Your closest relationship is with your phone

It’s the last thing you look at before going to bed. The first thing you see in the morning. You can’t keep your hands off it. It “engenders feelings of great affection while demanding intense closeness.”

It’s not your spouse or paramour, or even your pet dog. It’s your mobile phone.

Embrace your lover

As breathlessly revealed in “Meet the Screens,” an in-depth study released in October 2011 by Microsoft Advertising and the ad agency BBDO:

“Consumers have the most personal and intimate relationship with their mobile phone screen…. The relationship is one that’s just beginning and is flush with all the promise and excitement of a new love affair… Regardless of age, consumers’ closest [relationship is with their] mobile phones, across the board. A lover is a lover!”

Lover, indeed! The Parent Network reports that 12% of moms say they will even use their mobile device while in flagrante delicto. No further details were provided.

How marketers can share in the love

It’s not easy for marketers to create a love triangle with consumers and their mobile devices.

The Lover is the most informed, the most demanding, and the most sensitive. There’s a trust not to be broken. Because of this, consumers are least receptive to receiving advertising via their mobile phones. They don’t want advertisers to violate their lover. They don’t want mass and crass intruding on their relationship.

Which is not to say they’re totally against commercial content on their mobiles. It’s just that their expectations are much higher.

This eBook will show you how Sitecore helps marketers to meet such lofty expectations. With Sitecore solutions, you can weave the mobile channel into intimate digital conversations that can be analyzed and targeted in a highly personalized way.

Talk to me — and coupon me

Sitecore lets you weave the mobile channel into digital customer conversations

Every marketer knows that the mobile channel is exploding with new possibilities for customer engagement. But mobile is still just a single thread in the rich digital conversations that customers have with the organizations and brands they love.

This kind of integrated, multi-touchpoint customer experience has always been the “holy grail” of marketing. Today, delivering it matters even more.

Email: The pivotal connection

Perhaps surprisingly, everyday email is the conduit that links mobile users into an extended marketing conversation.

Email readership on mobile devices accounts for 30% of all opens, up from 10% a few years ago. Year-over-year (between March 2011 and March 2012), email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4%. It’s the same story on tablets—email readership on the iPad has grown quickly, up 53% in March 2012 over the previous year.

Sitecore allows marketers to easily interpret individual web visitors’ activities and connect them with behavior‐based emails that, in turn, link to real-time conversion via mechanisms like a QR code.

Real-world engagement

With Sitecore, you can easily create a personalized, multi-channel interaction that looks like this:

• • Let’s say your company sells energy drinks. A prospect saw a bus shelter poster promoting a new sports drink, and used her smartphone to scan the QR code on the poster.
• Later that day, the Sitecore system generates a follow-up email containing a link to the energy drink’s mobile microsite. On her smartphone, the prospect opens the email, goes to the microsite and activates a 50% off coupon.
• The microsite generates a 50% off coupon, using her phone’s geolocation information to direct her to the nearest convenience retailer.
• The promotion also gives the prospect the option to post her purchase as a status update on Facebook, so she can tell her friends she’s trying the new drink.

Engage with me

Personalize the mobile conversation

In the mobile medium more than anywhere, personalization matters. The success of any mobile marketing campaign heavily depends on it.

If you want to engage consumers through the relationship they have with their phones, you need to speak with them, intimately. Sitecore’s personalization capabilities let marketers target individual users with content that can make them swoon.

It starts with a fingerprint

The Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform makes personalization a natural and intuitive part of the content production process. It lets marketers easily configure a wide range of campaign landing pages, emails or other mobile site elements (such as site-wide calls to action, videos, sidebars, etc.) to deliver personalized content.

These personalization capabilities start with the moment a visitor arrives on the mobile site; the Sitecore solution immediately catalogs key “digital fingerprint” information including:

• Language
• Device
• GeoIP via wireless networks
• Geolocation (opt-in)
• Referral
• Campaign
• Keywords
• City
• Region
• Time

The digital fingerprint plays a key role in finding the exactly the right places to maximize interaction, focusing content to engage the mobile visitor and drive the desired visitor outcome.

Personalization without programming

Sitecore’ Customer Engagement Platform makes personalizing content easy — no programming required. Most of the process involves analyzing customer needs and establishing personalization scenarios. The Sitecore solution senses the mobile visitor’s needs based on their behavior or digital body language and adapts the presented information accordingly.

We call this capability Predictive Personalization. You’ll call it awesome.

Analyze this

Pinpoint the love with Sitecore Analytics

Analytics go hand-in-hand with personalization. Sitecore Engagement Analytics help you to intimately understand the interests and behaviors of customers and prospects — essential for relationships conducted via the mobile channel.

The more you know about them, the more they can love you.

And it gets even better. Sitecore Engagement Analytics can help you give all mobile visitors a better experience the next time they visit your site.

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Don’t shrink — rethink

The mobile websites people fall in love with aren’t shrunken-down versions of traditional sites. Because mobile web user requirements are different, mobile search engine behaviors are different — and so is mobile web activity.

To entice visitors to fall in love with your mobile site, you must understand the mobile-specific search phrases and categories the audience is using, and optimize your content around these terms. You can use Sitecore analytics to:

• Deliver in-context, in-time information about visitors as they progress through your mobile site
• Capture rich insights into your customers and their interests with native content profiling
• Quickly identify changing preferences and adjust content in real-time for a personalized mobile experience
• Verify and tune your messages for different customer groups and help them progress along highly desired site paths
• Pinpoint the mobile experiences that produce the best results
• Increase conversions
• Respond immediately to market trends and adjust your marketing efforts quickly

The result: Instant insight and control. Which everyone wants in a relationship.

C1000 Supermarket

Customers love a mobile app for smart shopping

With 419 stores and over 32,000 employees, C1000 is one of the Netherlands’ fastest-growing supermarket chains. The company’s motto is “Being smart,” which it has translated into an online shopping environment that seamlessly integrates the company website, mobile apps and email marketing.

Created by Sitecore partner eFocus, C1000’s core mobile app, “MyC1000,” allows users to access all of their shopping lists, personal online cookbook and C1000 emails anytime, everywhere.

Order up!

The mobile app also includes a custom-designed ordering module that lets on-the-go C1000 customers order seasonal offers that can either be picked up in-store or delivered. The Gourmet service was launched during holiday 2011 and topped 10,000 orders within a week. For the summer, C1000 customers also love the BBQ service, another big hit

Living in the cloud

To make it easy for customers to use their mobile devices to connect with their personal myC1000 settings, every feature is stored and synced within the cloud.

Never a forgotten item

The applications are synced in real-time, so changes and modifications can be tracked, and be read while a user is updating their information. Recipes, products and special offers can be added at home, and directly read by someone else in the household who may be at the store. This real-time information makes shopping a shared, and far easier, experience.

National Health Service

So, how are you feeling?

When you think you’re sick, you call the doctor. But what happens if millions of people want to contact the doctor at the same time? In the UK, there’s an app for that.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Direct offers medical advice, information and reassurance to citizens online and over the phone. One of NHS’s strategic goals is to allow more people to assess their care needs autonomously, and be directed to appropriate support services across the NHS.

First online, then mobile

NHS Direct’s Symptom Checker online service has been a success since launch in 2008, providing crucial support during the flu pandemic in 2009. The service also reduces the number of calls into NHS call centres and associated costs.

The Symptom Checker was re-launched in 2010 on a Sitecore-based website, allowing the service to be brought to the mobile channel. Sitecore partner Fusionworkshop was brought on to ensure that users are guaranteed a consistent experience.

A cross-device solution quickly goes live

Because mobile web standards are still emerging, the team worked to a crossdevice solution. By choosing Sitecore CMS, NHS Direct was able to use different layouts for each channel (online and mobile). Sitecore’s built-in multirendering functionality allowed separate presentation layers to be used, speeding development in a multidevice environment.

Within weeks, a linearized version of the Symptom Checker was running on the chosen browsers, optimized for the smaller screen sizes and capabilities. The mobile experience was tested by independent usability experts across a range of handsets and received excellent feedback. The mobile version of the Symptom Checker was launched in October 2010— making NHS Direct poised and ready to help UK citizens on the go, wherever they may be.

The Brookings Institution

A think tank in your pocket

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., that knows what people love to talk about: politics and policy.

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Live on Sitecore since 2007, Brookings is consistently ranked as the most influential, most quoted and most trusted think tank. Its mobile apps, for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android, make it easier for Brookings devotees to catch up on the latest policy news on the go, beautifully. Brookings’ mobile apps were developed by Sitecore partner Velir.

Streamlined cross-channel publishing

Rather than add new systems to manage, Velir extended Sitecore to deliver mobile and cross‐ channel publishing to all of Brookings’s digital properties, leveraging the existing Sitecore content library. Here’s how they did it:

• Velir used a custom‐built API on top of Sitecore to send the content to the mobile optimized sites and native applications for the iPhone/ iPad, Blackberry, and Android. This gives users access, via their phones, to thousands of articles available on the main site.
• By integrating social media into the Sitecore solution, Velir now lets Brookings content authors simply check a box to publish out to Facebook and/or several different Brookings Twitter accounts. Twitter publishing also includes a custom URL shortener, brookin.gs, and the option to schedule the posting time of Tweets. All of these efforts keep Brookings in the hearts, and minds, of its global audience.

Multi-channel publishing from a single location

The enhanced site allows content to be created, edited, and stored in a single location, while published out to every digital channel. The mobile application has several integration points that Velir planned and executed:

• Integration with the YouTube API to display videos using the standard video player
• Integration with the standard “share” function on Android
• Integration with the devices’ built in maps, phone and email functionality

Willem II football club

A tablet magazine to watch the game with

Named in 1898 after the Dutch king, the Netherlands’ Willem II football (soccer) club enjoys the support of an ardent fan base. When the club decided to redesign its website in 2011, it teamed with digital agency and Sitecore partner Estate Internet to create what today’s football fans are asking for: an interactive online magazine.

A dynamic online magazine

“The redesign is based on an annual survey of the Dutch national football organization (KNVB),” says Alex Otten, Chief Executive Officer of Estate Internet. The survey concluded that fans are mostly searching for news about their favorite football club, and the main source of this news is the football team’s website. “This kind of usage, and the rise of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, convinced all of us that the new website should be an online magazine,” Otten says.

A tablet companion to the television

More images and impressions, readability and navigation were key factors that went into the design of the new Willem II site, which is optimized for tablets. “With the rise of tablets, we know that more people will be visiting the website in the evening on the couch,” Otten says. The navigation and layout were adopted for readability from a somewhat larger distance and with touch navigation.

“The site uses many professional photos, which help give it the feel of an online magazine,” he says. Otten adds that while Estate Internet has supported Willem II with strategic and editorial advice, one of the tablet site’s most useful features is that content managers at the football club can easily update the site on a daily basis.

Natural next steps: “Like” and tickets!

Finally, excited fans can do what comes naturally— sharing the love on Facebook and Twitter. Sharing, “Like” and follow links are sprinkled liberally throughout the site. Fans can also click directly to a ticketing ecommerce application, helping to meet another of the sites goals: stimulating ticket sales.

See how we run

Sitecore’s architectural advantage

With Sitecore, you can create websites for the iPhone, Droid, Blackberry and innumerable future mobile devices — in fact, any device — easily and efficiently.

Separating content from presentation

Sitecore CMS is architected to deliver “future-proof” support for any present or future device. It natively supports multi-device output, allowing any page or piece of content to be repurposed in any format.

By separating content from presentation, and using the concept of devices, Sitecore allows the same content to be easily presented in multiple formats for web browsers, mobile devices, search engines, printers and future devices.

Each content item, whether a product page, form or account screen, can be associated with any number of devices, and each device can trigger different layout and rendering components. Whether the demand is for multiple smartphone formats, printer-friendly layouts, RSS feeds, or XML, developers will love the fact there is no limit on the number of different devices and content layouts that can be deployed.

Presenting mobile content, in context

Sitecore provides a host of capabilities that not only serves up content, but also does so in context — playing to individual devices’ strengths, and optimized for mobile engagement. These capabilities include:

• Device-adaptive templates that can be configured for each supported device.
• Locale detection, which lets Sitecore serve up geography- and/or country-specific content.
• GPS awareness, which allows Sitecore to offer seamless functionality like “find my nearest coffee shop/gas station/etc.”
• Form factor awareness that automatically makes the navigation device-appropriate.
• Screen resolution awareness that manages layout and information flow.

With Sitecore solutions, you can be sure that no conversation thread is left loose or incomplete. We give you the power to speak the language of love, across all communication channels.