In this post we will focus on Initate Stage which is Stage 1 of Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model. It is a first stage of “Attract” phase.
What does it mean to be on “Initiate stage”?
I will start here with the definition from “Connect” book.
In the Initiate stage, organizations use a ‘brochure site’ presence on the web with email campaign capabilities and web analytics
In other words everyone is on this stage as long as has a website – especially when you have Sitecore. The second background of it, is the fact that you probably focus on your products/services rather than on your clients. You use email campaigns to inform clients about new items in store or just about promotions.
Because you still do not know your customer you send the same information to all your customers – it means that some of them can treat your marketing messages as a SPAM – it is bad. You will learn later about possible improvements.
It is worth to mention That companies which are in the first stage usually we do not exist on social channels and Their websites are not mobile friendly.
Analytics
In Sitecore you have built in analytics features and even more because you have xDB which can provide you more information about your users than for example Google Analytics.
Many companies have decided to use Google Analytics parallel with Sitecore xDB and others analytics tools – it is not a bad idea because many tools provides different scope of features. It is good to know and understand how tools can complement each other.
Here you can read valuable article about it: click
If you are in initiate phase you probably only gather traffic data with Google Analytics and you maybe have installed xDB but you do not try to identify and know better your customers.
What is possible? Check videos on this website: click
Email Campaigns
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post – you use emails as a way of communication with your customers. From time to time you send bigger campaigns. You can use external mass mailing providers or Sitecore builtin Email Experience Manager (EXM – click for more information).
You should noticed that at this point you send the same messages to all your clients. For example if your products are clothes you will send promotion with bow-ties to all woman and man in your database – it is not a good way of selling – you should start think about segmentation and send different personalized messages for different groups of people.
At some point you will notice that there is a lot of work to do, when you have to work on segments manually – you can change that with Sitecore.
What I have to do to move to the next stage?
Next step for you is “Stage 2 – Radiate”. In next blog post I will describe details but for now you should be aware that you need a change.
Before you will move faster you have to be there where your customers are, so your website should be correctly displayed on mobile devices and you have to exist on Social Media channels because in the future you will use data gathered from them.
Please keep in mind that this article is just an overview - later, in next articles or in brand new series I will prepare "deep dive" into digital maturity. Stay with me, on my blog and learn more together!