The Architecture of Personalization and Engagement

Many DXPs market personalization as a turnkey capability built into their offering. This sounds great until you consider that personalization isn’t just a feature that you toggle on or off — it’s an operating model for defining how you engage with the different user cohorts who engage with your content.

Personalization projects are doomed to fail when they are limited by poorly structured content, slioed data, or rigid workflows that aren’t adaptable to the changing needs of your content organization. DXPs are often the weak link when your personalization project fails.

Your enterprise CMS architecture is squarely responsible for determining what’s possible in preventing those failures in personalization. When you have the flexibility to define content structure, with access to all the necessary data, while also being able to modify workflows to fit your organization’s needs, your chances for success are greatly improved.

If you acknowledge that your CMS choice imposes a ceiling on the level of personalization possible, it helps clarify your decision.

What enterprises really mean by “engagement” and “personalization”

Engagement is no longer solely about pageviews, likes, and shares. To fully understand your users and how they interact with your content, you need to go deeper to understand things like:

• How long customers spend with a content asset
• Which content causes users to engage with additional content
• How different audience groups engage with content
• The content journey a user or cohort takes when moving from one asset to the next

If you’ve ever received an email that starts with “Hello, [First Name]”, you’ve seen a failure of the most basic form of personalization. That’s also not what personalization means in an enterprise context. Personalization should be tailored to create an experience that reflects how users engage with your content.

With these definitions of engagement and personalization, it’s useful to examine the outcomes you want to achieve:

• Engaged time to understand how long users spend interacting with your content.
• Recirculation rate, which is the percentage of users who visit another page on your site after reaching the end of the one they started on.
• Content journeys to establish patterns followed as users move from one content asset to the next. These help identify cohorts of similar users.
• Conversion rate to identify whether content is or isn’t driving the outcomes your business requires.

Maximizing engagement through personalized experience informs each stage of the dependency chain, leading from content creation to the conversion events you track. It starts with modular, structured content, which is further enhanced by taxonomy and metadata. User behavior provides signals that feed into the decision engine that personalizes your website’s content experience for each user.

It looks something like this:

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A CMS with the ability to create and output modular, structured content is essential for building robust personalized experiences. Your content needs to be broken into the smallest, appropriate, independent components, in a taxonomy that both content creators and personalization systems understand, with supporting metadata to further classify your content library.

Structured content increases your flexibility in creating personalized experiences. With structure, content can be reused across:

• User segments that identify cohorts that exhibit similar engagement behaviors.
• Markets that may value your product differently and require a personalized or localized approach to achieve engagement.
• Content journeys personalized for those markets and user segments.

To achieve your outcomes, your CMS needs to support workflows and a governance model that build consistency into the way your team structures content, maintains taxonomy, and prevents siloed metadata when you have geographically distributed teams.

Content intelligence within the CMS brings all these pieces together to inform your audience-level decisions about how to personalize content experiences. 

How WordPress VIP supports personalization and targeting outcomes

WordPress VIP provides tools to support your personalization and targeting outcomes.

• Analytics from Parse.ly include content journeys that show how users move through your content. 
• Parse.ly also offers real-time insights that allow for faster decision-making than tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. 
• Automatic link placement updates existing content with links to relevant new content, helping connect the right users with your latest published work.
• AI-powered content recommendations automatically surface top relevant content to your posts and pages, creating personalized content journeys automatically.

When you need additional customer data from your CDP or want to leverage experimentation tools, WordPress VIP can integrate with most major providers.

One key advantage of WordPress VIP is the flexibility to expand as your content program matures. You can start with basic segmentation and add complexity or tools for experimentation as you increase your organizational expertise.

Some enterprises opt for a DXP because they believe they need to go fully headless to achieve personalization goals. WordPress VIP supports headless and hybrid models in addition to being an end-to-end solution for managing your content and the presentation layer. This increases your flexibility in how you reuse content.

FInally, leveraging features like content recommendations and smart linking from within WordPress VIP, you can define personalized content journeys that are rooted in data.

Why some enterprises outgrow DXP-centric personalization models

While DXPs bill their offerings as infinitely customizable, the reality is that customization comes with steep costs. DXP systems tend to require complex integrations to make everything work. This means that when you want to change your editorial approach or use an atomic content asset in a new way, it might require waiting for custom development to make the change.

Those changes come with a real cost. DXPs are known to charge annual licensing fees just for the privilege of using them. That cost comes before the system is even configured for your enterprise’s needs. Configuration comes at the cost of paying for custom development, coupled with the opportunity cost of lost time in waiting for the changes to be available for use by your content team.

Open systems like WordPress VIP, combined with out-of-the-box content intelligence and Parse.ly analytics, avoid those costs and put you in a position to move quickly.

Reframing personalization as a content and data capability

It’s important to remember that personalization isn’t a feature of your CMS; it’s an operating model for how your content delivers engagement outcomes. Those outcomes begin with a defined content architecture and are measured using analytics tightly coupled with your CMS.

Your CMS should empower your personalization strategy, not dictate it because of system limitations.