Over the years, Sitecore has been helping brands create awe inspiring customer experiences with targeted, relevant and personalized content marketing with real-time results and business gains across all available channels.

Integrating Sitecore's Experience platform capabilities with its marketing automation and experience optimization tools will act as a game changer for brands as they will have a crystal clear view of their customer experience management. Sitecore’s rich platform offers complete automation and content optimization (personalization) on a single platform which supports all content creation stages right from inception to execution to delivery, for driving conversions and customer engagement.

In this blog, we will discuss how to achieve your CX goals with Sitecore Experience Optimization in 2021 & beyond:

Sitecore Experience Optimization or Sitecore A/B testing along with auto personalisation stands as a pivot point for you to deliver delightful customer experience. With Sitecore A/B testing, you can witness a higher conversion rate, faster time to market, reduced time to purchase, improved user and customer experience as well as increased overall traffic.

The five stages of optimisation include:

Stage 1: Determine Conversion to Improve

Before you start testing, you must research thoroughly to find the best available opportunities to convert.

Stage 2: Hypothesize Change

Understanding and analysing visitor needs is a prerequisite to run customized tests and get desirable insights.

Stage 3: Identify the Variables and Create Variations

Utilize data and insights to run informed tests and create different variations for testing.

Stage 4: Run Experiments

Run multiple tests with different variables and metrices to meet the business targets.

Stage 5: Measure Results

To achieve tangible results, it is imperative to measure the different experiment metrices to make an informed decision.

The metrices that shape customer preferences have been a mystery for time immemorable. For example, let us say we’re having a party there are two kinds of fruits on a table- apples and oranges, while some people pick up the apple, some others pick up the orange, is there a way we can interpret the kind of users based on their preferences? Absolutely! With A/B Testing, Espire is helping brands determine why a certain user clicks on a campaign, helping them optimize their customer experience by leveraging the power of personalization. We help brands personalize their campaigns by running multiple tests with different content, design, demographic variables to generate data based on the customer preferences. Hence, we can map which users of what age, which designation, what location choose which kind of product/services, which enables us to run targeted brand campaigns with better results.

Content Optimization and A/B Testing in Sitecore

The most-asked question by marketers is - what is Sitecore Experience Optimization?

Sitecore offers Experience Optimization tool in Sitecore Launchpad. It is the ability of brands to show different experiences with different content versions to customers to find the one that is best suited to or optimized for them. Sitecore offers multiple testing methodologies. Broadly, Experience optimization deals with two categories of single-variable tests and multiple-variable tests.

1) Single Variable Tests

Single-variable tests are the basic and simple component tests which start with the creation of different versions of a single component on a page , which are then tested for performance against each other. These variant components are then optimized to offer value and engaging experiences.

2) Multiple Variable Tests

Brands and marketers can even test the entire page layout with a version test or a page substitution test. While a version test compares different versions of a page, a page substitution test can track the effect of two completely different pages on your site. Thus, whether it is single component test, version or page substitution test, a single variable test hovers around one single variable.

When you're done testing, you can compare the conversion rates and decide which page or component you want to use on your site. Basic content tests can be created in both the Content Editor and Experience Editor. Experience Editor is the most convenient and flexible tool to use as it allows you to use existing content and create new content without you need to leave your website.

Sitecore allows you test multiple components with different content, personalization rules and design. Creating component variants lets you create complex tests which you can use to test more than two variants of a single component against each other. You can also test multiple components at the same time, and each component version can be tested with every other component version.

How Does Sitecore A/B testing or Experience Optimization Help Marketers

• Sitecore A/B testing helps you simulate visits to your website to see how different personas in your optimization process interact with each other and then observe the effect on the 'engagement value' or the level of interest in a particular marketing asset
• It shows a detailed view of each trial tested for value analysis, target triggered, links clicked, and other usage metrics
• It automatically tests for content changes, personalization rules, actions, goals and events at the component or page level
• It gives an overview of all improvement efforts via Leader boards (Score, Activity, Forecast and Impact)
• It offers a in-built ML solution (Machine Learning) that analyses the data and makes recommendations
• You can use the customer insights gained from the testing to support marketing programs across multiple channels
  
  

Content Tests allow you to test different variants of your website content to understand which pages, or components work best with your customers. The content or components you compare in the test must be designed to achieve the same goal. You can quickly evaluate test results and gain insights on what content works best for your audience. Sitecore A/B testing will ultimately help you create targeted personalization rules and delight your customers with impressive customer experience leading higher conversions and business returns- at a time when customer demand for digital service delivery is the highest.

Espire's endeavour to deliver customer-centric, digital & customer experience transformation solutions, and total experience by covering end-to-end services of multi-experience (MX), user experience (UX) and employee experience (EX) will continue to remain our consistent focus in the years to come as we march towards our mission to have positive impact to our client’s revenue and profitability.