising for food products with items which are more suitable when someone visits from that part of the country. This is also true for items such as next day delivery, where you might choose to stop advertising it after a certain time of the day when your delivery cut-off has been reached. [CLICK] Customers are often distracted by busy, pushy layouts where everything is competing for attention. Everything looks a lot better when the page real-estate is optimised so only information important to the user's current context is displayed. Being able to dynamically show and hide content to suit what the customer is trying to achieve makes it more likely your customer will convert, and makes the browsing experience more satisfying for your visitors. [CLICK] Site where content feels personal to you can be more engaging and interesting. Amazon are particularly good at personalising recommendations and products based on behaviours, both during the current browsing session and historically. Using terms such as Your Amazon, Your store and your products only emphasises this. [CLICK] Finally, using personalisation correctly can be like having your very own shop assistant, "greeting" customers as they enter your store and guiding them to find the products they want. [CLICK] So, now onto our demo EPiServer site, where we are already logged in as an administrator so we can quickly jump onto the Visitor Groups section of the console. Now, you can see that we already have a visitor group set up for people who visit our demo site from the Manchester area. That's local to our offices, so we want to try and get them in for a cup of coffee instead of dealing with them via the phone, or over email. If we open up this Visitor Group, you can see that it's a very simple single criteria -- is the user browsing from the Manchester area? If we choose to set up a completely new Visitor Group, we are greeted with this screen, which allows us to select from a number of criteria which we want to base our Visitor Group on. And remember, membership of these groups is dynamic, so as soon as a visitor meets the criteria within a group, they will see the content targeted to that group, and if they no longer meet the criteria, they will fall out of the group straight away. So, as we have the commerce module installed on the site, we can see a lot of criteria based on things which commonly occur on a commerce site, such as basket contents, number of orders, total amount spent, etc. Let's say we want to create a "VIP" customer. This customer might get special offers, or a different customer service number to ring, so we want to be able to distinguish between a high-value VIP customer and a customer who has maybe not bought from us as many times, or doesn't regularly visit the site. We might have a number of different criteria to dictate whether someone is a VIP customer. It could be down to the total number of orders they placed, or the amount they have spent with us over a period of time, so let's make the membership of the VIP segment depend on the customer meeting a number of different criteria by using the "points" based Visitor Group. Now, if someone spends a lot of money with us, or frequently comes back to buy from us, then we'd like to treat them as a VIP, so let's create both of those as criteria for this group. What we can then also add is someone who has maybe bought a specific product, or has spent a given amount over a shorter period of time, say in the last 4 weeks. We can then weight these to say that any combination of these items contributes to a score which decides if you are a VIP or not. Right, so let's go back to our site and see how we can apply our Visitor Groups to show targeted content. We have a banner here on the homepage which we have set up as a content block. The block has been set to show to everyone, but we want to show local visitors a different block. We have the block already created here, and we just drag and drop it onto the page. We can then go into the personalisation options of the page and drag it to the appropriate place, and set the permissions. Now we publish the page, and change the view to see what the page looks like to visitors from Manchester and we can see the personalised block appear in place of the default header. It's as simple as that!