Beyond segmentation: Expanding personalization on Contentful dot com

When we launched personalization on the Contentful website, we weren’t trying to build the world’s most sophisticated personalization engine. 

We had plenty of ideas about what we wanted to personalize and how we wanted to implement those experiences. But the goal was always to keep things simple: Use only Contentful’s built-in capabilities and get the work done without adding complexity to our workflows, leaning on developers, or relying on third-party stats and data. 

And (spoiler alert) we did it. We stood the program up on simple, impactful personalized experiences and got great engagement results — not least a 195% increase in conversion on our homepage hero banner. 

But we didn’t want to stop there. The small steps we’d taken and the big wins we’d achieved with Contentful gave us momentum. We were ready to do more with our integrated personalization tools and push the experience variants further along the funnel.

So here are the personalization strategies that we implemented to build on our foundation — keeping the same simple, streamlined, agile approach that had worked so well before. 

Contentful Personalization

Flexible personalization made for marketers. Connect your data and content, test, and launch faster without sacrificing brand consistency.

1. Persona-based personalization

We had created homepage variants for our “first-time visitor” and “returning customer” segments. Now we wanted to go deeper into the site with variant experiences focusing on our personalization product itself: Contentful Personalization. 

Naturally, we wanted to target our key personas: marketers and developers. Our own insight — based on first-party data and site-generated tracking — helped us understand these personas’ expectations and goals, and we decided to focus on experiences that spoke to how our product solves their specific pain points.

The marketer experience

For marketing personas, we kept the product page messaging aspirational, clear, and intuitive. Marketers see a personalized header, a CTA to “Contact sales,” a lively, embedded video with voiceover, and a carousel emphasizing key marketer pain points: autonomy, brand consistency, and optimized testing. 

The developer experience

For developers, the personalization product page evokes technical possibilities and platform architecture. 

The first thing visitors see is an animated, coding-themed banner: typed code scrolling in the background with a playful nod to the magic of personalization.  

The text on the banner emphasizes platform capabilities, the CTA reads “View plans,” and the secondary CTA encourages developers to “View documentation.” 

Below, the pain point carousel highlights Contentful’s APIs, SDKs, and enterprise-ready infrastructure. It also emphasizes the accessibility of the platform, which frees devs to work on personalization without having to support non-technical teams. 

Both variants include a “toggle” that allows marketers and developers to quickly switch between experiences — effectively letting them peek under the hood for a direct meta-demonstration of the personalization in action. 

Results

In the first week of going live, the persona-focused personalization delivered a 63% month-over-month increase in sales inquiries via Contentful.com form submissions. 

2. Geolocation-based personalization

There’s value in getting the right message to the right place, so we wanted to explore the possibility of personalization based on customers’ location in the world. 

Contentful hosts live, regional events all over the globe — events such as our Contentful at the Cinema series, where customers get to see exclusive premieres for movies like F1 and Wicked. 

To promote those events to site visitors in the relevant localities, we started thinking about how their associated content experiences should be delivered. As you might have guessed, highlighting an event to a customer on the wrong side of the world, or any location too far away to feasibly attend, would create friction and actually have the opposite effect of what we were trying to achieve. 

But we could use Contentful to solve that problem. 

We leveraged first-party location signals generated by the platform to vary global event messaging on a hyper-local, city-by-city basis. 

For example, when we wanted to push registrations for our F1 movie event in specific cities (like Seattle, Boston, Austin, and Chicago) compared to others, we triggered targeted announcement banners on our homepage directly for visitors in those exact metropolitan areas. 

Results

Our geolocated personalization to local users drove a 51% rise in event registrations for targeted events compared to non-targeted ones.

3. Industry-based personalization

Personalizing by industry gives brands a way to create direct B2B appeal, and demonstrate immediate relevance to buyers who may be searching for options in a crowded marketplace. 

Industry-based personalization requires marketers to collect and activate firmographic data, which, essentially, is information about business attributes: industry, company size, revenue, location, and so on. 

We used Demandbase to detect a visitor’s region and industry and then used that data to personalize the hero, showing a message relevant to their industry along with recognizable customer stories from their region.

Here are some examples of the personalization in action.

Technology industry, North America

Consumer Packaged Goods industry, EMEA

Results

Industry-based personalization has only recently launched, so it’s a little too early to report on results. We’ll update when we have them. 

Master personalization with Contentful

Contentful Personalization was created to let anyone on your team stand up a personalization program without having to do any heavy technical lifting. To make that process even easier, Contentful Learning Services has launched a Personalization certification series. 

Users learn how to build, launch, measure, and improve personalized digital experiences using Contentful, with courses on identifying marketing opportunities, defining audience segments, running experiments, and scaling for multiple campaigns.  

Take your first (or next) step

Whether you’re ready to spin up a new experience variant or want to work through our educational resources to perfect your skills, Contentful is a personalization launchpad. 

But the point to take away here is that you really don’t need extensive complex, personalization infrastructure to deliver business results. There’s so much value in that first step: the alternative CTA, the reworded headline, the swapped image. 

Contentful makes it easy to discover and realize that value by showing you clearly what’s resonating with your audience, and then helping you create the experience that serves them. 

Let’s get started. Reach out to our sales team and arrange a platform demo.

Take a tour

Chat with our team

Your experiences should wow, not wait. Let's talk.