Rules-based personalization: creating a personalization strategy

Today’s most successful businesses know the importance of personalization to a prosperous digital strategy. According to a PwC survey, 89% of CMOs have focused on customer personalization to drive customer loyalty. That’s because it enables brands to cope with rising customer expectations and helps them to achieve ambitious business goals.

Customers have a wealth of channels, potential products and services, and platforms to choose from, and personalization can help brands differentiate and win valuable attention. In this article, we’ll explain what you need to know about rules-based personalization and how you can use it to create a fruitful personalization strategy.

Rules-based personalization is an approach to content personalization where a personalized experience is delivered to customers if certain conditions are met.

Following specific rules a marketer outlines, rule-based personalization allows brands to create multiple versions of content experiences for an intended audience. They can then specify rules to make these experiences more relevant to a particular audience segment.

For rules-based personalization to be effective, you need to have a solid strategy to capture customer data, as this type of personalization relies on explicit data provided by the customer to improve their experience. Data can be collected from several places, including a CRM and customer behavioral data.

Rules-based personalization generally follows if/then, and/or and sometimes else logic. If a visitor comes to the website and meets specific criteria, for example, if their IP address indicates they’re from Austria and it’s their first time visiting the page, then content about the latest Vienna event is displayed.

The number of conditions that can be set for a rule-based personalization strategy is endless as if/then conditions can be combined with and/or conditions and else. We can take the previous example and adjust it to if their IP address indicates that they’re from Austria, and they have a customer profile or have visited the page three times, then a pop-up with a discount for the Vienna event is displayed, else display a landing image for the event.

With rules-based personalization, marketers can game different scenarios that they believe are most relevant to their potential customers. In addition, since rules-based personalization relies on first-party data, customers are more likely to be receptive to the content you display.

Rules-based personalization offers a few benefits to brands that use it to build a personalization strategy.

Rules-based personalization is one of the easiest methodologies to implement. It follows simple scenario-based rules, meaning that brands don’t need much time or resources to get their personalization strategy off the ground.

With rules-based personalization, brands have a gateway to delivering a tailored customer experience. Marketers can immediately show customers content based on their location, the number of times they’ve visited a page, or the last time they made a purchase. While simple, these conditions offer an experience based on unique customer data.

Brands can hone in on a particular audience demographic by creating a complete view of their customer using data that has already been collected. They can then use this data to define specific rules to display content relevant to specific sections of an audience—for example, repeat customers who purchased a product during the last discount.

Businesses must deliver a consistent experience no matter what device a customer is browsing from. Rules-based personalization can allow brands to create an omnichannel experience once they meet the conditions set, regardless of whether they’re browsing on a mobile phone, laptop or other smart devices.

Magnolia is a composable digital experience platform that enables brands to manage content across various channels. With enterprise-grade headless capabilities, marketers can manage content in one hub and distribute it wherever they need, reusing content multiple times as they see fit.

This is accomplished without sacrificing the content authoring experience, as marketers can also access easy-to-use tools, including WYSIWYG editing and experience previews. But a digital experience wouldn’t be complete without the ability to personalize that content for different audiences. Magnolia includes out-of-the-box rules-based personalization that can be used to optimize content on various channels and provide a more tailored experience.

In situations where more than rules-based personalization might be needed, Magnolia also easily integrates with third-party solutions and brings everything together in a single interface.

Magnolia uses a rule-based personalization model where relevant content is pushed to the center, and irrelevant content is filtered out. Content variations are displayed to customers, and rules can be created based on traits, including preferences, search terms, interests, profile attributes, and more. Audiences can also be broken down into segments to make assigning rules even easier.

Discover more about how Magnolia does personalization by diving into our in-depth article to learn more about audience segmentation, explicit and implicit personalization, and more.