What It Really Takes to Optimize Your Sitecore Solution

No matter where you are on your digital transformation journey, you’ve probably discovered that no tool or system truly stands alone. For most companies, Sitecore is just one piece of the puzzle.

As you consider your approach to Sitecore experience optimization, make sure your roadmap aligns with digital strategy across the business. Identify where Sitecore may present overlaps with your existing marketing technology stack, and negotiate if you don’t plan to leverage those features. This critical step prevents costly duplication of effort and ensures that you get the most out of your Sitecore investment.

Helpful questions to ask about Sitecore implementation

Whether you’re just getting started with your Sitecore implementation or you’ve been using it for years, it’s helpful to take a step back and see how the solution fits in with your overall environment. You may want to start with questions like:

• Where is our organization now in terms of persona development, market understanding, positioning, and content? Take our diagnostic quiz
• How does Sitecore help us execute against our digital strategy objectives?
• How does Sitecore fit in with our existing enterprise IT architecture?
• How does Sitecore support our martech strategy and long-term roadmap?

The best martech strategies constantly evolve to meet changing markets, circumstances, and goals. Taking a people-driven approach to your martech stack can help your organization stay nimble, even if you’ve already made tool and platform investments.

Not sure how to take stock given limited time and capacity? Consultation from an unbiased third party could be a good solution.

Is Martech Strategy Consulting right for you?

Sitecore recommends an extremely robust architecture, with server counts easily expanding into the dozens across testing and production environments. When you add in a complex web of databases and multiple hosting solutions, it’s easy for configuration to become an issue.

To ensure that your marketing team can use the full suite of tools that Sitecore XP offers, it’s important that your implementation partner — whether that be your internal IT team or an external vendor — validates the architecture to avoid unanticipated roadblocks.

Signs you need a Sitecore architecture audit

If you’re running into Sitecore performance issues, it might be time to conduct an architecture audit. A few signs that your Sitecore instance was not architected to scale include:

• Issues with basic authoring capabilities, including staging environments and workflows
• Loss of Sitecore Experience Analytics’ ability to capture data from website interactions
• Missing out on valuable user profile and interaction data
• Inability to associate user sessions, profiles, and patterns
• Failure to log and capture goals and value scores to assist with A/B testing, personalization, and automation

How M/I Homes increased Sitecore speed and reduced resource strain

What to know before, during, and after your Sitecore implementation

Sitecore’s intuitive interface often belies its complexity, leaving marketing teams surprised by how much planning and how many resources are required for an effective implementation. Unfortunately, when it comes to your Sitecore solution, what you don’t see early on can create obstacles down the road.

If your current set-up isn’t working, you may not know who to ask for help. Even if you do have an internal IT team on the job, it’s natural to run into roadblocks. Sitecore implementations and upgrades are complicated, but there are solutions!

Have questions? Let us know

Once you have a solid foundation in place in the form of a validated architecture, you’re ready to move into Sitecore tools. Most Sitecore implementations leverage front-end editing tools like Sitecore’s WYSIWYG Experience Editor and Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), which are based on the concept of components.

What are Sitecore components?

Think of components like widgets that allow marketers and UX designers to build pages out of common pieces and patterns. Arranging components on a page is a lot like playing a game of Tetris or building something out of LEGOs.

Why do Sitecore components matter?

In Sitecore, components live inside of layouts, which help add guardrails or rules around which components can be placed in certain areas of a page. However, when inexperienced IT or implementation partners take shortcuts or overlook components in the design stage, marketers can be locked out of some of Sitecore’s most exciting capabilities.

• If templates are too rigid or code-heavy, marketers must rely on IT to make any changes.
• If templates are too flexible, site code becomes vulnerable to too much risk. 

Without component-based design, marketers can’t use Sitecore personalization and testing tools. To get the most out of Sitecore, finding the sweet spot between flexibility and templated structure is key.

How United Healthcare increased online transactions through better design

Your customers don’t know — or care — which tools and platforms you use to create your online footprint. Behind the scenes, however, your marketing, brand, and support teams know exactly how critical your technology stack is to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience that converts.

How to optimize your martech stack

Your martech stack is only one part of your digital ecosystem. If one team works with Sitecore, while another performs similar functions with another tool, your organization risks losing data, missing opportunities, and overspending.

To avoid operational silos, use your digital roadmap to limit functionality overlap and maximize each tool or platform’s strengths. Being strategic about your digital landscape helps you get more out of your time, resources, and technology.

Common integrations that make sense with Sitecore

Sitecore’s API frameworks make nearly any integration possible, although some come with a price. Work with your IT team or external partner to determine what makes the most sense for your organization.

Organizations often find overlapping functionality in tools like:

• Sitecore Experience Analytics and Google Analytics
• Sitecore Marketing Automation and Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Sitecore Email Experience Manager and Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Sitecore Optimization and Optimizely
• Sitecore Testing and Optimizely

Your CRM platform, such as Dynamics 365 or Salesforce, should be a top consideration for integration. Tapping into your CRM data allows you to sync valuable website information with your existing customer datasets, and to leverage all of your data in Sitecore’s personalization and automation tools.

How one company fast-tracked their marketing maturity with data integration

To take advantage of Sitecore’s most advanced marketing features, it helps to start with a limited set of goals and personalization factors, then iterate toward more sophisticated value scoring.

What are Sitecore goals and how many Sitecore goals should I set?

Goals are user actions with assigned values along the conversion funnel. The more goals a user accomplishes during a site visit, the higher their value total goes, leading to better targeting of additional Sitecore features and tools, as well as helping your marketing team improve overall site value.

Using goals helps you:

• Set personalization parameters
• Get better reports in Experience Analytics
• Analyze the customer journey
• Define marketing automation rules

We recommend that you start out with no more than a dozen goals, accompanied by a hierarchy of value scores. It’s often most helpful to start with broad categories like low-, medium-, and high-impact values.

How can I improve Sitecore personalization results?

While Sitecore’s impressive personalization capabilities often sell the platform, going overboard on personalization can have a net negative effect on your marketing efforts. In fact, Sitecore personalization doesn’t make sense for every company! Before you start setting up personalization in your Sitecore solution, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Consider your business case. How does the work involved in creating, testing, and maintaining personalization rules at scale amplify your value proposition?
• Start with explicit yes/no values. Begin your testing with a simplified baseline.
• Test first. Test the results of your pattern recognition before you personalize against them.
• Work from custom content. Make sure that each pattern personalization is backed up with truly customized content.
• Create a value matrix. Have a clear plan for measuring and determining the value of the personalization.
• Test again. Before committing time and resources, test each feature and scenario first, then test again and again throughout the process to continue refining for better results.

Do I really have to do that much testing?

Short answer: yes. To deliver Sitecore experience optimization, your team needs a culture of iterative review. Each new idea needs a pilot project, and even established goals, patterns, and values should be regularly reviewed to keep your approach fresh and relevant.

You may find that some goals are triggered too often to be meaningful, some patterns prove confusing to the user, and some scenarios just aren’t worth the effort to maintain at scale. It’s very easy to lose the meaning behind why you are segmenting your customers or what you are trying to achieve with personalized content.

Not sure how to set up a testing cycle that makes sense for your needs? Putting a plan together may be easier than you think. A Sitecore expert can help you think through your capacity and Sitecore solution, and set you up with a smart testing cycle, in one free 30-minute consultation.

Schedule your free 30-minute smart Sitecore testing call