Back in the day, in 1958 LEGO estimated that six standard LEGO bricks could be combined together in nearly 103 million ways. Ofcourse, most ordinary people believed it, because 103 million is a big number and it came from the makers of Lego themselves. The number was assumed accurate until a few years ago when a young mathematician at the University of Copenhagen decided to verify its accuracy.
Søren Eilers, a professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen was curious about the methodology behind that number and soon discovered that the previous calculation was flawed and incredibly lower than his projections.
Soren solved the puzzle and arrived at the mind boggling number of 915,103,765.
In simpler words, Nine Hundred Fifteen Million, One Hundred and Three Thousand, Seven Hundred Sixty-Five.
Why do we care about this? As marketers, this begs us to think if six “standard LEGO bricks” (the rectangular 4×2 bricks) can lead to over 900 million combinations, what stops us from designing super hyper-personalized experiences that deliver exactly what our customers need using a finite set of capabilities on our digital platforms?
Personalized experiences have many benefits for brands, from building key customer relationships to driving long-term revenue.
- Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5–15%, and increase marketing spend efficiency by 10–30% (source).
- The top five benefits of personalization include increased visitor engagement (55%), improved customer experience (55%), improved brand perception (39%), increased conversion rates (51%) and increased lead generation and customer acquisition (46%) (source).
- Brand loyalty among millennials increases by 28% on average if they receive personalized marketing communications (source).
The marketers biggest challenge today is not the lack of tools at their disposal, but instead it is the lack of ideas. Every CMO and CIO worth their salt has invested in onboarding the best in class marketing technologies for their teams. The one thing I have seen most organizations struggle is leveraging these technologies and customer data into meaningful experiences at scale. The most common response from CX / Marketing teams is that they are spread too thin and dont have the time to study the trends at depth. Most marketers seem to be busy delivering with little time for introspection and planning.
This is where our new friend AI kicks in. Aritifical Intelligence already plays a critical role in delivering customer experiences at scale. AI led personalization refers to
- Categorization of multiple data sets
- Extraction of valuable insights from them
- Automated actions
Introducing you to Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP).
Sitecore XP is not just another content management system (CMS) with some fancy features. Sitecore Experience Platform(XP) combines customer data, analytics, and marketing automation capabilities to nurture customers throughout their journey with personalized experiences in real-time, across channels. I intend to speak about Sitecore capabilities in depth in future posts, but this post is dedicated to my favourite Sitecore AI.
Sitecore AI is a unique always on Auto-Personalization solution that automatically identifies visitor trends, creates customer segments, and modifies elements on a page to deliver personalized experiences.
It connects seamlessly to a wide variety of data sources to build a true 360 degree view of your potential / existing customers, automatically identifies different trends based on their behaviour, creates custom customer segments and automatically modifies the elements on a page to serve a personalized experience.
The most beautiful aspect about Sitecore AI is its ability to learn from its experience and test new permutations that optimize the experience for your customers, every time.
As a marketer, if you feel overwhelmed with the infinte digital customer journeys and want to deliver a consistent yet personalized experience to every customer, then Sitecore XP might be an interesting solution for you to consider. Make your first step count by pointing it in the right direction.