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Originally Posted On: https://www.oshyn.com/blog/sitecore-ai

Sitecore AI uses machine learning to help deliver personalization at scale. According to Gartner, “the demise of third-party cookies, heightened consumer sensitivity to messaging, and tightening of marketing budgets have restricted personalization opportunities.”

Yet marketers are expected to deliver digital experiences that provide value to the business and the customer. Therefore, they need access to the right tools to help them reach their personalization targets.

Sitecore has provided a digital experience platform that helps businesses to manage content and engage their customers. Now with Sitecore AI, they have another tool to help navigate the modern customer journey. In this article, we’ll delve into the problems facing most marketers today and show how Sitecore AI can help solve them.

Problems Plaguing the Modern Marketer

Marketers have several responsibilities on their hands. As the primary personnel responsible for creating engaging digital campaigns that turn visitors into customers, they can have a tremendous impact on a firm’s bottom line. However, executing tasks that lead to increased customer engagement and eventually, revenue doesn’t come without challenges.

1. An Evolving Landscape Focused on SpeedMarketers have found themselves competing in a world ruled by convenience. Consumer preferences are constantly changing due to the ease with which they can find the products and experiences they desire. According to a study by PwC, 80% of consumers in the US favor speed and convenience as key parts of their customer experience. And that number is even higher in other parts of the world.Even though marketers have been able to leverage the technologies at their disposal to aid them in the battle against major competitors like Amazon, the speed with which customers change their channel preferences remains a cause for concern.

   Speed is becoming a major differentiating factor, and those that are slow to market with their latest campaigns or slow to adapt to customer preferences will lag behind.

2. The Demand for PersonalizationAnother critical element impacting what marketers are able to do today is the level of personalization that customers are demanding.Consumers face an onslaught of information across several digital channels. Therefore, audiences are not as receptive to generic or impersonal content. They desire to have a human connection and content that is tailored specifically to their needs. According to Salesforce , 66% of customers expect brands to understand their unique needs, but many of them don’t believe that it is happening.

   Marketers are well aware of the importance of personalization, but unfortunately, many personalization initiatives are handicapped by several channels. From an ability to collect data that’s scattered across disparate silos to a lack of quality data to perform personalization initiatives in the first place, marketers face several obstacles to achieving personalization success.

3. Multiple Decision-MakersIt’s not uncommon in several organizations to have upwards of four people involved in a content workflow, providing input and feedback on campaigns before they’re ready for release. While collaboration is an essential part of marketing today, there are times when having too many cooks in the kitchen can be detrimental, especially to the consumer.Unfortunately, these multiperson decision-making workflows slow down innovation and time to market. As a result, organizations can find themselves struggling to keep up with the competition and the demands of their customers.

   Marketers need to have agile processes in place that help them avoid being slowed down, providing agile teams with the ability to deploy multiple campaigns, personalize them to the needs of their audience, and do so at scale.

How Sitecore AI Removes Personalization Guesswork

Personalization can be challenging to execute. Even when you think you’ve got it all figured out, without the proper assistance, the result might not meet the standards of your customers. Not to mention the other obstacles that can get in the way for marketers and businesses trying to provide their customers with a great customer experience.

Sitecore AI combines with Sitecore Experience Platform and Sitecore Content Hub to help organizations deliver personalization at scale, with speed, and without being hindered by multiple decision-makers.

Sitecore Experience Platform already provides a digital experience platform and includes a CMS that allows businesses to connect with customers, manage content across multiple sites. This enables them to deliver personalized content across several channels using a single platform.

Content Hub enables brands to control their content lifecycle, including planning and producing content, collaborating with team members, and managing content for every touchpoint.

Sitecore AI enhances these capabilities even further, helping brands to analyze behavior to determine where customers are in the journey and selecting the best content to continue optimizing their experience.

Here are some more things that can be achieved with Sitecore AI:

• Auto Personalization delivers time-savings and visitor-engagement benefits by helping to identify visitor trends and create customer segments.
• Image Similarity analyzes images and content assets for similarities to determine how they can be reused and repurposed, simplifying content curation.
• Automation eliminates the need to make personalization decisions manually and instead serves the right content at the right time while still enabling the marketer to have the final call.

More About Auto Personalization

Automated personalization can be used on existing content variants. You don’t need to pre-define user segments to build personalized experiences. Instead, recommendations are made on the content variants to provide a better user experience based on previous behavior and interactions.

Sitecore builds on the existing personalization capabilities found in Sitecore XP, allowing auto personalization to be enabled at both the component and personalization rule levels.

How Machine Learning Gets Involved

Sitecore AI leverages the machine learning capabilities provided by Sitecore Cortex. Users can analyze page optimization test results from A/B testing. Results can be clustered into different segments to discover unique insights. For example, some pages resonate better with particular groups, thus enabling you to provide specific content for different segments.

Get the Most Out of Sitecore AI With the Help of Oshyn

Sitecore AI can help marketers tackle many of the problems that plague them, providing easier ways to solve various personalization challenges. Overall, Sitecore’s digital experience platform delivers the tools necessary to meet the customer experience demands of today.

However, if you want to get the most out of Sitecore and Sitecore AI, you should consider getting help from a recognized Sitecore partner. At Oshyn, we’ve worked with top brands such as The National Education Association Member Benefits (NEAMB), a subsidiary of the National Education Association (NEA), to help them enhance the personalized experiences for their customers.

As a Sitecore recognized partner, we’ve helped brands maximize what they can do using Sitecore and provide enormous benefits for their customers. Learn more about Sitecore AI and what it means for the future of marketing by reading our ebook: How Sitecore AI is Transforming Modern Marketing.