The Importance of a Headless CMS in Achieving Personalization at Scale

We are all familiar with the term 'Personalization at Scale’, but each of us has a slightly different understanding of what that means. Most people associate personalization to understanding the customer’s individual preferences, real-time intent and purchase history and then programmatically scaling the delivery of tailored content to multiple touchpoints using sophisticated AI algorithms.  Although this may be the north star of personalization, the reality for most organizations is much more primitive.  The journey towards full-blown personalization actually starts with tailoring content based on basic factors such as location, current cart contents, previously purchased items, local events, weather and even explicitly stated preferences such as favourite store location.  The hyper-focus on understanding the customer often takes away the attention from 'Content,' the most vital component of personalization.

Content is what the customer consumes at the end of the day and unless you structure the content to be orchestrated at scale, it is impossible to achieve personalization at scale.  In scaling personalization efforts, marketers need to create unique content for a diverse set of customer contents such as the ones listed above, which is an often time-consuming process. Let’s ignore omnichannel for a second and focus on a single website for a single direct-to-consumer brand.  Let’s even forget about 1:1 personalization and start with the basics. Let’s talk about creating content that is tailored for multiple markets, languages, devices, local events and campaigns for a handful of customer personas.  In this article, I make the argument that personalization at scale requires structured and modular content, which is only possible with a headless CMS as opposed to conventional Web CMS.

Breaking it down: How structured content drives scalability

Content is anything that is consumed by the customer on a given touchpoint.  Traditionally, marketers think of content as something that gets displayed on a specific page on a website. Take a direct to consumer brand website for instance, with 100 pages, 3 languages, 5 geographies, 12 campaigns a year, and 10 customer types.  Using the traditional approach, you would end up with a whopping 216,000 unique pages that would need to be created and managed by your team.  That’s a lot of content to create, manage, govern, launch, and reason about.

Now, let’s try a different approach.  Let’s break down the pages into 10 reusable component types such as promotions, daily offers, header banner, blogs, videos, featured products, etc.  Even if you created a unique version of each of these reusable components for every language, geography, campaign and customer type, your math would look something like this:

Number of Reusable Components x Number of Languages x Number of Geographies x Number of Campaigns = 10 x 3 x 5 x 12 x 10 = 21,600 unique pieces of content. Even though this is a gross overestimation (as you would likely be able to reuse certain components across dimensions such as geography and customer type), this is already 10 times less than a page-centric approach.  Going from a page-centric view of the world to a modular approach is a paradigm shift and this is where a headless Content Management System (CMS) becomes crucial. It allows you to create modular, reusable content by separating it from the page or context it will appear on.  Companies like Contentful, Contentstack, Kontent.ai and Storyblok have mastered the art of creating and managing structured content.  

Content should describe itself, not when and where it should be displayed.

Apart from significantly reducing the effort required by your content creators and designers, you get the benefits of consistency and ease of management.  However, this also means that each reusable and structured content must describe itself with metadata and tags appropriately so that this content can be selected programmatically within a specific context.  Content should describe itself in a way that doesn’t create a 1:1 coupling with every customer segment, market, or campaign.  This approach discourages reusability and hence scalability of your personalization efforts.  Instead, the content should have self-describing tags such as:

Theme: Sale, Back-to-School, Holiday, Sustainability

Season: Summer, Winter, Fall, Spring

Imagery: Beach, Mountains, Cityscape, Forest, Dessert

Tone: Joyful, Inspiring, Relaxed, Urgent, Mysterious

Inclusivity & Diversity: Gender Diversity, Racial & Ethnic Diversity, LGBTQ+ Representation, Disability Inclusion, Age Inclusivity

Color Scheme: Blue, Red, Green, Black and White, Pastels

…. And so on.

For instance, both US and UK have their summer at the same time, but Australia doesn’t.  Instead of creating separate content for each region, the marketing team may simply pick content items that are tagged as ‘summer’.

Rule-based vs. AI-powered Approach to Personalization

There are two ways to tailor content for a given context: Rule-based criteria and AI-Powered Recommendations.  Most of you will agree that organizations are not ready to give up 100% control to AI algorithms to decide what your customer should see for 100% of the content presented on your website (or any other channel).  What you want is to allow AI to decide what to show when you have sufficient behavioural data available and offer rule-based control in all other instances.  As AI's role in predicting customer behaviour grows, rich metadata on modular content becomes even more critical. It provides the necessary information for the algorithm to make a connection between customer attributes and content metadata.  For rule-based control, this metadata is just as critical.  The rules engine needs to be able to select content to display based on criteria specified by marketers, and this criteria is nothing but combinations of metadata and tags.

As the marketing landscape continues to evolve and customer expectations reach new heights, personalization is no longer a luxury but a necessity. At the heart of personalization-at-scale, lies content - it's the bridge that connects your brand to the customer. To scale personalization efforts effectively and efficiently, the adoption of a headless CMS is fundamental. However, it’s essential to not just adopt the technology but also embrace the philosophy it brings – making content modular, reusable, and self-descriptive with metadata and tags that can be used by both rule-based and AI-powered algorithms to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.