Personalization is a strong component of building engagement within your community. If the experience is exactly the same for everyone, you end up losing people. Too focused on the early stage of community engagement and you lose your experienced members. Too focused on those who are further along in their journey and you never fully onboard your new members.
Vanilla has an amazing ability to help you create these personalized journeys without having to overly segment your site.
Segmentation
Personalization all starts with segmentation. You have customers, but what information about your customers can help you meet their needs?
Roles
You likely have Admins, Members, and maybe Guests. But what about personas within your Members? Segments such as Advocates, Staff, Partners, Beta Testers, etc. can help you create an experience for each.
For example, try adding a discussion widget of unanswered questions that you can highlight to your staff or Super Users to get some help:
Ranks
You likely have a series of ranks created to help with your gamification strategy (think behavior driving strategy), but are you using these ranks to drive your customer experience as well?
The great news is that the New Layout Editor allows you to create widgets that are focused on specific roles and ranks. This means that instead of creating separate categories or even groups to help members move along the community journey path, you are able to create duplicate widgets with a focus on a specific segment.
This is especially beneficial for the following:
- Calls to Action – if you are looking at new members, one of the first ways to get them involved is adding a profile picture and participating in the Introduce Yourself post. Or maybe you allow guests to see a portion of your site. Maybe your CTA is an event that is open to non-customers.
- Knowledge Bases – if you have a KB for a specific segment of your membership, you can use the KB widget with the Conditions to surface that information easily
- Quick Links – create a tailored experience to help guide your members based on their level of experience. Help should be highly featured for new users, along with specific KBs, drafts, etc. Think about what a new member is likely to need help finding. Change the focus for those that are more senior members. Maybe add Q&A, Ideation, etc. And if you have specific segments, include links to their resources right there on the landing page
- Categories as a link – Another way to create a link to an area that helps with Categories widgets and the top level nav. This is a category that doesn’t exist in the traditional sense but allows you to create a category and add a redirect URL. This can help create an experience based on things you want for specific roles.
- Events – although many might be targeted at your entire membership, you may have times where an event is specific for a particular group (early access members, advocates, prospects, partners, etc.).
- Unanswered Questions -
It is all about making it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.
**When setting up any segmented widget, be sure to scroll down to the Conditions area of the set up and target that first rank (or if you have a new member role, be sure to include that as well)
