Three benefits of integrating personalization apps with Contentful

The Contentful Marketplace is a terrific way for users to extend and expand the capabilities of the Contentful Content Platform, with more than 58 apps available since launching in March 2021.

Case in point is a launch event for the Frosmo Segments app last week, where team members from both Frosmo and Contentful discussed how integrating a personalization app into a content platform would maximize the business value of your content.

We’ve shared the recipe for personalization and lead-generation in a previous post, Personalization for lead-gen is a piece of cake, outlining an effective strategy to treat your customers to a uniquely tailored experience (and why it’s important to do so).

Personalization software from Frosmo was listed as a “secret ingredient” to this process, and now with the addition of the app to the Contentful Marketplace, adding personalization to your site becomes easier and more straightforward.

So how does the Frosmo Segments for Contentful app work? It integrates the Frosmo Platform with Contentful via audience segments, which the app makes available directly within Contentful through a segment selector field.

Users can now add the field to any content type, and once added, it enables you to attach segments to an entry of that content type. Thereafter, the entry can be addressed to visitors in those segments.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of the app itself, however, there is also the matter of the close collaboration between Frosmo and Contentful that went into its development. For a period spanning more than a year, the web team at Contentful played the prototypical end-user feeding back the ideal workflow and implementation to Frosmo.

Representing Contentful at the launch event were Mats Hellström, regional partner manager, and Moritz Guth, senior manager, Web Marketing. Over the course of their conversation with Mikael Gummerus, CEO and founder of Frosmo, they touched upon three benefits of integrating personalization with a content platform like Contentful.

Benefit #1: Improving the user experience

Contentful is a versatile and powerful content platform, and there are different aspects of its capabilities which are most relevant to different audiences — whether they are developers or editors or managers. 

“There are a lot of different people we’d like to reach with our website,” explains Moritz. “We have diverse audiences. We have people from a technical background, for example, but we also have content creators and industry leaders, and we want to greet every group with relevant content.”

The alternative is too terrible to contemplate: a boring and generic message on your website that provides no information or value to the person reading it. And if they don’t find the answers they seek, there’s not much reason for them to stick around. 

“Personalization is really about improving the user experience,” adds Mikael. “When it's easier to find what you're looking for on the site, and when everything just feels convenient, you like the site more, right? It's been studied over and over again that if the user experience is better, then you get more leads. Your Average Order Value grows, and your conversions improve.”

Moritz gave some examples of how personalization is deployed on the Contentful site. “One thing we do is we create variations of certain components or modules on the website and serve those variations to different people based on who we think they are,” he says. 

“They might be a developer, for example, or perhaps someone else. Indications of the persona, among other things, might be based on things they’ve done previously on the website.”

Benefit #2: Ease pressure with automation

In addition to personalization modifications that improve the user experience, there is also the ability to offer personalized — and automated — content recommendations. This has a huge benefit for the team of editors and creators working behind the scenes.

“Contentful is a mature product with extensive documentation,” explains Moritz, “for example, guides on getting started, best practices, knowledge base articles, blog posts and so on.”

Gifted as the editorial team might be, however, it’s not realistic for them to manually handpick and select bespoke recommendations for everyone who visits a page on the site. 

“If you have a couple of thousand articles floating around,” says Moritz, “how can you make sure to have up-to-date content recommendations that learn from what users want?” 

There are many variables at play, ranging from relevance of the suggestion to the currency of the content, and it would be counterproductive to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.

“And this is where a personalization app like Frosmo kicks in,” says Moritz, “which just naturally starts learning about user intents, behaviors and affinities, and then — for example — surfaces unique content recommendations for every individual reader on our blog. And that's really useful. The alternative was basically not to do recommendations at all, because it's just too much work.”

Benefit #3: Reducing complexity

“If we think about who should be responsible for personalization and optimization,” says Mikael, “that should be primarily at the focus of one team to make it coherent.”

But then you also have a lot of people who are managing the content. For example, inventory on an ecommerce site with product information attached to each item, overseen by editors and merchandising specialists.

“So those creators should be able to continue to work with the processes and software they’ve already learned to use,” Mikael continues, “but then enhance those with personalization.”

Mats also points out that an app like Frosmo is tremendously helpful for solutions partners, because it takes away the complexity of creating a user experience connected to personalization for the content creators. 

“Now you can focus on generating business value for your end customers,” he says. “The beauty of it is that it's quite easy to do using our marketplace. It's basically a one-click install and you’re up and running and you can start working with the segments that you have already created.”

More about the Frosmo Segments app

Frosmo is a versatile personalization engine used for automated, AI-driven customer journey optimization. Key features include dynamic content and product recommendations, rule-based content targeting and real-time segmentation of website visitors.

Using the Frosmo Segment integration allows Contentful users to attach segments to their content entries, which in turn allows the entries to be targeted to visitors in those segments. Targeting personalized content to visitors improves the performance of business KPIs such as bounce and conversion rate, number of page loads and time spent on the site.

Features

• Frosmo segments from a given site are now available in Contentful.

• Users can attach Frosmo segments to their content entries, which in turn allows the entries to be targeted to visitors in those segments.

• Users do not need to know anything about the Frosmo Platform or the Frosmo Control Panel to use this app.

• Users can attach a Frosmo segment selector field to any content type.

• When a user creates an entry from a content type that includes the field, they can use the field to select which segments to attach to that particular entry.

Requirements

To use this app, you will need:

• A Frosmo account.

• You must also have a Graniitti API access token from the Frosmo Control Panel. The token must be created by a Frosmo user with access to the site.

• The site must have at least one segment defined in the Frosmo Platform.

You can find the Frosmo Segements integration on Contentful Marketplace, together with more details on installation, documentation and support.

Launching apps on Contentful Marketplace is easy

“When Frosmo thought about building their own Contentful app, they talked to us first because we'd already been collaborating to implement the product on our website,” says Moritz. 

“So we had a series of conversations and brainstorming sessions to identify the most valuable — and also viable — use cases to get started with. We drew a lot from our own experiences and thinking about how we set up Frosmo.” 

“Working with the Contentful team to develop the app,” concludes Mikael, “the idea was really to focus on how it's a natural part of the workflow for content creators and editors. It's been a fantastic collaboration and a really easy platform to launch on.”

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