Most businesses dream about attracting 100% of customers’ attention online, mastering hacks, tactics, and even hard-hitting technical setups. Moreover, organizations frequently develop numerous websites to engage with different customers. Within Salesforce, however, everything’s much easier; you can have just one site and still provide super-targeted experiences. This is when personalization enters the fold.
In this article, I shed light on personalization in Salesforce Experience Cloud. For your convenience, I also added how-to guidance, tips, and tricks you can try on the fly. Are you ready to unlock personalization for your Experience Cloud site?
What Is Personalization in Salesforce Experience Cloud?
Personalization is the heartbeat for organizations striving to cater to varying customer demands and interests. Being a standalone, out-of-the-box feature for Salesforce Experience Cloud, it revolutionizes the ways users perceive the content and how this content looks on a site page.
To give you clear context, imagine you own a channel sales business, use a Sales Cloud PRM, and have a partner portal built on top of Salesforce. Consequently, you have three partners that you would like to interact with and assist. However, you run just one site on Salesforce. So what’s the solution?
With Experience Cloud personalization, you can customize three completely different versions of one site, without a single string of code. Speaking the Salesforce language, you have a splendid opportunity to target specific audiences with clicks-not-code.
Using Personalization in Salesforce Experience Cloud in 7 Ways
1. Craft Personalized Experiences With Experience Cloud Templates
Once you start building your site on Salesforce, you can choose from a selection of pre-built templates or develop one on your own to suit your specific business needs. There is a rich assortment of templates in the Creation Wizard, such as:
- Microsite (LWR)
- Build Your Own (LWR)
- Help Center
- Customer Account Portal
- Customer Service
- Build Your Own (Aura)
- Partner Central
- Aloha
- Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce
How to Set It Up
If you don’t have an Experience Cloud site yet, let’s create one! From Setup in your Salesforce org, find Digital Experiences → Settings. In there, select Enable Digital Experiences. After that, click New. The next step is “choosing the Experience you love”, which is picking an Experience Cloud template, activating it, and configuring it to your liking.
2. Adjust a Site’s Theme
A theme on an Experience Cloud site is what gives it a distinctive look and feel. It defines content regions of your site, containing the main components: a header, footer, navigation, and user profile menu.
In the theme department, you can apply colors, fonts, the company’s logo, and other images so that your site matches your brand, and, more importantly, the right audience (we’ll talk about it in a moment). In essence, it has everything needed to create a branded experience for site visitors and keep them engaged.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Given that Salesforce offers an array of pre-built, mobile responsive themes for the next level of customizing and fine-tuning an Experience Cloud site, you can play around with them as you see fit – your content won’t be affected and you can change the theme any time. Some of the different themes are:
- Ember: Content-centric theme with a full-width hero section and responsive design.
- Cypress: Minimalistic aesthetic with a call-to-action button in the hero section for a better content experience. Plus, there are two layout versions for homepage and unpretentious site pages.
- Stella: Content-heavy theme where content is put front and center.
- Webster: Search-forward theme, featuring a search box on the homepage and a simple header for other pages.
- Jepson: Modern and content-forward theme, much like Stella.
- Citizen: Visually appealing theme for your bold business goals with an image-centered homepage element and a prominent header.
- Customer Service: Default theme for a site with customer service capabilities in mind.
How to Set It Up
In Experience Builder’s left dashboard, go to Theme → Change Theme. That’s it! It’s your call which theme to apply – feel free to comb through the collection and make your choice. Even if the decision changes in the future, you can simply opt for another theme, without altering the site’s content.
3. Play Around With Branding Sets
Branding sets in Experience Builder is an entry-level personalization that controls three main things: a company’s logo, color scheme, and fonts. This setup helps you rethink your site’s visual appeal and dynamically change its style, slipping it into the overall brand image.
Thus, you can develop and use multiple branding sets for just one site. Each set represents a gallery of colors and other elements you can tweak to suit different audiences. That is why branding sets are tied up to certain segments or audiences of your site.
How to Set It Up
In Experience Builder, go to Theme → Manage Branding Sets on the left panel (the arrow button next to X). From there, you can either edit, duplicate, or rename the default branding set that comes with the given template (1), or create a new one from scratch (2).
4. Set Up Audience Targeting
Do you remember that PRM site example at the beginning of this article? With audience targeting, keeping three partners engaged with personalized and relevant content is simplified – let me elaborate on this one.
In Salesforce, you can create an audience – a way to define certain criteria to segment the users who are visiting your site. Thanks to this feature, you can customize the site and display different pages, data, and components to different audiences. To move this personalization train further, you can assign audiences to page variations.
Page variations allow you to display users various versions of the same page, such as a homepage, a record detail page, etc. For instance, your partners are located in North America, Europe, and Asia. Instead of building an individual site for each region, you just craft its region-specific versions. After that, you assign audiences based on geographic locations and apply them to each version.
How to Set It Up
As with almost anything in Experience Cloud, you can tweak page variations and assign audiences to them in a few clicks. Enter Experience Builder and choose the page you want to create variations for → Page Settings.
Under the Page Variations tab, click the New Page Variation button (1). Here you can choose a preconfigured page or start with a blank page. Give it a name, and hit Create.
Once you’re all set with a page variation, specify the audience who sees it by hitting the Manage Audiences button. You can create a new one or assign an already existing one.
For this article, I developed a homepage variation for partners located in California. When my site is published, an alternative homepage will be available for partners (audience) meeting the State/Province – California criteria.
5. Personalize Shared Regions
First things first, what are shared regions? These are header, hero, and footer sections shared across all pages in the theme layout. Any page that shares a theme layout inherits whatever changes you make in the shared regions. To override it, just create a new theme layout.
How to Set It Up
In Experience Builder, open the Page Settings → Properties → Layout. Here, you need to mark the Override the default theme layout for this page checkbox. The Theme Layout settings show up. As you choose the layout from the dropdown, you can personalize the regions of the page, making them one-of-a-kind for your audiences.
6. Create Groups By Interest on An Experience Cloud Site
If you always thought Salesforce was a strictly technological space, think again. Today, it’s a place where people can share their expertise, collaborate on projects, and form hyper-focused groups on an Experience Cloud site.
How to Set It Up
Building personalized groups on an Experience Cloud site is no rocket science. Here is an example of how to create a personalized group on an Aura site. First, enable groups on your site in Experience Builder by adding groups to the navigation menu. Just click the Theme Navigation Menu → Edit Default Navigation.
From here, you name a new menu item (Groups in our case), choose the Salesforce Object → Group, and make the item publicly available to let site visitors browse the list of active groups on your site. Do not forget to Save menu and Publish your changes.
Let’s see what we’ve got. As I navigate through my site, I see the Groups tab in the navigation menu. Once I click it, there is a Group list page with all the active groups. This is my next step, so let’s hit the New button.
Here I provide my group with a name and specific description and decide on whether to make this group public or private. I opted for the former option.
In a few clicks, I created a new public cyclists group and added a description with all the essential details. Plus, I can customize the group the way I want it and add new members to it! This is what a Group detail page looks like:
7. Download AppExchange Solutions
Being an indispensable part of personalization in Salesforce Experience Cloud, AppExchange solutions can drive your site’s user experience. You just have to pick the best one that aligns with your business requirements and lives up to users’ expectations.
How do you understand what exactly your customers want? By simply listening to what they say. Create user surveys, polls, or feedback sessions to realize where you can bridge the gap between your product or service and users’ needs.
How to Set It Up
Once you solved the mystery, go to the AppExchange marketplace and choose your booster solution. There is an ocean of apps, services, and expert insights that you can take to your advantage. Discover them and be ready to revamp your personalization strategy.
Summary
Personalization in Salesforce Experience Cloud offers sundry opportunities to tailor one site to various user segments’ needs. Everything hinges on your primary objectives. Create numerous audiences and page variations for your site, adjust its layout, change a color scheme, and shape groups by interest using Chatter.
To take user experience up a notch, consider Advanced Communities – a certified Salesforce consultancy and an app provider. Giving your Experience Cloud personalization efforts a boost is always a good idea!