Personalization is one of the hot topics these days, so it's time to show everybody how to walk the talk with an article to illustrate some very basic yet interesting cases of controlling (and personalizing) website content using FlowStack.
Personalize landing pages
Let's start with a small example.
With the content builder we create a landing page which should act as a confirmation page for online hotel reservations. We want to say "Thank you", and at the same time try to upsell. That could involve having customer upgrade room (sea view, balcony, wifi..), include breakfast and so on.
Since FlowStack is built on the concept that "Customer is First Class Citizen", you are able to access the profile data anywhere, which proves very useful for not only the typical "Dear [FIRSTNAME]" but also for deciding which elements to show.
Create a new block with a call to action button "Save 10% on breakfast" linking to a page where customer could add the breakfast to his reservation.
Click settings for this block, click the segmentation tool and set a condition for showing the block (depending on the data model, it would be something like "profile.lastReservation.breakfastIncluded is false")
When the landing page is visited, it will show the "Save 10% on breakfast" if the condition is met by the visitor.
Orchestrate and personalize elements of any page of your web site
You can personalize your own website as well using the tracking scripts content method to insert or replace content in specific parts of your website. The content you create or define in FlowStack - It could be content created as a landing page, a web form or content retrieved from a service or feed, e.g. web shop products. Insert a short snippet on your website and use FlowStack to control what to show.
<script>
// Using the short hand version
fs('content','name_of_content','#content_container');
</script>name_of_content is the name of the content created in FlowStack.
#content_container is the id of the element you want to insert the specified content into.
Going Crazy
We couldn't resist playing around, and (in our heads at least) created a small website using FlowStack as a CMS
Create an index file on your server
/**************
* index.html *
**************/
<div id="content_container"></div>
<script>
$(document).on('click','*[data-page]',function(){
fs('content',$(this).data('page'),'#content_container');
});
fs('content','homepage','#content_container');
</script>
Create a few landing pages in FlowStack
/**************
* homepage *
**************/
<h1>This is my index page</h1>
<div data-page="help">Help</div><div data-page="next">next</div>/***************
* help *
***************/
<h1>This is my Help page</h1>
<div data-page="homepage">Home</div>/***************
* next *
***************/
<h1>This is page 2</h1>
<div data-page="homepage">back</div>AdTech meets MarTech
If you're already using a DMP for segmentation (Read: Adding preset and custom categories and weights to visitors) you could easily attach that data to your profiles and get the benefits of a Customer Data Platforms possibilities for personalization, using api for relating visitor id from a DMP to FlowStack visitor id and then to FlowStack profiles.
You're probably already used to getting your hands dirty using javascript to call services to grab relevant content to show based on categories, so the following might look both familiar and convenient.
Since speed is crucial for deciding what to show and actually show it, you could setup segments in FlowStack and use the tracking scripts method to show which segments the visitor belongs to.
fs('get_segments', function (segmentsIds) { // Here you would retrieve the content to show and show it console.log('Profile belongs to segments: ' + segmentsIds); }) FlowStack R&D is playing in the alpha sandbox, and already got some very promising results. Decision to show content could easily be made this way in less than 30ms, so we're aiming for ad server performance on the release of this feature.
Request time
Why use a CDP like FlowStack for personalization?
The whole point of the CDP is to act as the marketers database. With the principle of Customer is first class citizen and the possibility to orchestrate from the marketers platform, it empowers marketing to "do more" on it's own.
We certainly know there are many roles within marketing, and more roles will come in the future. As I wrote in the intro to this article "It's time to show how to walk the talk". The talk in the thin high air is mostly walked by others with hands on experience of platforms - the doers. Hopefully you all see the benefits of being able to do more.