Supercharge your Umbraco Website: Part One – Personalisation and A/B Testing

Let's face it: we'd all like life to be a bit simpler sometimes. The long working week, too many commitments and people to please, an endless to-do list and responsibilities, and never enough time. It can all start to feel a bit overwhelming. But life doesn't always have to be complicated.

Working as a marketer or content editor is far from simple – it's certainly not just sitting on TikTok all day! Today's marketing demands more, and trying to create website content that is precisely tailored to your target audience is challenging. How do you get it right, relevant, and guarantee it'll pay off?

Luckily, there are a TON of amazing tools out there that can help make your job as a marketer more manageable – hallelujah! And thankfully, for organisations that use the Umbraco CMS, there's uMarketingSuite – a real game-changer in helping marketing teams achieve their goals simply and effectively. 

Introducing: uMarketingSuite 🙌

uMarketingSuite is the all-in-one marketing toolkit for Umbraco that brings the personal, offline brand experience, to the web. From deep insight into your analytics, to sophisticated personalisation, to a more user-friendly workflow, the suite allows marketers to enhance content to meet users' needs better and ultimately lead to more conversions and happy customers, members, or general website visitors. (With Umbraco v7 reaching End of Life in 2023, uMarketingSuite works on Umbraco 8.2 or above!)

Although it may seem daunting at first, we promise that once you get started with uMarketingSuite, you'll wonder why you ever spent so much time doing anything else.

The following series, 'Supercharge your Umbraco Website', will be looking at tips and tricks to make your Umbraco website the very best it can be, making life simpler for you, and your users.

In this article, we'll introduce you to some of our favourite bits about uMarketingSuite and how they can make your website better than ever. Let's kick off with personalisation and A/B testing. 

Personalisation

Consumers expect personalised experiences online and offline, and it's fair to say we have pretty high expectations. This can make things challenging for marketers and content editors, but thankfully, not with Umbraco.

What is personalisation? 🤔

Put simply, personalisation means customising every user's experience to meet their unique needs. Think about Spotify; it recommends music tailored to you via 'Discover Weekly' and encourages you to build your own music library. There's also Netflix; it utilises personalisation adapted to users' interests over time, recommending relevant TV shows and films to you.

According to Salesforce research, 75% of business buyers expect companies to provide personalised experiences.

This is probably one of the reasons why personalisation is at the heart of the uMarketingSuite, making it easier than ever to be a digital marketing master. You can ensure your users find the right content at the right time.

In short, if you make the online experience personal, it has an overall positive impact. You can build stronger, more trustworthy relationships, and through relevant, personalised messaging, you can really connect with your end users – and hopefully lead to more relevant, conversions.

It's also more human. And people want to buy from humans, not robots! 

So, where do I start?

It's super easy to implement personalisation within Umbraco itself.

Umbraco personalisation can be split into two categories: Explicit and Implicit. 

• Explicit Personalisation – This includes user behaviour data such as the time they visit a specific web page, their location, or the device they're using to access it.
• Implicit Personalisation – This includes the more unspoken elements like current clicks or specific behaviour exhibited on a page. uMarketingSuite can predict what your user is looking for based on this data and use this to offer a more implied form of personalisation.

💡 Other cool features of personalisation with uMarketingSuite include:

• Personas: Easy-to-manage labels that represent users with similar needs.
• Ah-hoc Segmentation: Personalise pages however you'd like with flexible, specific ad-hoc segmentation.
• Powerful Algorithms: Whether out-of-the-box or creating your own, have an algorithm that meets your unique requirements.
• Granular Analytics: By integrating the uMarketingSuite Analytics feature (link to blog), your algorithm will improve as time goes on, so you can constantly evolve personalisation.
• Content Overview: Umbraco makes it easy to see all your content and pages so you can implement your content strategy and send out personalised campaigns.

A/B Testing

The uMarketingSuite also comes with out-of-the-box functionalities like A/B testing that can be set up within minutes.

As a marketer, you'll know that there's constant scope for improvement – but how do you choose which improvements to implement?

By setting up A/B testing, you can test two or more components or different pages against each other to see which best suits your audience. Although not every test will be successful, they will give you the information you need to plan and optimise your site. For example, does the specific location or colour of a 'call to action' button or link on the website affect conversion rates? With A/B testing in uMarketingSuite, it's easy to find out.

With A/B testing, you can gather data that will help you make more informed decisions and hopefully lead to significantly better results in the future.

Once uMarketingSuite has been correctly installed and configured on your site, its features and functionality can easily be set up within the normal Umbraco back-office; they simply extend those available out-of-the-box with the Umbraco CMS, so managing personalisation and A/B testing is seamless for content administrators and editors.

Please get in touch with us today if you want to learn more about how we can help you set up personalisation and/or A/B testing on your Umbraco website.

NEXT 👉 Now that we've finished talking about what makes personalisation and A/B testing such awesome features, come back next week, when we'll share how to utilise the Analytics features of the uMarketingSuite.