The Comprehensive Guide to Personalisation Best Practices

Modern marketers would tell you different preferences in customer communication. Some would use text or SMS, while some prefer diligent engagement in social media. While email isn't exactly the newest form of communication, it's proven to be one of the best ways to generate leads.

And to maximise email's effect in generating leads, you'll need to personalise it. Skip that part, and you risk making your potential customers feel like a number in a spreadsheet. The good news is that it’s not difficult to learn the basics and even master the art of personalisation.

Start with a 360-Degree View

Before you can personalise anything, you need to truly know your customers. This means going beyond demographics into behaviours, preferences, and motivations at the most granular level.

Your customers don't think in channels; they think in experiences. When someone browses your website on mobile and then calls your customer service team, they expect you to remember their journey. Every business needs to create consistent experiences across every touchpoint.

Here’s how you can start to see that complete view:

Integrate channels: Move toward omnichannel integration so experiences stay consistent.

Centralise your information: Eliminate silos and keep all customer data in one place.

Combine data intelligently: Link behaviours and outcomes (e.g., white paper downloads leading to new clients).

Quantify every outcome: Track both positive and negative interactions to assess true customer value.

This foundation gives you the insights to focus your efforts effectively.

Nurture Your Customers

This next part is about building relationships, not just closing transactions. When you focus on putting customer needs first, you demonstrate trustworthiness. And that, in our books, should be the foundation of any lasting business relationship.

Before anything, you should understand who your customers really are. This goes beyond knowing their location and job title. What are their pain points? What keeps them awake at night? 

Every interaction, like social media engagement to mobile purchases, provides insights and context you can use to create more relevant experiences in the future.

Once you understand them:

• Personalise content authentically: Sending an email with the heading “Dear Valued Customer” is just asking for trouble. Effective personalisation requires four key elements to really work:

• Authenticity

• Accuracy

• Relevance

• Timing

• Use smart automation: Automation will unlock possibilities for your personalised content at scale without compromising quality. This works due to Sitecore’s capability to work with four distinct data types:

• Implicit data (like behavioural patterns)

• Explicit data (like info customers provided)

• Structured data (meaning organised database information)

• Unstructured data (like videos, images, audio)

When you nurture customers in this way, you build lasting connections that can endure for years, or even decades.

Use Location and Context for Personalisation

Now, let’s get more specific. Location-based personalisation allows you to reach customers when they’re most likely to engage. If someone walks into their favourite restaurant or bar, and then receives a 20% discount on their main course, that’s a prime example of contextual timing.

Here’s how to master this:

• Set crystal-clear goals: Define whether you’re expanding, retaining, or improving CX.

• Target with precision: Choose focus areas that maximise impact with minimal loss like exclusion of potential customers when focusing on a small area.

• Consider the journey context: A discount is useless if it arrives too early or too late in the customer journey. Use your customer data to determine the perfect moment to make offers.

• Implement the right technology: Platforms like Sitecore’s IP Geolocation personalise experiences by region and analyse behaviour patterns.

Identify Your Most Valuable Customers

The most valuable customers don’t demand special treatment, nor do they always communicate their needs clearly. Yet they pay on time, cost less to retain, and drive long-term value. But how do you identify them? Here's how:

• Ask the right questions: Where is each customer in their journey? What do you know about them?

• Create meaningful segments: Divide your customers using the PIE framework:

• Potential – opportunity for growth

• Importance – size of the segment

• Ease – simplicity of identification

• Leverage tech: Use modern tools to detect patterns and automate segmentation.

Do these well and you're well on your way to focusing resources where they matter most.

Focusing on the Customer

It goes without saying that the whole act of personalisation is about the customer. Now, we just have to double down on it. This means prioritising customer satisfaction above internal processes. It may sound obvious, but when employees are empowered to go the extra mile, the overall experience improves tenfold.

Here's an easy 3-point process on how to start:

• Make customer focus a team effort: This isn’t just marketing’s job. It requires organisation-wide commitment.

• Deliver content when, where, and how customers want it: Discounts or promotions only matter if they’re delivered at the right time in the journey.

• Enable cross-team collaboration: Break down silos that force teams to duplicate content and repeat processes.

Achieving Multichannel Cohesion

The end goal is to give customers consistent messaging across every channel. When your email offers one deal while your social media promotes something entirely different, you create confusion that drives people away.

To avoid that:

• Get everyone aligned: Cohesive multichannel marketing requires input across teams, not just marketing.

• Understand the complete customer journey: Deliver messages at the right time, not too early or too late.

• Double-check asset centralisation: Keep all necessary files in one accessible place for faster, consistent content creation.

• Create comprehensive profiles: Capture data from every interaction and store it in a single, accessible location for a unified view.

The Bottom Line

Personalisation isn't about having perfect data or the most advanced technology, but about respect. When you show customers that you understand their situation and care enough to provide relevant and timely information, you build trust that translates into loyalty and revenue.

If you’re ready to welcome the potential of personalisation with your business, check our services. Find out how you can better personalise each aspect of how you do business and build relationships with your customers.