Content personalization with Drupal: today and the future

Anyone who uses a Drupal website today as a marketing tool cannot ignore the fact: optimizing conversion is no longer just about the form of the content, but about relevant context. The more relevant the message to your visitor, the more effective it will be and the greater the chance that your visitor will convert. Simple, right? Also with Drupal there are many possibilities to offer personalized content to your visitor. In this article we outline today's situation and look at tomorrow's possibilities.

Often these parameters are combined to create a specific context, for example:

• show a different homepage banner when a mobile user visits the homepage the second time
• Show a product teaser from category X when the user already showed sufficient interest in products from this category.

The possibilities are endless, and that is also one of the pitfalls of personalization.  So start simple and build up gradually, based on insights into visitor numbers.

As with other adjustments with an impact on the website, we start with a strategy: the personalisation strategy. This includes some crucial aspects.

Just like with a general digital strategy, we start with the review of the KPIs. What do you want to achieve? More sales or a better experience? Do you want more leads, or less contact with the helpdesk? Every company has different needs: our strategists make your specific KPI's concrete by means of workshops. Next, we ask a few simple questions:

What am I going to personalize? Which content on the website is best suited to personalize? How can the marketing team produce enough relevant content and does this fit within my marketing budget?

How am I going to personalize? The choice of parameters for personalized content is crucial. These parameters determine the choice of the platform that will take care of the personalization. On the basis of the "What?" question, it is now also determined whether the necessary data (to control the personalization) is present and how it can be linked.

When should my personalization scenarios take effect? At the beginning of the process, marketers will focus on the quick-wins: things that are obvious and yield the fastest profits. Afterwards, personalization is a matter of thinking up, trying, optimizing, repeat...

These three pillars are further elaborated in an overall strategy and form the basis for the choice of implementation, the production of content and of course the marketing plan. 

Email personalization

Many companies today already have a marketing platform such as Mailchimp, Mautic, Active Campaign, Hubspot, Sharpspring and so on. Although some of these platforms also have a web personalization solution, you can start with email personalization. These platforms all allow you to add extra info to your own email database, so that users can be put into segments. Then you can create landing pages within Drupal to give each of these segments a personalized web experience.

Implementation of personalization has a clear footprint. On the one hand, the entire team (marketing, sales, ...) needs to understand what the benefits can be, and will be involved in defining the strategy. On the other hand, the business objectives will give a direct control via KPI's to the personalization to be used.

Whereas your marketing team used to make the same content for your entire target group, they will now divide it into the target segments that will serve as the target of the personalization. This immediately means that more content will be produced. The strategy has to take into account the possibilities of your marketing people. Of course Calibrate can temporarily support you to create this content. 

Your Drupal website also needs to be technically ready. Through a quick scan Calibrate can figure this out for you, after which we can give you specific advice.