Understanding Composable Digital Experience Platforms
For those unfamiliar, a Composable DXP is a modular and flexible framework for building and managing digital experiences across various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, and other digital touchpoints, and which goes beyond just a traditional Content Management System. Unlike traditional monolithic DXPs, which offer a one-size-fits-all solution through a bundled suite of features and functionalities, a Composable DXP follows a modular architecture, allowing organisations to assemble bespoke solutions by integrating best-of-breed components from either a single or multiple vendors.
The Role of Personalisation
Personalisation is the art of tailoring services and communications to cater to the specific needs of your website visitors. With the aid of DXPs, hotels and resorts can harness vast amounts of data to deliver highly customised experiences. Here are some helpful third-party links which give general and hospitality-based statistics as to why personalisation should be on your radar if it isn’t already:
When you think about how hotels typically view the customer journey, it is generally along the lines of the following:
Therefore, it is not surprising to hear many view personalisation as a bottom-of-funnel activity. However, you shouldn’t neglect what can be achieved higher up the funnel. We have one customer who has a brand page, so targeting users in the research phase with a component that shows a list of all their related hotels in a 3-column format. However, the list was initially static. The customer knew which countries travelled to each hotel, and so dynamically changing the hotel order based on the visitor’s country (geotargeting) increased clickthrough rates to the first three hotel websites by 25-140% on average, depending on the hotel and its location.
At the end of the day, we know it can be daunting for customers to identify and implement a personalisation strategy. The point of this story was that you don’t need to think of one personalisation strategy that will move your conversion rates by 5 or 10%. Instead, you can think small, such as sort ordering based on some criteria, and then monitor the results. If it doesn’t work out as expected, undo the change and try something else. Ultimately, combining small, optimised changes can make a massive difference to your ROI.
Once you start to get the hang of it, then you can get into some quite interesting scenarios which we can help you with, such as:
- Personalised booking experience where the content adjusts based on past website behaviour, preferences, and demographic information,
- Shopping cart abandonment: seeing where people drop off during the booking process and then re-engaging them at their next visit. In this case, it would help if you had a bespoke booking engine and tracked their progress via the customer profile. The pros and cons of webstore booking engines versus the case for a custom-built booking engine are discussed in our next article,
- Understanding how many times a potential customer has visited the website without booking and offering a one-time only incentive to make that person book,
- Map out and personalise the entire guest journey using personalisation and marketing automation to create detailed guest journey maps with feedback loops.
The benefits of personalisation thus come down to:
- Enhanced User Experience: Personalised websites provide a more relevant and engaging experience for users, making it easier for them to find what they need, as in the case of sort ordering.
- Increased Conversion Rates: Personalisation can significantly boost conversion rates by delivering tailored content and offers.
- Improved Customer Loyalty: Personalisation makes users feel valued, fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat visits.
Of course, there are things to consider when implementing personalisation. Here are some hints to consider:
- Data Collection: Gather data from various sources, including user behaviour on the website, past purchases, and demographic information. However, make sure the data is clean and fit for purpose.
- Segmentation: Work out your audience segmentation so that you can start to deliver more targeted content to a specific group of users and then build out from there.
- Dynamic Content Delivery: Use tools and platforms that allow for real-time personalisation of website content based on user data. For this reason, we choose to develop with Optimizely, Sitecore, and Uniform.
The Role of A/B Testing
Sitting alongside personalisation is A/B testing. This process involves comparing two versions of a webpage, component, or element to determine which performs better by positively impacting the conversion rate. Businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimise their websites by systematically testing different variations. You may also come across multivariate testing, where multiple elements within a single page are tested to determine the best-performing combination.
We advise customers to use one of those third-party solutions that uses heatmaps, scroll maps, and recordings, combined with the A/B testing tools in your platform of choice, to work out how people engage with each page and where there is an opportunity to optimise the layout for maximum ROI. Using a product like Crazyegg with its page side-by-side feature, for example, is a great visual way to create the best landing pages for marketing campaigns based on what people do on your site and by the devices they use. You will find that some DXPs, such as Optimizely, have partnered with the likes of ContentSquare to add these capabilities into their experimentation products. For platforms without this functionality incorporated, you will need to purchase a third-party product like Crazyegg to benefit.
Composable DXPs also offer scalability, both horizontally and vertically, allowing businesses to handle increasing traffic and data volumes efficiently. This dynamic scalability through techniques like Static Site Generation (with incremental options for a better editing experience). If you have ever sent out a marketing campaign, only for your website to fall over under the weight of page requests, you will understand the benefit.
Generally, when it comes to testing, an 80/20 split between running tests based on data-backed hypotheses and those based on “gut feel” makes sense. Gut feel is valid. However, suppose you did everything based on what you think may hold true instead of what the underlying data tells you. In that case, you run the risk of running multiple tests without moving the needle in terms of increasing performance and ROI. Having said that, Optimizely, for example, has its Web Experimentation platform that offers front-end A/B and multi-page testing capabilities, enabling businesses to test and learn at scale and innovate at speed, which may suit better depending on your specific circumstances.
In terms of the benefits you should expect to achieve through running A/B testing:
- Data-Driven Decision Making: A/B testing provides concrete data on what works best, removing the guesswork from website optimisation.
- Optimised User Experience: By identifying the most effective elements, A/B testing ensures that websites are continually improved to enhance user satisfaction.
- Increased Conversion Rates: Optimising key elements such as headlines, call-to-action buttons, page layouts, and booking engine layouts can significantly boost conversion rates.
Fostering Website Innovation
The question becomes, how do personalisation and A/B testing foster website innovation? Well, let’s take an uncomplicated look using Optimizely as a basis:
The general premise is that the platform will have tools for tracking what people do on the website and how you can use dynamic content to personalise to them. At the core is a customer profile that tracks what the user does on the system. It can also generally be extended to capture data specific to your requirements, such as knowing whether a user completed their booking or downloaded a particular PDF.
Analysing what the customer does using built-in analytical tools or third-party solutions, such as Google Analytics or even tailored solutions using Microsoft’s PowerBI or Tableau, can offer previously unknown insights and unlock thoughts about additional personalisation scenarios or new functionality. Of course, these new personalisation or functionality scenarios can be A/B tested, and the customer profile can be extended to capture any new data that may offer additional insights. Subsequently, this is how you end up with a continual innovation loop.
Conclusion
To summarize, website personalisation and A/B testing are powerful tools that drive innovation and enhance user experiences. Businesses can continuously optimise their websites by leveraging data to systematically test variations and deliver tailored and relevant content. This dual approach not only improves engagement and conversion rates but also fosters customer loyalty and satisfaction. It also enables the hotel to remain competitive and meet the ever-evolving needs of its website visitors.
Include Agency is a widely respected Optimizely, Sitecore, and Uniform implementation partner with a wealth of experience in delivering bespoke solutions for leading hospitality brands. If you would like to discuss anything in this article or if we can help you with your own Composable DXP projects, please reach out to us.
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