The power of session-level analytics reporting in Sitecore Analytics

Some background on session-level analytics in Sitecore:

The conversation often comes up when discussing Sitecore Analytics: "when should I use Sitecore Analytics and when should I use xyz Analytics?".  The use of multiple analytics tools, the coordination between them, and/or the decision to standardize on one analytics tool is a significant topic, but from my perspective it's simply important to consider what the landscape of Sitecore Analytics provides.  On the surface:

1. Sitecore has incredible analytics drill-down capabilities--from a list of recent visits, to all visits from a particular company or source, to an individual visitor, to an individual visit.
2. Sitecore offers standardized OLAP cube data, and a set of sophisticated business intelligence dashboards
3. Probably most importantly, Sitecore provides ACTIONABLE analytics.  Your reports are right there in your power tool of content authoring and publishing.  Now you can DO something with that analysis right away.
4. Sitecore provides incredibly compelling segmentation possibilities.

Together these capabilities span the spectrum of the ultra-specific (an almost Tealeaf style capability of watching an individual session which could be interesting for many situations such as a high-price ecommerce transaction, evaluation of a sample session for usability, etc.) to the ultra-summary (the rolling up and tearing back down based on my own business’ dimensions or facets).

So for today, let’s get ultra-specific.  For those of you that have read other articles about Launch Sitecore, you’ll know that our purpose is pretty specific—create an evaluation package that’s best-in-class so that our prospects can quickly learn that Sitecore is the best platform choice on the planet.  For those of you that understand our Engagement Plans, you’ll know that this process looks like this:

1. Through demonstrations and technical deep dives, our Sales Engineering team builds interest in having a prospect visit www.launchsitecore.net.
2. While enjoying some articles about Sitecore, our visitor is really urged to login or register to get to the good stuff (the download of the package itself).
3. After registering, the visitor wants to download the package (the site itself that they can apply to their local test installation of Sitecore).
4. After a glorious evaluation of the product, the visitor (now our customer) tells us how great the experience was in an incredibly over-simplified feedback form.

So, since this is only intended to be marginally real-world, let’s go through this is a visitor, all in one visit and see what we get on the other end from the reporting side.

The Simulation:

First, visit www.launchsitecore.net.

Since we’re simulating a brand new visitor, we’ll go ahead and register:

We are so excited about Launch Sitecore, we want to get our hands on the package right away, and we choose to download the version for Sitecore 7.x:

As we read a Digital Marketing System focused article, we check out the slide out at the top right of the screen, used to show the type of information Sitecore is collecting about our visit.  We notice that we've been categorized in the Digital Marketer Audience Segment (based on a number of articles we've read, including the "Create a Goal" article.  We also notice that it seems we are investigating the site to a level that shows we have a "Detailed" interest in the content.  We're not just reading the home page--we've investigated some detailed articles about the Sitecore Digital Marketing System.

The Reporting:

In the Sitecore Marketing Center, we can find the Latest Visit report.  Lots more to talk about around this reporting interface itself (including filters, date ranges, etc.), but for today let’s get to the info about our simulation.  First, since I’m in my home office on a snowy New England day, I’m behind my Comcast ISP account.  Beyond the scope of this article is my ability to tag my visitor sessions with additional information (from forms filled in, from authentication events, etc.) that could further identify my visitors.  In addition, I chose to “categorize” all Comcast Cable visitors as “My Company”.  (I could have categorized this as “ISP” or anything else I’d want to use to describe visitors from the Comcast DNS resolution).

I could drill down to all Visits from Comcast Cable by clicking on that link.  That would then show me more specific visitor sessions (possibly with specifically identifying tags).  Since I just ran through the simulation, I know this session is mine and I’ll bypass that by clicking on the link under the Date & Time.



Now at the Visit (Session) Detail report, I get a nice snapshot of my overall visit.  Some things to notice:

• We were able to tag the session with “MikeBlogTest” (the name I used to Register with the site)
• We see that I visited by clicking on a link within my Blog
• We see the total value of the visit was 85 Engagement Value points (with the breakdown of goal achievement following)
• We get a nice breakdown of the Pattern Card shape that is emerging from my visit—the specific content profile key attributes that are accumulating based on my content consumption.

Further down in the report, we start to get even more detail about the visit, including:

• The fact that my Campaign was triggered
• Fields that were filled out in our registration form
• Pages visited and specific duration for those page views
• Goals achieved (Register)

Another page, and more detail to round out the entire session.  More goals and fields filled in.  One interesting thing I want to point out here is that we actually captured an “error” on the site (line 17).  Error is in quotes here since, depending on how we handled it in the application, this could have been completely invisible to the visitor.  While this isn’t in any way a sophisticated error handling technique (it’s not meant to be), it could provide incredibly valuable information to the reviewer of the report in the context of the site visit.  What this tells the reviewer is that when a visitor clicked on a Search Result, there was no presentation assigned to the item clicked on.  A nice bit of usability testing after the fact (hey, we can’t catch everything in QA).

The Summary:

While not every analysis requirement will focus on an individual session or individual visitor, it is important to know that we can drill down to this level.  This gives us an incredible foundation to consider ties to transactional systems (Ecommerce), CRMs and other data sets to develop a full picture of our customer experience and value.  This is the ultimate leaf of the analytics tree, while keeping the ability to aggregate and roll back up to the branches.  By rolling back up, we will be able to get this same insight at the company level (all visits from one of our prospects), at the Pattern level (with Sitecore's ability to model the audience segments, now I can use those segments to hold aggregate analytics), and much more....

Using Sitecore Engagement Plans as an Audience Segmentation Tool

Engagement Plan as Audience Segmenter

I've been kicking around the idea of, instead of strictly mapping out a customer journey with Sitecore Engagement Plans, to instead use them as a visual audience segmentation tool.  With the great analytics that Sitecore is collecting, this seems like a natural extension to be able to divide the visitors within that analytics data into well-defined categories of patterns.  I'll end this post with an idea that could be added to the current Sitecore concept of Pattern Cards (with your great development addition, of course).

An example audience segmentation Engagement Plan

The idea is this: use the States and Conditions of Sitecore’s Engagement Plan to get a visual indication of the distribution of your audience based on any segmentation criteria.  Since the Rules Engine is so nicely involved in the Engagement Plan Condition checks, this to me is an incredibly natural use of this tool.

The Idea in Launch Sitecore

Here’s how it falls out for Launch Sitecore.  Our audience segments are clearly defined by the groups we envision might visit us at www.launchsitecore.net.  However, this definition is strictly based on content consumption—using Sitecore’s Pattern Card matching, we simply watch for the thresholds between these content consumption patterns.  If someone is reading a lot of articles around Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System, we might conclude he appears to be a marketer.  While this is really cool and easy to do, I have always thought that these patterns need to be a bit more descriptive, inclusive of content consumption patterns and potentially a lot more.  In addition, the definition of this pattern should be flexible and open to change on an ongoing basis—without development.

Talking to a lot of smart partners and clients lately has verified my assumptions.  As we get into the real-world use cases, we talk about all the attributes that should come together to fully define a marketing persona—everything from campaigns to keyword use in search to “known” profile attributes in CRMs to landing pages to referral sources.

Enter the Rules Engine

Enter the Sitecore Rules Engine and the perfect modeling environment for this situation.  Back to Launch Sitecore and our example.  As a simple start, all I want to do is segment my visitor traffic between two opposing possibilities—the visitor appears to be a Marketer or the visitor appears to be a Technologist.  We know that a couple of our Patterns nibble at this persona, and through content consumption our visitor might look like Mark the Marketer, or Devon the Developer.  But what we’re shooting for here is a much richer definition of the age-old split between marketer and technologist.  (By the way, if you consider yourself the perfect marriage of both, give me a shout).

First, we begin with a State that everyone is going to start their journey in:

The initial Engagement Plan state that all our visitors start in

We also get to decide which visitors we want in this plan.  For example, we might only want to evaluate visitors from a certain campaign.  Maybe I'm writing lots of articles on digital marketing subjects, and I want to test if the readers of those articles exhibit what I've defined to be "marketer" behavior on the site.

For the visitors we decide to track in this Engagement Plan, the first assumption is that we don’t yet have enough information to define them as Marketer or Technologist.  But we can immediately rectify that by invoking the Rules Engine in our first condition check.  We could check for either, but we chose to to first see if we should deem this visitor as technical.

A set of conditions we can check for to see if some one is "a technologist"

Our Condition invokes the Rules Engine where we can build a very sophisticated grouping of attributes that, for us at Launch Sitecore, peg someone with the Technical label.  We’re going to use the Pattern Card matches as a possibility (now grouping a couple of them together that represent our two technical Patterns), as well as including an additional possibility that someone got to Launch Sitecore using the word “development” in their search phrase (i.e., “Sitecore development”).

While this is a simple example, hopefully you’re seeing the possibilities here.  Never mind how rich the out of the box condition set is in Sitecore (geography, site, where you are in the content hierarchy itself, etc., etc.), we also know that this condition could be absolutely anything you dream up that returns a true/false.

If the condition returns true, we’re done and place the visitor in the Technical bucket:

A state for those we've deemed to be Technologists

If the overall condition returns false, we drop down to the check for the Marketer:

A set of conditions we can check for to see if some one is "a marketer"

As before, we are able to reuse our initial logic around Pattern Cards, with Connie and Mark combining forces as a possible reason to label a visitor as a Marketer.  In addition, we look for a search keyword containing DMS (Digital Marketing System) as well as a check for my MarchBlogBlitz campaign.  Since many of my articles in this time period are covering Analytics, I’m making the assumption that we have some Marketers on our hands.  Keep in mind the ability to replace the “or”s for “and”s, giving us possibly more granular condition definition.  As above for the Technical case, if this multi-clause condition returns true, we dump the visitor in the Marketing bucket.

Nice little trick if both of these checks return false.  We simply put the visitor back into the Undecided state and let other things trigger another check (maybe the next check is done on a follow up Goal, Page Visit, Login Event or anything else we might wait for our visitor to accomplish).  We do this by one last Conditional check, which always returns True:

Send the visitor back until we're sure

Here’s another look at the overall plan:

The full audience segmentation Engagement Plan

Pretty simple, but sky’s the limit.  One really cool idea that fits nicely into this is a very simple geography breakdown.  I could have, for instance, three states representing West, Central, and Eastern United States and immediately drop visitors into those states as they enter the site based on our GEOIP resolution.  (Since I am in the world of ideas only here, be sure to appreciate performance implications of making such wholesale checks).

Manually test how a visitor maps to the plan

One last really cool thing.  Since I have lots of visitor information in our Launch Sitecore site, I can even run a visitor through my new Engagement Plan.  Using the Supervise features of Engagement Plans, I grabbed my user (the Visitor associated with my Facebook authentication).  I moved that User to my new plan and the Undecided State.  In Supervise, I can manually press the trigger:



Since my Conditions are checked at Session End (among other events), I chose to run the Session End Trigger.

Sitecore goes through the entire logic of my plan and determines that my user account should be placed in the Marketing bucket.

The results of manually sending someone through the plan

Way cool.

NOW GO DOWNLOAD LAUNCH SITECORE.  (Need to get that great data for my reporting experiment).  I’ll let you know how our audience trends between this new Marketing and Technologist segmentation.

Extra Credit

For the interested student and the great developer….

Where I think this would be even more interesting is to use this same logic in the Pattern Card feature of Sitecore.  My prototype took all of 2 seconds (since it doesn’t in any way work).  But for an enterprising developer that adds the Rules logic to the Pattern Card check, this seems like a killer feature:

This becomes especially interesting considering Pattern Cards are an automatic dimension of Sitecore’s Analytics reporting.

The Engagement Plan for Launch Sitecore

I think Engagement Plans in Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Plan stand to be one of the most exciting parts of the platform, but I’ve honestly had a difficult time to date describing them without seeming overly complex.  The public Launch Sitecore site (www.launchsitecore.net) has given our team the ability to really see an Engagement Plan in action and to have goals, motivations and paths that are real and meaningful to us.  We are able to treat Launch Sitecore as a mock company which provides us with some real-world challenges—great ideas balanced with limited time (although Chris Castle should be the spokesperson for a high-powered energy drink), differing opinions on a feature roadmap, security concerns and more.
Among the many opportunities this site provides us is the capability to see the progression through an Engagement Plan that leads towards our Sales Engineering team goals.  Here’s the whole plan:

OK, back to my comment about being confusing.

If we break it down and I describe our motivations for this Plan, it actually becomes quite simple.  At Launch Sitecore, we’re trying to

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

My previous post describes our discussion around the goals (that our visitors will accomplish) towards that end.  An Engagement Plan allows us to truly map out the paths we anticipate our visitors will take as they accomplish the goals we set for our organization.  We started by breaking this down to 4 major steps, as shown in the diagram below:

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The Campaign Phase.

This phase represents the time when our Sales Engineering team is working to engage with the prospect.  This is likely going to be before they’ve ever visited Launch Sitecore.  It’s generally the time period when a Sales Engineer has had a detailed tech deep dive with a group of developers and project strategists.  The prospect group is really interested in getting their hands on Sitecore and spending some time with the application.  We at Launch Sitecore have the perfect evaluation package for that situation.  The ways that the prospect can be engaged from here are:

1. The Sales Engineer can encourage the prospect to visit www.launchsitecore.net and Register for an account (or login with their Social Network credentials).
2. The prospect can click on a Sales Engineer’s Email Signature which has a link to Launch Sitecore (with the appropriate campaign id assigned for each Sales Engineer).  I cheated and any link from these blogs uses that campaign ID as well (check the query string in the above Launch Sitecore link).
3. The prospect can receive a full Email Campaign Newsletter from a Sales Engineer with links describing the download and install process for Launch Sitecore.  Since a prospect may receive an email, we have also included all the default Email Campaign Engagement Plan states (send not complete, message unopened, etc.)

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The Active Evaluation Phase.

This is the bulk of the plan, where we check to see if our prospect has downloaded Launch Sitecore and, then, given the team feedback about the experience.

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The Evaluation Complete Phase

This is our main decision point where we assess the outcome of our plan.  More on this below.

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The Decision

This is an exciting roadmap item for us.  Since our group is very interested in the outcomes of our prospects’ evaluations, we want to see the results—how many of the prospects that engaged with the Sales Engineering team became happy Sitecore customers….and how many will be back for future discussions .
Our first step will be manual.  As we assess our customer wins, we will move the various prospects from those customers into the appropriate state or bucket (Happy Customer).  Our roadmap item is exciting though—through a connection to our Microsoft Dynamics system, we can tie account results from that system to our Engagement Plan and automate the process of moving these prospects to the appropriate state.

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Back to the start, and the Campaign Phase
Each of our campaign phase options (prospect registering on the site, prospect clicking a Sales Engineer’s auto signature, prospect receiving an Email Campaign message) will advance the prospect to the “Evaluator has been engaged” state of the plan.

OK, they’re on the path.  Instead of going step by step through the process, let’s review the end game here.  We anticipate one of three things will happen with this prospect from here:

1. The prospect will download the Launch Sitecore package, spend some fantastic time evaluating Sitecore, come back to our Launch Sitecore site and give us some insightful feedback on how great the experience was (or how we could add to it).  Awesome outcome.  And in our Engagement Plan terms, this visitor will end up in the Complete Evaluation and Feedback State shown above and below.
2. The prospect will download Launch Sitecore and never get back to the site to give us feedback.  Pretty good.  Download No Feedback.
3. The prospect will never leave this “engaged” state because they never download Launch Sitecore.  Not good.  No Evaluation.

Here’s again how those “semi-final” states look in our Engagement Plan:

So now we just need to map out the possibilities of how they’ll get from point A (being engaged) and point B (one of the 3 outcomes).  And since we have a clearly defined optimal outcome, what can we do in these paths (dropping some candy in the right place, if you will) to increase the likelihood they will choose that specific path?
While it’s somewhat interesting to us what the visitor reads articles on our site (see my post on the Launch Sitecore personas), we are really focused on having this prospect download the evaluation package.  So, our first decision point is basically, “Have they downloaded or not?”.

This is a condition in the Engagement Plan.  It’s an opportunity to take advantage of the Rules Engine to see if something is true or false (see the Yes/No possibilities that branch from this condition).  In our case, the evaluation of the condition is simple—has this prospect downloaded the evaluation package.  As you can see below, we’re checking whether the “Download Site” goal has been accomplished by the prospect.

In our case, since the Launch Sitecore package is actually part of our Sitecore content tree (in the Media Library), we were able to assign the goal to the Media Library item directly:

The only other thing to keep in mind when wiring this up is to ensure you’ve put an appropriate “Trigger” on the current state the visitor is in when you assess this condition.  Remember back that our prospect is in the “Evaluator has been engaged” state.  If you click on a state in the Engagement Plan designer, you get an option to define the Triggers for this state.  In our case we used the achievement of the goal itself as the spark to assess the condition:

 

We will add some other Page Events to this (so that we can ensure the condition is tested for those that don’t download the package).  To describe our logic from here:

1. If a prospect downloads Launch Sitecore, we put them in the “Feedback Path”, where we will check periodically for the achievement of the Feedback goal (a visitor fills in a Web Forms for Marketers form to give our team feedback).
2. If a prospect doesn’t download Launch Sitecore, we will wait for 10 days.  If 10 days has passed, we will use Email Campaign Manager to send out a follow up email reminding the prospect of the benefits of downloading the package.
3. If a prospect has received a follow up email and has still not downloaded Launch Sitecore in 10 additional days, we will drop them into the “semi-final” state I discussed before.  This doesn’t need to stop there however as we consider what actions we will take if a prospect is heading down this path.  For instance, we can email the Sales Engineering group and suggest that someone reaches out to the prospect to offer some help (maybe something happened with the download process?).  As a future feature, we can tie directly to our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and make the sales person on the account aware of the progress.
4. All along the way, we have the opportunities to communicate internally (contact a Sales Engineer about the current situation, or to the prospect themselves (either explicitly by sending out an email or having an SE call, or more subtly by changing the prospect’s experience the next time they are on the site based on the current Engagement Plan state they are in).

As we continue to add features to this plan (including full usage of Email Campaign Manager and the Dynamics Connector), I will describe in more detail the strategy and mechanics of these connections.  In the meantime, we will have fun monitoring the progress of our prospects through this process and continue to ensure we are doing everything along the way to accomplish our Launch Sitecore organizational goals:

Previous post:  The Personas for Launch Sitecore  |  Next post:  An Analytics Session for Launch Sitecore

The Goal Discussion for Launch Sitecore

With our North American team’s www.launchsitecore.net project, we needed to have the fundamental discussions that you or your clients will need to have when taking advantage of all the power of Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.    There are many places to start this discussion (and I will try to cover most of them in follow-up posts), but one that seems to be a very likely starting point is Goals.  For Goals, there are two main parts to this discussion:

1. What are all the Goals, large and small, that could be accomplished on my site (and how do I identify that they’ve been accomplished)
2. How do I stack / rank those goals in terms of relative importance for my site.

#1 is fairly straightforward.  Sit in a room together and brainstorm—what are all the conversions that I care to track at all?  Figuring out how those Goals will be identified could spark a bit more discussion (and potentially some developer insight) if the Goals themselves are complex and/or  require notifications and communication with external systems.  Some examples—an ecommerce transaction completing but the completion actually occurs outside of Sitecore, a goal that represents a specific path through the site (page A to page B to page Z without going to page C), leaving a video at a certain timestamp, etc. (well, that might be a failure, but you get the point).

For Launch Sitecore, our goals were fairly obvious and straightforward—your discussions or arguments could be more heated.  For us, we are really trying to engage our Evaluators of Sitecore.  Our Sales Engineering team is involved in the whole Prospect—>Partner—>Happy Supported Customer lifecycle.  Most of our time is focused on trying to provide the best software evaluation stage (sometimes a day and a demo, sometimes months of rigorous proofs) in the industry.  Launch Sitecore is a platform that now helps us do that.
So for goals, it’s clear:

1. Talk to our Evaluators (both Business Folks and Developers) about the great features of Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.
2. Ask them to register at www.launchsitecore.net.
3. Encourage them to download the Launch Sitecore package.
4. Be excellent at supporting their efforts to uncover the power of the platform.

We know if they Download Launch Sitecore (Goal), they have started down the path to success.  We are interested in how many people will engage with us using their social network credentials (and therefore Sitecore’s Social Connected Module) by logging in (Goal).  We want people to Register (Goal, very selfish here, but this is what enters you into our Engagement Plan funnel….more on that later).  We strive for a continual improvement of this offering so we request our Evaluators’ feedback (Goal).  Even reading an article might be important to us (there was some discussion amongst the team here, so I’ll talk about this in terms of Engagement Value next).

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#2 above (how do I stack / rank) is less straightforward.  Now we need to answer tougher questions and apply relevance to the goals we’ve brainstormed.  This will lead to a closer focus on priorities, a reordering and reshuffling of the value of Goals and probably even the throwing out of some of those Goals during the brainstorming session.  In Sitecore’s parlance, this is coming up with a relatively scaled Engagement Value for the Goals we’ve identified.  This can provide for some really interesting (potentially heated) discussions around the main question:  “Why does our site exist?”.
In an ecommerce site this discussion might be short enough to have at 5:00 on a Friday—we’re here to make money, checkout = $.  Done.  In others (or in an ecommerce site considering other goals), it’s not as clean-cut.  How do we value a lead?  Is it important that someone watches a promotional video on our site?  Do we strive for them to Like us?  Is someone that starts a checkout process but than abandons it valuable to us?
For Launch Sitecore our discussion was pretty straightforward, with one important twist:

Read an article:  Something we’re still discussing, but for the time, a Goal.  Notice no Engagement Value placed on this goal…it’s something we currently think we want to track as a conversion, but we aren’t necessarily OPTIMIZING our site for this activity.

Login (social or new account):  We’ve felt that by someone logging in, they’ve felt the Launch Sitecore site is a good place to hang.  They feel they are getting something from the offering (maybe they want to see their favorite articles all in one place, find our pointers to helpful links to be very convenient).  We’re engaging with them and we place value on this.  5 Engagement Value Points.

Registered:  An initial registration is particularly important to us for two reasons:

1. We know that they have probably registered as a result of an SE Engagement (more about campaigns that will tell us for sure later) and that they are doing so to download Launch Sitecore.
2. The selfish reason is that we are using registration as an entry point to the Engagement Plan we’ve built for this site.

10 Engagement Value Points.

Downloaded Launch Sitecore:  The obvious winner for the biggest goal of them all, right?  Wait a minute.  If we think through the overarching goal of our site, the reason we built our site:

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

So, we have to think more carefully about the flow.  If someone just Downloads Launch Sitecore, we know they have great intentions of spending some time with Sitecore.  But things happen, people get busy with their full-time jobs.  How do we really know they got the experience we were hoping for?  What if something happened during the download and they never got back to it?  Our team needs to re-engage (as we’ll see in our Engagement Plan) and ensure we are being excellent at supporting this evaluation.  Now if the Goal…

…Gave the Launch Sitecore team feedback about the evaluation is accomplished, now we’re talking.  We can be very confident that the Evaluator actually spent time with the package and has offered up their insights.  Even if these comments are less than complimentary, we have the information we need to meaningfully re-engage.  This is our ultimate (and highest on the Engagement Value scale) goal.

The relative scaling—25 for downloading and 50 for giving feedback—reflects this conversation.
More to come as we continue to look at the Analytics, Multi-Variate tests and Engagement Plans on www.launchsitecore.net.

Previous Post:  (Re)Introducing Launch Sitecore  |  Next Post:  The Personas for Launch Sitecore

(Re)Introducing Launch Sitecore

Register or login (socially) and grab the download at www.launchsitecore.net

If you are evaluating Sitecore or if you’re a partner working on pitching Sitecore to a prospect, hopefully you’ve had a chance to download and experiment with Launch Sitecore.  I wanted to take a moment to explain the motivations behind the project, the current state and the future hopes and dreams.  I plan on doing a series of posts around this growing platform, as our whole team is buzzing with ideas about the directions this could take.

Before continuing, I wanted to take a moment to give credit where credit is due.  Howard Kim and I dreamt this up a while ago and had been brainstorming lots of ideas based on some challenges in our daily work lives.  Our entire North American Sales Engineering team has kicked in with ideas, article writing, proofing, testing and particular areas of expertise.  But I can’t continue without recognizing the heroic efforts of Chris Castle, who took this project on with such enthusiasm and skill that it has taken on a life of its own.  (I would say it’s his baby, but for those of you that know Chris, there’s just no additional room for that).  This was a part time job in addition to an amazingly busy and productive full time job.

The thing I like most about this project is that, while allowing creativity to enter, it has stayed true to its goals:

• Create a package that is easily installable, understandable, self-documenting
• Highlight effective and efficient solutions to common scenarios—reusable content, navigation, configuration, separation of content and presentation
• Provide a consistent and seamless path from initial developer discussion—>self-install and investigation—>follow up deep dives—>successful evaluation
• Provide a clean and extensible starting point for SE team, partner and client proof of functionality / proof of concept activities
• Use the platform in our own “public” site to show real world examples of Digital Marketing System, Analytics, Email Campaign Manager, GeoIP resolution, the upcoming OLAP cube and more.

The motivation for this project has always been clear and concise: 

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

Our team believes so strongly in the power of the Sitecore platform that we know absolutely anything you need to do can be done.  From the recent Symposium video from the great folks at Carnival Cruise Lines: “if we can think it, it can be done with Sitecore”.  We also know that with power comes a growing responsibility for the Evaluator.  I can imagine quite a few dictates out there that come close to something like, “go figure out what that Sitecore thing does….and we really need to make a decision by next week”.  Yikes.  In my 5 years at Sitecore, the thing I’m assured of is that I’m going to learn something new every day.

The power of Sitecore doesn’t mean that you’re looking forward to a road of painful complexity.  The amazing thing you’ll see over and over is how things are built from the Core.  This Launch Sitecore package is not an amazingly flashy, feature-laden site.  Nor is it intended to be an ongoing content-based site.  It is intended to highlight the strength of that Core, to let you have a number of ah-hah moments, to get the juices of creativity flowing and to become a vehicle of your ongoing Sitecore learning.

So that’s the Launch Sitecore package—a downloadable Sitecore package (installed with the Installer in the Sitecore Desktop).  But we’re pushing on from there.  Now, a public site:  www.launchsitecore.net.  I’m extremely excited about where this is heading—a real-life Engagement Plan, meaningful Goals and Engagement Value, use of Sitecore Email Campaign Manager throughout, GeoIP lookups and Analytics, available OLAP cube reporting and much more.  Our whole Sales Engineering team will be able to share this story—why we created this site, what were our discussions around Goals, Engagement Values, how did our Campaigns perform, what did we test and how did that improve our Evaluators’ experiences.  And we of course want you to be along for the journey.  Give us some feedback on the site (after all, it’s a Goal and a State in our Engagement Plan).   Or contact any member of the Team (also on the site).

Next Post:  The Goal Discussion for Launch Sitecore

Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform: Segmenting the Audience

I'm amazed at the richness of the conditions that exist in Sitecore's Customer Engagement platform that can be used to strategize audience segmentation.  This new release takes huge leaps towards the very exciting goal of synthesizing customer activity--online, offline, implicit behavior, explicit profile attributes (either in Sitecore or external to it), channel activity based on email campaigns, mobile experiences, subscriptions, external social sites and much more.

I've had lots of conversations recently that boil down to "where do I begin?"

Mark Twain reminds us:

"Never put off till tomorrow, what you can do the day after tomorrow."

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.  The great thing is, you've chosen (or are now choosing) a Customer Engagement Platform that is built on the groundwork of THE world-class Sitecore Web Content Management System.  This is not a new building.  This is not new set of really high floors set to topple.  This is an expansion of an amazing platform that is the right combination of high and wide, with incredibly sturdy sections all over the place that are ready for your designer touches, when you're ready.  (Walk around for a while).

But let's use another Twain quote as an addendum today:

"All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime"

After all, we are trying to have the best digital marketing strategy on the planet.  Put one foot in front of the other, eat the elephant one bite at at time, and now my trite quoting is officially done.  Let's look at a really simple starting plan:

In this scenario, we decide that our visitors (or potentially even more compelling--our members or customers), are in one of four states.  These states could also be envisioned as a sales funnel, with the first state I'll describe being the entry point to the funnel:

1. Just Browsing.  Think of this as a default state where you don't want to make any assumptions yet.  You have content for this--compelling content pages that keep this visitor engaged and circling down the funnel.  In terms of Sitecore's Customer Engagement Platform, maybe this visitor hasn't yet hit your predefined and prestrategized thresholds of goal achievement or profile values.  You're just not ready to guide this visitor in any particular direction until she "tells" you a bit more about herself.  She also hasn't logged in (although this doesn't necessarily mean that she hasn't been to your site before).
2. Interested in featured product line.   It's the end of the quarter and you have three million of these widgets to sell.  The company is buzzing with ideas about how to promote and unload this last batch--from email newsletters going out to new subscribers, customer service agents noting the promotion to all call in customers, an add running directly on your home page and various landing pages pushing the widget.  While this impression is going to be everywhere--both online and off--you obviously don't want to assume someone is interested in the widget because they've heard about it.  Your criteria is more specific--it's the conversion, the achievement of a predefined goal you've identified as a confident assumption of customer engagement.  As we'll see, this doesn't have to be one thing.  Maybe he specifically searched Google for the exact part number of the widget.  Maybe he opens the email, goes to the landing page, and fills out a form asking for pricing.  Maybe he's downloaded both the widget installation manual AND watched the Getting Started Video.  Maybe he's talked to a customer service agent and told him that he's "very interested" in purchasing by the end of the quarter.  However he got to to this state, now you're ready.  You're ready to change his experience as he gets to the next landing page two days before the quarter ends.  He now gets the very aggressive coupon clearly presented on his arrival.
3. Ready to buy online.  It's down to the wire and we only have a few days left to the quarter.  Salespeople are carefully watching the transition to this state.  These visitors have been presented the coupon (and maybe even that coupon was part of a multi-variate test where different messaging was presented).  There's been contact outside of the site, where customer service has entered detailed notes in the CRM about the questions asked last week.  This company's DNS record is all over your Sitecore Analytics data--multiple employees of the company have filled out Web Forms for Marketers forms and we've tagged names and email addresses.  We see conversions all over the place, from downloads, to form submissions, to poll questions showing buying intent.  Finally, we see that a shopping cart has been started and 50,000 widgets are in it.  The shopping cart is almost complete.  It's the 30th.  Time for a call.
4. Existing customer.  Any time during the month we can have an authentication event--someone logged in and we now know him.  Whether his profile data is directly in Sitecore's security tables or sitting in Dynamics, Salesforce or another CRM or home-grown system, we know have a rich set of profile information to work with as we customize this visiting experience.  Has he purchased the Widget in the past?  Has he purchased products that are profiled in a similar way?  Has he specifically told us that he wants to receive email campaigns with these types of offers?

With the four possible states fully described, let's see some conditions we could use to personalize the experience for our visitor.  In follow up posts, I'll keep this theme alive and talk about how we could monitor this with the new Customer Engagement Platform Engagement Plans.

Keep in mind that, while there is an incredible set of predefined conditions available in Sitecore by default, this condition engine is easily extensible to account for your own very specific conditions--conditions that may be based on information in Sitecore or in any external system in your overall solution.

To keep the example simple, let's imagine a simple News Story that we're writing for our site.  You could think of this News Story as being a landing page, the Widget product page itself....whatever.  The point is that we can simply have an image control on this page that can show something different based on the state the visitor is in.

It all starts with placing our simple Show Image control on the page.  We can easily do this in the Device Editor shown below, or we can do it directly in the Page Editor:

Adding our Show Image control in Content Editor's Device Editor.

Now we can set up the set of conditions that will segregate our visiting audience into the four states.  For our example, we'll simply upload some images that are nice visual indications of the current visitor's state.  In the real world case, we might have the Image control vary the advertisement image, we may swap out the control altogether based on the visitor's state, we may have a very rich control that uses dramatically different logic, markup, access to external systems, etc.  Here's our images:

Funnel images to depict the visitor's state

Now we are able to have our Show Image control easily switch between these images.  Techically the control itself is able to switch its Data Source....point to a different content item in the overall Sitecore content tree.

Now, personalizing the component is an exercise of thinking through all the conditions that would lead to our decision that this visitor is part of a particular state.  First one is easy (working from the top of the funnel down).  Here, we just have the "Just Browsing" image, since we're not ready to differentiate the experience for the visitor based on our current information.

Now, it's on to the Interested in Product state.  We've decided that we'll determine a visitor to be interested in the Widget product if ANY of these conditions exist (we could have used AND clauses to ensure multiple factors exist):

1. This visitor is a known user that has received an email campaign focusing on widgets from us and has opened the email.
2. This visitor has reached a landing page we set up (maybe by browsing through the site, maybe they saw the link in a featured search result, maybe a Facebook wall post) AND they've filled out the form that they see there.
3. This visitor reached our site by searching on a specific term in a search engine.

Here's what that set of conditions looks like using prebuilt conditions in Sitecore's Rule Set Editor:

Rule Set Editor for our multiple, independent clause condition

Similarly, we'll list the conditions that brings a visitor down to the "Ready to Buy" section of the funnel.  For our example, we decide that this person could:

1. Have an "Engagement Value" greater than 10.  This will be covered more in my follow up posts, but think of a combination of goals, events and conversions each having a specific value associated with them.
2. Have a user name (could just be a tag that we've captured, doesn't need to be an authentication event) of Mike Casey.  Maybe our customer service agent has talked to Mike.
3. Be a member of the Flagged in CRM role.  More again in a future post, but our connection to a CRM could allow a non-CMS user (like a customer service agent working in a CRM) to affect the existance of this condition simply by completing their day-to-day tasks.
4. Have a lead profile score of greater than 25.  Since your content authors are able to assign profile values to the content they create, you are now able to determine a threshold at which you'd be confident on the lead value of this visitor.

Completing our rule set by including a check for a particular customer role (this could get a lot more interesting by tying our knowledge of this customer to this clause--what products did they buy, what are their site preferences, etc), we know have a fully built out set of conditions to match a visitor into the approrpriate state:

Our finished set of conditions

Hopefully this gets you thinking about where to start and how rich the set of prebuilt conditions in Sitecore really is.  Remember that you don't have to consider sweeping changes to your Web site based on these conditions--little things, nuanced changes in site navigation, featured image spots, customized landing pages can be incredibly powerful.  In future posts we'll dive deeper into the Engagement Plans that can help us move our audience along the path towards our predefined goals for our digital strategy.