According to “The State of Personalization 2021” by customer data management platform Twilio Segment, personalized experiences are in high demand. No surprises there, right? But what’s truly shocking is the fact that there’s still a big gap between consumer expectations and the reality that brands are delivering.
While a massive 85% of businesses included in Twilio Segment’s survey said they offered personalized experiences, only 60% of consumers reported feeling that their experiences were actually personalized.
The brands who are able to fill this personalization gap with valuable, unique experiences—at scale—will be prepared for whatever the future of consumers and business throws at them. Read on to learn how to say goodbye to random content and say hello to modern technology that makes personalized, content-driven experiences not just effective but affordable and repeatable.
No More Random Acts of Content: Master Personalization with This Modern Technology
Why does personalization all start with content? Because content is typically how customers first interact with your brand (and sometimes it’s the only way they ever interact with it).
From advertising campaigns that bring new consumers to your business to the informative content that convinces them to make a purchase to the personalized emails that help retain them long-term—content is a huge tool in your experience-creation toolbox. So, the content they encounter shouldn’t be sent at random with no regard for individual needs and preferences.
But we all know that’s much easier said than done for businesses with lots of consumers, lots of offerings, or lots of moving parts in the marketing department. For you, we created the world’s best MACH-powered, agile, headless CMS.
Start Marketing at MACH Speed with Headless CMS
Let’s start with headless CMS. Just like any good content management system (CMS), a headless CMS is a central “hub” where your content assets and activities live.
What makes headless CMS different from traditional CMS is its modular architecture, which separates content creation and management from how it’s eventually published. This separation between the content and the code empowers marketing teams to create content while technology and design teams use modern tools to build cross-platform experiences that bring that content to life. This modular architecture works together thanks to application programming interface (API) technology and makes it so that content is easy to optimize, publish, and even republish to websites, mobile apps, social channels, chatbots, and more.
One step above the standard headless CMS is the MACH headless CMS. MACH is a classification for technology that is built on microservices, connected via API technology, native to the cloud, and headless from the ground up. These features give a MACH headless CMS infinite scalability, the agility to adapt to every modern consumer trend, and the power to integrate with other cutting-edge platforms to build a well-rounded marketing program.
And that brings us to Contentstack—an agile, headless CMS that’s built on MACH principles, bringing all the best modern CMS features together under one roof. And Contentstack doesn’t just employ MACH principles, the company is even a founding member of the MACH Alliance!
Coupled with complementary MACH technologies like personalization provider Uniform and MACH-methodology implementation agencies such as EPAM, personalization suddenly starts to become a whole lot more manageable than the old-school, rules-based suites many marketers know and probably don’t love.
How Headless Tech Powers Your Personalization Plan
Here are just a few ways taking a more measured and less random approach to content with the help of a headless CMS can greatly boost the power of your personalization efforts.
Customize Individual Experiences Without a PhD in Rules
Rigid, complex webs of rules used to be the only way to deliver content that was somewhat “personalized” for different consumer groups. However, marketers who have kept up with the times know that, today, uniqueness is celebrated and the brands who are willing to do the work to recognize each customer’s preferences are rewarded.
Today, content must be personalized for each consumer based on context. Historically, this has been a practically impossible task to pull off at any kind of scale. But with a modern, headless CMS that has intuitive tagging tools and can also integrate with agile and highly performant personalization platforms, businesses can finally leave rules in the dust and develop more effective personalized content.
Finally Flex Your Creativity and Start Innovating
Creativity is an important element of every marketer’s toolkit. Unfortunately, marketers often don’t have enough time to put their creativity to use on innovative campaigns. Why? Because they’re stifled by the repetitive processes that come with working in an outdated, legacy content management system.
With an agile, headless CMS like Contentstack that believes in the democratization of content, marketers are free to create, manage, and publish creative campaigns without waiting for help from tech teams — who are often already immersed in their own world of tasks.
Integrate Best-in-Class Tech and Elevate Your Brand Experiences
Content management isn’t the only technology that has evolved from tedious, complicated processes toward user-friendly and agile alternatives. A headless CMS can integrate with best-in-class modern personalization technology to create a workflow in which your team can quickly and seamlessly create personalized experiences from within a single user interface.
See Personalization In Action: “Project CUE” by Contentstack, Uniform, and EPAM
With MACH technology and an agile mindset, personalization can be spun up in a matter of weeks. To prove it, Contentstack, Uniform, and EPAM teamed up for “Project CUE” — a real-life demonstration of agile personalization in action, conceptualized as a journey of planning an imaginary trip to Las Vegas. In less than one business quarter, the team identified a use case, developed a content model in Contentstack, added personalization with Uniform, and debuted the omnichannel experience live.
Keep scrolling to see the infographic that details how modern CMS combines with modern personalization technology to create content experiences that are anything but “random”.
