When do we use Personalize? Personalize has been with us for a while, but I feel like this question still comes up a lot but as we start talking about this, let’s make one thing abundantly clear…

Personalize ≠ XP Personalization

Personalize is NOT XP personalization.

It does not work in the same way and is not designed to achieve the end result in the same way. Even if the goal of both of these platforms is to personalize an experience for a user, the methods used differ greatly, and that’s what changes when, and how, we should use Personalize as compared to XP personalization.

Let’s take a deeper look…

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I want to be clear on something though. Both tools can do both jobs, content personalization and conversion optimization. But, they were built with different focuses in mind. Because of that, their strengths aren’t the same in each of these arenas. Personalize was built originally without Sitecore in mind. It was an acquired product which was then worked into the platform.

The primary distinction between optimization and personalization lies in their respective objectives. Optimization seeks to enhance the user experience for each website visitor. Personalization aims to tailor the experience to specific segments. This can sound like a language nuance at first, but the difference here can be seen more readily in the typical paths to each of these objectives; providing more/alternate CTAs vs. providing more personalized page content.

Personalizing at the level of an individual is much more daunting in classic XP if you’re doing page content personalization. You’d need to create data source variants for each possible scenario, whereas in Personalize you can utilize next-best recommendation engines to offload that.

Personalize might not be idea if you’re still thinking about personalization in terms of segments only. If you’re at a point where your personalization is targeted at each individual user, then Personalize is likely to be a great fit.

Experience Platform’s classic component personalization is better replaced with XM Cloud’s Pages personalization.

When Personalize shines

• Personalize works best when focusing on conversion optimization.
• Particularly powerful with multiple channels for conversion because of its client-side nature.
• Exceptionally useful for commerce organizations or other organizations with numerous conversions that can have a relatively low conversion time.
• Think about the most important conversions on your channels (site, app, etc.) and build user stories around and use cases for increasing those conversions using data.

When Personalize doesn’t shine

• If you’re having trouble thinking about where to surface more CTAs to the user, when, and based on what data.

And remember, if Personalize isn’t a good fit yet it’s very likely that XM Cloud’s out-of-the-box (OOTB) personalization will meet you needs perfectly.