Preparing for your next great Sitecore Engagement Plan

In every partner and client session I facilitate, we inevitably spend a lot of time talking about Sitecore Engagement Plans.  It's a fantastic platform feature that ties all the pieces of a Sitecore digital marketing discussion together--from considering why a site exists in the first place to laying out the goals we want our visitors to achieve to the actions we want to take in the process of creating hugely successful digital campaigns and experiences.

By the time we're talking about Engagement Plans, though, I've realized that we've already covered a ton of information.  Sitecore's feature map is incredibly impressive and always too much to fully consider in one sitting.  When I started facilitating these sessions, I tried to have the group go through the actual mechanics of setting up an Engagement Plan in the system.  While these mechanics are straightforward, I realized over time that the importance of the discussion wasn't about the points and clicks to create the Engagement Plan in Sitecore--it was the about the customer journey we were setting out to model.

So, a very simple thing hit me over the head--start with a Visio template to act as the brainstorming tool.  While I still recommend in most cases just diving into Sitecore and creating Engagement Plans directly, I wanted to offer this file in case it helped anyone with their brainstorming sessions along the way.

Download the Visio Template Here.

The Visio diagram is a model of our Launch Sitecore Engagement Plan described here.  With this, you can quickly brainstorm:

1. States along your Engagement Plan / Customer Journey
2. Actions to take as a visitor transitions from State to State
3. Conditional checks to determine whether a visit should move to a new State
4. Customer experience as it relates to a particular state (personalization rules if a visitor is in that State)
5. The behavior you are trying to drive, the endgame, the Goals.