Personalize voice conversations based on geodata in Sitecore and Salesforce

While Sitecore enables marketers to deliver digital personalizations, S4S helps sales teams deliver personalized voice calls.

Research suggests 92% of marketers believe their customers expect personalized experiences. The recognized leader in personalization is Sitecore who has been delivering targeted content to website visitors for many years. Sitecore customers that also use Salesforce can leverage S4S to improve their sales effectiveness using the personalization data Sitecore has accrued. This post looks at using S4S with the Sitecore IP Geolocation Service.

Geolocation Examples

There is profit in knowing where your prospects are located. Geo-targeting is a way to deliver personalized web content to individual visitors based on the visitor’s location. This increases engagement and conversions. Real-world examples of this include:

• Offer deals to visit a branch store e.g. clearing stock surpluses from your Seattle store
• Invite visitors to a nearby event e.g. promoting an upcoming conference in Birmingham
• Render content that betters resonates with the locale and way of doing business. This recognizes that people speak different languages, have diverse cultures, and like to see information in familiar formats
• Render images that convey a homegrown feeling – portraying the business as being part of the visitor’s community e.g. an image of the Rockies may work better for a Denver visitor
• Share shipping and tax information specific to a country e.g. recognize local tax policies
• Personalize offerings based on the local climate or hemisphere e.g. sell raincoats in winter
• Identify the visitor's time zone and personalize based on day and night e.g. determine if overnight delivery is required

Sitecore is the ideal web content management system to implement geo-targeting. The IP Geolocation Service can identify the location data then Sitecore’s rules-based personalization engine can deliver the geo-divergent content. You could stop right there, or bring Salesforce into the picture and really start having real fun!

Factoring in Salesforce

Showing geodata in Salesforce lead or contact records provides valuable sales intelligence. It determines who in the sales team is best to respond, when, and which language to use. Operators can plan their sales calls better, like talking about location events, knowing the proximity of a nearby store, or confirming the lead address is where they are calling from.

Populating Salesforce

So how can you populate Salesforce with the geodata from Sitecore? New and existing Salesforce records need to be tied to a lead's Sitecore contact record so the full wealth of geodata can be pushed to Salesforce using S4S. There are three ways to approach this:

Webform: Website visitors complete a lead form. S4S creates or updates a Salesforce lead with the:

• Web form fields
• Sitecore AliasID (to tie the visitor records together in both systems)
• Geodata and other Sitecore analytics

Email: The lead is sent a campaign email that invites them to visit the website. The link in the email has a URL parameter with an identifier that is present in the Salesforce lead record. When the recipient clicks the link:

• The website opens and S4S reads the identifier
• S4S uses the identifier to find the matching Salesforce lead record then updates the record with the Sitecore AliasID

Scheduled Task: A one-time Sitecore task is used to iterate through every Sitecore contact record and, using a matching field (like email address), finds all the corresponding records in Salesforce. S4S then bulk updates the matching records in Salesforce with the Sitecore AliasIDs.

All three options populate the Salesforce lead record with the matching Sitecore AliasID. This links individuals in both systems. To ensure Salesforce is kept up to date, S4S provides a Sitecore scheduler to regularly push the geodata to Salesforce.

Power to the Sales Team

We've looked at getting geodata into Salesforce but the story does not end there. S4S also allows sales teams to personalize Sitecore. When a field is changed in a Salesforce lead, S4S can push the change to the matching Sitecore contact record. Sitecore rules can then re-personalize the website based on the new field value. This happens in real-time or when the lead returns to the website.

A sales manager, for example, after learning a prospect is located in Colorado, selects "Colorado" in the lead's State field. When the prospect visits the website, Sitecore renders the targeted content to the visitor.

Conclusion

S4S helps sales teams deliver voice call personalizations. The Sitecore IP Geolocation Service captures geodata which Sitecore uses to tailor web content based on demographics. This powerful feature increases prospect engagement and a useful data source for the sales team. Using S4S, this intelligence is passed to the Salesforce team where it plays an important role in sales conversations.

Other S4S features let you interact with website visitors in other ways. If you have questions about interacting with Salesforce data please contact us. It is, after all, what we do!