01MarMany Kentico customers are unaware of the huge marketing potential that comes as standard within Kentico Website Marketing features.
Find out how to start unlocking this capability. View article
Kentico is an all-in-one content management system, e-commerce and online marketing platform. The Kentico website marketing features come as standard with the Kentico EMS license. This means getting started is usually a matter of configuration. As a result you can improve site visitor tracking, monitor the performance of campaigns and customise page content – and much more – quickly and for much less than the cost of developing new capabilities or using external systems.
Here are three tips to get you started:
1. Stay within Kentico environment for as long as possible
To get the most out of your Kentico website marketing features, it needs to be ‘aware’ of what’s going on. Many implementations however are based around having separate systems for contact management and possibly marketing. If you don’t have a specific reason for doing so, then don’t. Kentico handles all these functions; and makes user data more readily accessible across them.
Export to another system too soon and you could miss out
When you run your marketing activities using the Kentico website marketing features, you get to take advantage of the activity tracking available within the system. Activity tracking not only enables you to assess the effectiveness of an activity through reports, etc. but also; it can be used to refine your segmentation and/or develop thresholds to prioritise ‘hot’ leads.
Many Kentico website marketing features include an algorithm (rule) builder that enables you to access contact attributes (e.g. anonymous Vs customer) and/or activities (e.g. clicked on an email, visited a page, abandoned shopping cart). These can be dynamically updated so that you are always working with the freshest data.
But I need to use a 3rd party system?
When it is necessary to utilise 3rd party systems, the key is to establish a two-way data exchange. You need a ‘single source of truth’ for customer data and have one system continually update the other. Our preferred approach is to have Kentico as the master and use the 3rd party system to provide additional functionality as required and then update any statistics. In this way you get the best of both worlds.
2. You need a plan to make the most of your Kentico Website Marketing Features
Functionality is all well and good, but without a plan success is likely to be hit or miss. Better results come from consistency and this is more likely with a plan. If you don’t have a plan, best to start with the objective of understanding more about your website visitors/customers. We favour a hypothesis based approach (e.g. the majority of our sales come from our email campaigns, the majority of our sales are from repeat customers, etc.) and then constructing tests to determine whether these hold true or not. Establishing condition-based contact groups within Kentico is an ideal way to generate the data you need.
Once you’ve got a feel for your customer base you can then start to build up your digital marketing plan. Think about the role each digital channel will play towards meeting your objective. If your objective is to increase sales, we recommend also establishing some interim conversion goals to act as milestones along the way. You can then generate reports based on these conversions to check the performance of each step.
In developing your plan, we find the concept of a customer journey is great for structuring your thinking. A customer journey plots the ideal path that potential and existing customers traverse through the key stages of attraction, acquisition, service, retain/grow. You can map this journey using a table with the stages as the column headings and your digital channels as the rows. Channels (can be offline as well) are your customer touch points – where your customers come into contact and/or interact with your brand. Your website is one digital channel, but you will likely use others such as email, social (e.g. facebook). Your choice of channel should be based on the forms of communications favoured by your target customers.
3. There are many ways to skin a cat.
Consider Kentico’s website marketing features like you would a toolbox: you don’t need to use every tool, every time. There are common functionalities across many of the features (e.g. contact groups Vs personas) meaning they can often be interchangeably used to achieve the same ends.
We favour a building-block approach where we take the output of one function and use it to create further abstractions. This aids refinement, plus makes the sub components available for other purposes. Higher abstractions such as personas take a bit of fine-tuning, whereas contact groups are usually more stable and can be used for other purposes. We therefore base our personas on contact groups (plus other factors) to give us greater consistency across functions.
By Chris Frith
Looking for help unlocking the marketing potential of your Kentico website?
Chris is a Kentico certified marketer that can help you get started.
Talk to Chris today about unlocking Kentico website marketing features
