Personalization is nothing new but rather becoming the norm for customer experience. Of the millennials and GenZers polled in a recent survey, 75% expect connected processes, seamless handoffs between departments and channels, contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions. Even 63% of Baby Boomers and 69% of GenXers want the same thing. 

Customers are demanding next-level personalization; basic personalization features, such as calling out a customer’s first name, fail to engage with customers in any relevant way. Only 8% of these survey respondents answered that they would be encouraged to engage with a retail brand if they sent an email that included their first name or sent a birthday email. Not only are customers expecting more personalized interactions, they want them at every touchpoint of their journeys. Organizations now have to deliver mass personalization or what we call personalization at scale.

Why is Personalization at Scale Necessary? 

Let’s unpack this term into two parts: “personalization” and “at scale”. Personalization refers to the tailoring of messages or offers to individuals based on their actual behavior. Businesses are expected to not only create content but also deliver this content to individuals that they would want to see, based on their actions and preferences. The second part of the phrase, “at scale”, means delivering these personalized experiences to multiple audiences, across devices, while still being relevant to individual customers. 

Organizations should not only be able to execute and connect fine-grained personalized experiences across multiple touchpoints such as websites, mobile devices, email, IoT and physical stores, to name a few, but also deliver tailored experiences to more people.

The average customer will encounter 15 to 20 brand touchpoints before that brand or product becomes relevant in his or her mind. This number is higher than it has been in recent years; in 2013, customers would only interact with 4 to 6 touchpoints before submitting an inquiry and we can only expect this number to rise in coming years due to IoT and other new emerging channels. Ensuring customers have a seamless, cohesive and personalized experience throughout all of these touchpoints is critical to not only obtaining new customers but also building a long-term relationship with them. Additional benefits of scaling personalization include: 

• Boosting revenue by up to 15%.
• Reducing customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%. 
• Increasing efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30%.
• Enhancing customer purchase intent by 78%.

How Does Liferay DXP 7.2 Support This? 

Although personalization at scale is very beneficial, successful execution can be very difficult. Why? Simply because, personalization itself can already be a challenge. Needing to expand that across multiple channels, multiple audiences at the same time is even more daunting and requires more resources. Understanding these struggles, we built Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) 7.2 in order to help digital-first teams be able to successfully personalize experiences at scale. Here’s how: 

1. Create Experiences: First and foremost, in order to deliver personalized experiences, businesses must be able to create those experiences. On Liferay DXP, business users have access to tools that empower them to easily create content pages and other digital experiences without the help of a developer. Users can drag and drop content, widgets and fragments to build engaging pages. Improvements made on Liferay DXP 7.2 to the content authoring experience, interface and web experience creation have made the process even more friendly for business users to create visually pleasing pages with a fraction of the effort. In addition, users can now preview content within an associated display page before publishing. Map content to individual sections on a page to see how everything would look live. 
2. Personalize those Experiences: Business users can easily define audience segments with robust rules for fine-grained personalization and engage these segments with a range of personalized experiences across pages, navigation and assets. A few of these segmentation rules include personalizing according to device, cookie, URL and content visited, among others. Segmentation capabilities have now been moved into the core DXP platform for this version so all content and applications can leverage segmentation to provide personalized experiences. On DXP 7.2, users have even more powerful tools available to personalize and target content on web pages and fragments. Automate content personalization based on user behavior with interest-based content recommendations. Easily create content sets for reuse across multiple pages and add targeting to personalize these sets of content. Easily execute personalized variations to display different content depending on segmentation. One of the biggest difficulties involving personalization at scale is the inability to not only gather the right data surrounding your customers but also make sense of it. Sometimes there’s too much, sometimes it’s not specific enough to help your marketing campaigns. To overcome this, organizations need to create a single customer view. Liferay DXP integrates seamlessly with Liferay Analytics Cloud to help provide deeper insights on your customers, pages and content. In addition, use segmentation categories and data across both platforms for more specific targeting and personalization.
3. Manage Digital Assets Effectively: Because you will be delivering personalized experiences to a large number of individuals, there will most likely be a large number of digital assets to manage as well. Reduce time spent performing manual tasks with new bulk management features available on Liferay DXP 7.2. Additionally, the newest version of Liferay leverages third-party machines learning services to provide personalized experiences and improve the findability of assets by automatically adding tags to images and documents upon upload.
4. Think Headlessly: One of the biggest new additions to the latest version of DXP is headless functionalities, namely headless APIs and headless CMS. Because content and presentation is now decoupled on Liferay DXP 7.2, businesses have the freedom to use the best of both a traditional CMS and headless architecture in one platform. With a hybrid CMS, content management is detached from the front-end with an API so users can publish content across multiple channels freely without needing new front-end templates every time. So developers can leverage the freedom of a headless system while business users still have the convenience of traditional content management tools. Headless capabilities are especially necessary to be able to effectively create experiences on multiple channels, without front-end developers being brought in for every new channel or interface added. Businesses need to be able to create consistent experiences across multiple channels, even future ones, in order to remain successful in the digital age. 

By leveraging these features available on Liferay DXP 7.2, your business will be able to win and retain customers by delivering personalized experiences at scale. Start giving your customers the relevant experiences they desire for.

Making it Personal 

In the era of digital experiences, personalization is becoming increasingly more critical to the success of a business. Ensure your organization is ready to deliver engaging experiences that distinguish your business from the competition. Use Liferay DXP as the foundation for these experiences.