Customer data management

Kentico Xperience allows you to capture data about your visitors and customers, turn the data into actionable insights, and create custom-tailored experiences across all the different marketing channels. The platform comes with a set of fully integrated tools to leverage your customer data: you can send personalized newsletters and marketing emails, individualize the visitor experience on the website or automate processes, all while staying compliant with data protection regulations.

Customer data in Kentico Xperience

Kentico Xperience gathers information about activities both anonymous and registered or subscribed visitors perform on the website.

You can track campaign results, analyze your customers’ behavior and identify potential buyers. Using built-in tools or integrating third-party Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine learning (ML) solutions, you can segment your contacts into groups. With the contact groups, you can then optimize any content on the website or in emails into highly relevant messages that will resonate with your customers.

The Data protection functionality in Kentico Xperience helps you stay safe within the boundaries of data protection regulations in any marketing‑related actions.

In general, you don’t need to integrate other tools to send emails or test-optimize your content. Here are some ideas of what you can do with the collected customer data by using out-of-the-box features:

• Adapt website content based on your customer preferences and increase your customer engagement.
• Send personalized, relevant messages based on what your customer purchases.
• Trigger automated processes to qualify your prospects into leads.
• Recommend relevant content and products using integration with AI/ML solutions.
• Remind contacts about their abandoned shopping cart.
• Segment your audience to serve the most relevant content.
• Organize your customers based on which personas they most fit.
• And many more.

How customer data in Kentico Xperience works

Website visitors are recognized as contacts and you can manage them in the Contact management application. 

From the very moment visitors agree with tracking on the website, the system starts collecting information about them and their activities into their contact profile. Your contact profiles give you an overview of the customer journeys, their names, emails, addresses, their searches, orders, purchases, and much more.

Contacts are identified by their email addresses. Kentico Xperience will always try to match and log all activities done by a specific contact, even when the contact performs the activity on a different device (e.g. when opening emails on their mobile phones).

Kentico Xperience allows you to integrate other tools, such as your CRM, and turn Kentico Xperience into a customer hub for all your marketing activities.

Try tracking a contact for yourself

1. Open the Contact management application in one window and the website in an incognito window.
2. In the incognito window, click the I agree button in the consent banner to agree with tracking.
3. Click the Contacts tab to refresh your contact list in the Contact management application.
4. In the list of contacts, click the Created column header to reorder your existing contacts from newest to oldest.
   • You can see your new contact that the system created. The new contact’s name is Anonymous - (timestamp).
5. Click the View () button next to the contact to open the contact profile and switch to the Activities tab.
6. Perform some activities in the incognito window for your contact. Here are some examples: Visit Articles, visit Coffee Beverages Explained article, Cafés page, submit a form, e.g., on the Contact page, etc.
7. Switch to the window where you have the administration interface and click the Activities tab to update the data.
   • You can now see what activities Kentico Xperience tracked.
8. Switch to the contact’s Profile tab and see that your contact is no longer anonymous.

Contact segmentation

Whatever you learn about the contacts, from their data, content preferences, or different activities, you can further use to shape the experience of your customers. There are different places where you can apply what you know about your contacts, for example, on your website, in automation processes, or in your email messages. 

You can use built-in features such as Contact groups to create specific segments and improve the customer experience by targeting these groups. The Scoring application helps you spot promising leads. And the Personas application will help you shape your customer experience around your customer avatars.

Let’s take a look at creating contact groups.

How contact groups work

Contact groups help you dynamically create segments based on your contact’s psychographic or behavioral attributes, such as age, gender, interests, purchase behavior, or their lifecycle stage. 

The Contact groups application organizes existing contacts. An individual contact can be a member of any number of contact groups.

You can create your contact groups manually or use built-in conditions to fill your groups dynamically. In the latter case, Kentico Xperience evaluates contacts on the website and in the database and automatically adds every contact that matches specified conditions to the group.

Here are a few examples of groups in which you can organize your contacts:

• Contacts that are interested in specific products.
• Contacts that submitted specific forms on your website.
• Contacts to target in seasonal campaigns.
• Contacts who came to your store.
• Contacts that share the same characteristics, e.g., of the same age group.
• Contacts with a similar sales-readiness level.
• And many more.

Creating a contact group

You can create as many contact groups as you want.

Specify contact group conditions

Kentico Xperience comes with a built-in macro condition designer and many rules out-of-the-box. You can combine these rules to define precise conditions. They will help you break up your audience into highly relevant segments and ensure your messages will resonate. If the built-in rules don’t match your use cases, ask your developers to create custom ones.

Try it for yourself

Let’s include everybody who submitted the Coffee sample list form into a contact group.

1. Switch to the Contact groups application and Edit () the Prospective clients contact group.
2. Select the Condition-based contact group checkbox.
3. Click the Edit button next to the Macro condition field.
4. In the Edit macro condition dialog window, search for the macro called Contact has submitted specified form in the last X days and double click it to add it to the macro condition designer.
5. In the macro condition designer, click the select form parameter and specify the Coffee sample list from the drop-down list.
6. Click Save & Close button in the Edit macro condition window.
7. In the contact group, click the Save button.
8. Click the Rebuild contact group button.
   • Kentico Xperience filters the contact database and adds every contact that passes the condition to the group.

Whenever a contact fulfills the condition, Kentico Xperience will include it in the group. How can you test it?

1. Open your website in an incognito window and click the I agree button to allow tracking.
2. Navigate to your Coffee samples page (https://yourwebsitedomain/coffee-samples), and submit the form at the bottom of the page.
3. In the Contacts groups application, open the Prospective clients contact group.
4. Switch to the Contacts tab and use the filters above the contact list to check the contact you have tested.

Conclusion

You’ve learned about the different ways Kentico Xperience helps you collect customer data and segment your audience into contact groups. Learn about other segmentation options, data privacy, and other digital marketing scenarios in our training course for editors and marketers, or continue with the Business tutorial.

If you’ve seen all pages of the Business tutorial, see what Next steps you can take in mastering Kentico Xperience.