Contact Management provides an overview of all visitors to your website, including their personal attributes and online behaviours. You can then use this data in a variety of ways, including launching marketing campaigns, analysing online behaviour, identifying potential customers and personalising content. Below are some of the more common questions we hear from clients – and have faced ourselves – in dealing with Contact Management in Kentico.
These FAQs cover the following areas:
- Contacts in Kentico
- Contact segmentation
- Setting up Activities, Attributes and Macro rules
- Further resources
Contacts in Kentico
Does Kentico recognise one contact on different devices?
If a visitor accesses your website from different devices (e.g. from their office and then from home), Kentico will not ordinarily recognise them as one contact. There are two exceptions to this. The first is where a contact has clicked on a link in an email you sent through Kentico (assuming you have correctly enabled link tracking). The second exception is where the visitor provides an email address on both devices. The system will then be able to recognise the visitor and and merge their information into one contact.
If I have two websites under one Kentico instance, do these instances share the same contacts?
No. Even where two websites are under the one Kentico instance, they do not share cookies. So if a visitor comes to one website, they will not automatically be recognised as a contact on the other site. The exception is where the visitor provides an email address on the first site and then provides their email address again on the second site.
Contact segmentation
Segmenting your audience lets you more accurately target your digital marketing efforts (e.g. through content personalisation or email marketing). There are two main options for segmenting your website’s visitors in Kentico: Contact Groups and Personas. The system also allows you to segment your audience with Scoring, which enables you to identify potentially valuable leads.
When should I use Contact Groups and when should I use Personas?
Personas represent typical user groups on your site and are assigned to visitors once they reach a defined points threshold (based on attributes and behaviours). As with Personas, Contact Group membership can be determined automatically based on the fulfilment of defined conditions, but you can also manually assign someone to a Contact Group (for example, if you collected business cards of potential leads at a conference you could manually assign them to a Contact Group).
The fundamental difference between Contact groups and Personas in Kentico is that a website visitor can only belong to one Persona, whereas they can be in multiple Contact Groups. So if you want to segment your audience into categories that may overlap (e.g. based on likely interest in particular product lines), you would be better off to use Contact Groups.
Contact Groups allow you to target very specifically defined user groups. For example, if you are running an event in Australia, you could send an email invitation only to contacts based in Australia; or if a new model of your product has just been released, you might want to send an email to people who have purchased the old model to let them know the new one is available.
By contrast, Personas are designed to capture more broadly-defined groups of potential customers. For example, a financial services organisation may use a range of attributes and on-site behaviours to classify visitors as ‘Young Professionals’, ‘Middle-aged with a Family’ or ‘Approaching Retirement’. Or an educational resources provider might segment visitors into ‘Teachers’ and ‘Students’.
What happens if a visitor reaches the points threshold for more than one Persona?
Normally, if your Personas are sufficiently distinct and well defined, this shouldn’t happen. However if it does, Kentico will assign the visitor to the Persona for which they have scored the highest percentage of the points threshold (e.g. if Visitor A scores 100% of the points threshold for Persona 1 and 150% of the threshold for Persona 2, they will be assigned to Persona 2).
What is an ideal number of Personas for a website?
The optimal number of Personas for your website will depend on your particular business model, but in most cases the recommended number is between two and five. You should also consider your available resources, as you will need to produce enough content for each Persona. It’s best to start with no more than three Personas and then if you want to add more, do this once you have a better understanding of your audience’s online behaviours.
Can I create rules in Scoring to deduct points?
Scoring is generally used to assign points to visitors who fulfill certain conditions that indicate their likelihood of becoming a valuable customer. However, Kentico also allows you to create rules that deduct points where someone has an attribute or performs an action that suggests they are not likely to be interested in further contact with your organisation (e.g. if they provide an invalid email address, or unsubscribe from your email campaigns). To set this up, you simply allocate a negative number for the score value. You can’t actually disqualify someone from the scoring process but if you really don’t want someone who fulfills a particular condition to qualify as a lead, you would just assign this condition a very high negative number (e.g. -1000).
Setting up Activities, Attributes and Macro rules
When setting up Personas or Scoring, how should I decide whether to use an Attribute, Activity or Macro?
Both Personas and Scoring in Kentico are set up through a rules-based points system. There are three types of rules available: Activities, Attributes and Macros. In a nutshell, Attributes are characteristics attached to a person (e.g. name, contact details, job title, gender), Activities are online behaviours (e.g. page visit, opened email, on-site purchase) and macros are typically combinations of both.
If you are just wanting to target one thing, use the relevant Activity or Attribute (if there is one). Macros are useful when you want to combine a number of rules. For example, in Scoring you may want to assign points to visitors who come to your site from either Australia or the US. You can achieve this by using both Attributes and Macros but if you set it up through Attributes, you will have to set up two separate rules. With Macros, you only need to set up one rule (i.e. you can select multiple countries in the one rule). Macros can also allow you to be more specific (e.g. by combining an activity with a timeframe).
To some extent, deciding whether to use a Macro or an Activity/Attribute is a matter of trial and error, as there are some conditions that can be found in Activities/Attributes but not Macros, and vice versa. If you can’t find an out-of-the-box rule to suit your situation, speak to your developer as they may be able to create one for you.
Further resources
Want to know more about Kentico Xperience? Download the guide.
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