I always feel that the Engagement Plan discussion in Sitecore can become the centerpiece for the larger digital strategy discussions for the platform. There's something about specifically discussing customer journey paths in the tool that expands ideas while focusing purpose. Engagement Plans become the hub for modeling visitation flows, for defining integration points and messaging, for clearly identifying compelling personalization possibilities and more.
In our first iteration of our Launch Sitecore Engagement Plan, our flow was ultra-simple.
- Entice registration
- Convince visitor of the benefits of downloading the Launch Sitecore site package
- Provide a feedback loop
As a summary, "create incredibly valuable evaluation experiences for our prospects". We had other side goals, but in essence our site existed to provide access to this great evaluation package, and everything we focused on was a funnel around that endpoint.
For this release, our goals are significantly loftier. We started discussing our Sales Engineering Team goals in a broader context, at the company level. Our team is here to ensure that our prospects have the very best evaluation experience in the industry, that they make the most efficient use of the incredibly small window of time generally dedicated to evaluating a software purchase. In this window it is our job to show people why we are so proud to represent this platform, showing the balance of the ease-of-use and simplicity of entry points while starting to highlight the incredible platform power that lies deeper in the application.
Our main goal of making our Launch Sitecore download available hasn't changed. With this release, however, we are setting the stage for the download journey to be the beginning of the path towards our loftier goals. In essence, we are starting to analyze not only the flow our visitors follow as they navigate the Launch Sitecore content and download the package, but we are looking forward to the incredible insight this will lead to as we evaluate the place Launch Sitecore has in an overall Sitecore selection process.
I'll discuss the new plan in its two major sections. The first section below is similar to our entire flow in our first version, where everything led to a download of the Launch Sitecore package:
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| The first "stage" of the new Launch Sitecore Engagement Plan |
As you'll note, we don't evaluate every visitor to Launch Sitecore for this plan. Our first goal, and the event that actually enters a visitor into this plan, is the fact that the visitor registered with our site. While certain plans lend themselves to create flows for authenticated and anonymous users, our making the download of Launch Sitecore available requires that our visitors provide registration information.
Once again, our main decision point is whether or not our registrant has downloaded the Launch Sitecore package. This is very easy to evaluate--we keep these downloads available in our Sitecore Media Library, and a request to this item in the Media Library will inform the Engagement Plan that "Yes" path should be followed for the "Downloaded?" question.
Instead of just sitting on the yes/no question about whether our visitor has downloaded, we take the opportunity to further assess his/her level of engagement with the content available in the site. You'll see terms like "Qualified" and "Engaged" which simply represent our own checkpoints about whether our content is providing valuable results. For instance, the "Qualified" check represents an overall Engagement Value Points check. (Has this visitor spent some time, read a bit about our Sales Engineering Team, etc.?).
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| The Rules Engine Check for a threshold of Engagement Value points |
Engagement Value Points may be achieved as our visitors are finding value within the site. While the value of 7 is our own arbitrary threshold, we decided that it represented a reasonable blend of potential goals and activities our visitor would experience for our definition of "Qualification" or "Engaged". The nice thing here is that we can use these state transitions as personalization triggers. A "Qualified" visitor, for instance, will simply get some slightly catered messaging on the bottom of the home page, appreciating the fact that they've spent some time with us and encouraging them to do more.
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| Personalized messaging on the home page based on Engagement Plan State |
So far, so good. We are now able to consider messaging that will gently nudge our visitor towards the goal of downloading Launch Sitecore. On to stage 2, where this year we will be striving for much more significant insights around how our evaluation teams decide to select the Sitecore platform.
The future stage of our Engagement Plan represents some great opportunities for this insight. We know that the success of this part of the Engagement Plan is going to be our connection to our own CRM data (Dynamics). Take a look at the stages our visitors will transition to, and then I'll discuss the ideas around that very important integration point.
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| The post-download phase of the Engagement Plan |
This set of States represents the success (or failure) of the overall Sitecore evaluation experience. Sitecore is, and has always been, a fantastic data integration platform. In contrast to many systems out there, Sitecore never enforces that data be native to Sitecore in order to fully leverage in Sitecore-initiated decision point events. This Engagement Plan is a perfect example of that. Sitecore provides an incredible basis for this integration with Dynamics, where contacts that are managed and native to Dynamics become seamlessly integrated with this process modeled in Sitecore.
Since there is so much rich data in our Dynamics environment (opportunities that become prospects, partners, etc.), these contacts should always represent the system of record for these individuals and companies. Our Engagement Plan will be able to leverage this information to assess State transitions--as our Launch Sitecore evaluators become customers of Sitecore, they will transition based on updates to CRM records and land in the appropriate Engagement Plan state. We'll get insightful analytics around how our downloads could lead to purchases or how our evaluation flow should improve.
Beyond the incredibly rich Analytics that we'll get in Engagement Intelligence reports, our Engagement Plan itself will highlight these State transitions:
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| Engagement Plan Monitor Mode for State transitions |
Along the way, we can use this Engagement Plan to discuss micro-segmenting opportunities. A small example below (we don't have a ton of visitors yet) is an example of how I could create a list of all registered visitors who have downloaded Launch Sitecore and live in New Hampshire (note that I found 3 that fit those criteria):
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| Micro-segmenting with the Dynamic Segment Builder |
Much more to come in future posts around this Dynamics integration and the insight we drive from this Engagement Plan analysis.
