How a rules engine supercharges personalisation
At Pixl8 we spend the vast majority of our time building sites which have large degrees of personalisation. This is largely driven by the number of membership associations we work with, and that these organisations really want to deliver the most engaging experience possible for their users.
At the heart of delivering a relevant or personalised experience is data and comparatively membership organisations are strong at knowing their users and recording information about them, whether that is the level of membership or areas of special interest. Whether of course, they are able to use that data with their website will depend on a number of factors - the quality of their CRM or back office systems and their chosen website platforms and provider capabilities.
Assuming that there is solid integration between the website and back office systems, it is common to use tags and flags within the CRM to flag content and allow the user to also identify their areas of interest or preferences using the same flags, this creates a single source of truth.
Whereas permissioning a page based on membership level or highlighting a resource based on a flagged specialist interest offers value and quite often we want to nudge users based on more advanced rules.
This is why at Pixl8 we believe a rules engine is the single most important component for personalisation.
Some examples
- "If the logged in user has recently had an email bounce or has marked a recent email as spam" → Show this content
- "If the user has booked to attend our upcoming conference" → Give them access to this special section of my website
- "If the user is due to renew in less than 30 days " → Show this visual reminder
- "If the user is visiting from outside the UK" → Prompt them to visit our section for international members
- "If the user filling in the form is a member" → Hide the questions we already know the answers to
By making a rich set of data available to the website around user profile and activity, rules are automatically generated based on the data relationships and then we provide a simple drag and drop rules engine. This enables us to focus our efforts on data rather than determining all the personalisation options up front and coding all the functionality. We can make these personalisations available in website content or to individual email recipients
We’re massively excited about rules we see it as the personalisation game changer, and like anything else in our preside platform, developers can code their own at lightning speed.
