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THE REALITIES OF MODERN PERSONALIZATION

Sep 8, 2022

or: here's why we're bullish on the Stackbit+Ninetailed partnership

Anyone who’s worked with personalization knows that it’s great in theory, but
very difficult to succeed at in practice. Typically, there are both
organizational and technical factors at play, leading to friction and
frustration.

We can provide the guidance necessary for your personalization program to
achieve its goals, by contextualizing the conversation individually for each
stakeholder in your organization.


THE 2 BIGGEST CHALLENGES WITH PERSONALIZATION

Personalization for your website: Everyone says they’re doing it. Everyone says
you should do it, too. Your bosses want to see it happen. It’s money on the
table! Perhaps you’ve even tried to do it before.

And if you have, you know that it’s a labor-intensive process, fraught with
technical issues, and integrating personalization providers with your website(s)
is a pain. There are just too many moving pieces and frustrating constraints.

There are two main reasons this process is so challenging: the organizational
push and tech woes.


THE ORGANIZATIONAL PUSH

There’s no denying that it takes a tremendous amount of effort for a
personalization program to materialize. You may be able to swing your first few
wins easily, but only with significant help from the personalization vendor.
Eventually, the reality of the massive effort required will sink in.

To be successful, you need to be creative, take risks, and be willing to
coordinate and sell your initiatives with multiple stakeholders, many of whom
may not be fully engaged until they see hard proof of the ROI (a classic
Catch-22). And sometimes, a promising test will just fail to show the meaningful
results you’ve been hoping for.


THE TECH WOES

The prosaic technical reality of implementing personalization often conspires
against successful execution.

Often, it’s page performance and annoying visual artifacts that suffer as a
result of integrating a personalization tool. Then there are also browser
constraints and new regulations to consider. And of course, there could always
be (and usually is…) something incorrectly wired in the implementation.

The classic approach of client-side personalization did have its upside: once
you’ve injected that pesky JavaScript file onto your site, you’re relatively
free to create and preview personalized experiences. It was never a completely
smooth integration, but it kinda worked.

But, while the emergence of APIs and web frameworks helped solve many of the
technical and performance issues, the actual user experience of creating and
maintaining personalized experiences has taken a big step backwards.


IMPLEMENTING PERSONALIZATION DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A POWER PLAY

Content Ops (marketing, digital, and personalization teams) usually get the raw
end of technical tooling. As a result, many of these folks have become too
skeptical to believe that a better experience is possible. While developers tend
to be vocal and picky, content folks often make do with mediocre tools.

This imbalance leads to friction among these internal groups, which can result
in a major reshuffling of tools any time one side (content vs. developers) gets
the upper hand.

I’ve seen it, and it’s not healthy. Personalization tooling decisions should
never be about who has more power.


CAN PERSONALIZATION REALLY BE DIFFERENT?

The short answer: Yes!

Even as we’re just starting down the path of what this collaboration can offer,
we’ve identified two primary areas of focus to address the challenges mentioned
above:

 * Provide a superior authoring experience: Velocity and independence to content
   creators should be considered table stakes. Just as it used to be with
   classic tools, but even better by leveraging current technological
   capabilities. Creating and editing experiences should be both visual and
   tightly integrated into the website’s content editing UI — not a bolted-on
   feature.

 * Maintain developer happiness: we must maintain (or ideally: increase) the
   developer experience of today’s personalization tools, which means providing
   minimal code requirements. Developers should never have to make code changes
   for each and every new personalized interaction. Developers don’t want that,
   and neither do editors.

Managing to keep both sides productive and happy means actually being able to
move from ideation to execution to iteration in short intervals, without ongoing
developer intervention.


NINETAILED PROVIDES THE PERSONALIZATION 

Ninetailed has honed in on what a personalization tool should do in a modern web
environment (and beyond) by providing a composable experience.

Admittedly, this word (composable) seems to be everywhere these days — all too
often in a vague context. In this context, the composability of Ninetailed
means:

 * Meet editors where they are: It should not make you learn yet another UI that
   you have to log into and use on a daily basis. It is better to integrate with
   established headless CMS systems.

 * Leverage established analytics tools: It should not try to have its own data
   collection and analytics silo. You’re going to be more trusting of the
   analytics tools you already use (and pay for), and should be able to continue
   to use these tools, even after adding personalization capabilities to your
   team.

 * Respond in real-time: It should be fast to respond and process user events in
   near-real-time, including merging profiles from multiple devices. When it
   comes to personalization, lags mean missed opportunities in a user’s session.

 * Provide an API-first service: It should have first-class APIs and SDKs so
   developers can make decisions and load data from anywhere. The more it stays
   out of your way, the more effective it is to your team.

These points mean that Ninetailed can focus on the core tasks of a better
personalization product, while not getting bogged down by complex peripheral
tasks that other tools in your stack are already dedicated to providing. As an
added benefit, this also translates to Ninetailed’s ability to offer competitive
pricing.


STACKBIT BRINGS THE CONTENT EDITING EXPERIENCE

At Stackbit, we’re ultra-focused on balancing the quality of life for both
content ops and dev teams. We do this by providing a world-class editing
experience for content ops, while allowing developers to bring their own stack.

Let’s explore how the combination of Stackbit and Ninetailed provides an
optimized experience for both content ops teams and developers.


MAKING PERSONALIZATION CHANGES IN CONTEXT AND IN REAL-TIME

This integration brings Ninetailed’s capabilities straight into Stackbit’s
visual editor. Instead of editing in a CMS interface (which can be intimidating
and confusing) and waiting long periods of time for changes to appear in some
internal environment, the effect of a personalization-driven content change is
immediate — you see exactly what you’re doing as you’re doing it.

The video below shows this process in action.




THE DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

For developers, enabling this integrated experience is easy and unobtrusive to a
website’s code. And it is enabled in the same way across any component using
personalized content.

In the example Next.js (React) site used in the demo above, we made enabling
personalization for a component as easy as wrapping the component code in a
withPersonalization helper. (View the source code on GitHub.) You could also
roll your own for any other web framework.


THE NEXT GENERATION OF PERSONALIZATION ON THE WEB

We’re confident that we can provide concrete guidance on the challenges of
personalization for the multiple stakeholders in your organization.

We understand the jobs to be done for each team. And we’re used to working with
organizations in the process of a major overhaul of team structure, a massive
tech stack retooling, or (often) both.

We’re ready to be partners on your journey.

Elad Rosenheim


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