Before you start

Things you need to know:

Before configuring your Experiences, we advise that you create at least some of the SmartBlock content that you want to use.
Experiences is a powerful tool and offers endless possibilities for personalisation, but start simple; create two Experiences and one Experience rule set, and get that working as you want it. Once you get the hang of it, you can expand from there.
You can’t archive an Experience if it is in an active rule set, and you can’t activate a rule set if an Experience within it has been archived. When an Experience is archived, you know that it isn’t actively being assigned to any visitors.

Create an Experience

Go to Content > Experiences.
Select CREATE EXPERIENCE.
Enter a name for your Experience, then select CONTINUE.

From within the Experience you can:

Configure web content for this experience, using the EDIT option for Site Editor on the Web Slots tab.
Configure message content for this experience, using the ADD TO SLOT option on the Email Slots tab.

Configure web content

To configure web content, select EDIT on the Web Slots tab to navigate to the Site Editor. When you access from an Experience in this way, the Site Editor is linked directly with that Experience only.

Use the Site Editor to adjust the website, as required, for that specific Experience.

Learn more in Site Editor.

To preview your changes, and check how the Experience may interact with other Experiences, select the Preview icon. This shows your web page, along with a toolbar allowing you to switch between which Experiences are displayed. You can also change priority order and set an Experience to takeover for previewing purposes only. It's also possible to preview multiple Experiences at the same time.

Once the changes are published, any visitor entering the website, and being placed on that Experience, is shown this web content.

Configure email content - Using Experiences within Slots

Once an Experience has been created, you can use it in Slot Rules. To edit Slots:

From the Experience Site Editor page, select the Slot, then select the Edit icon in the Edit Placement side panel.

or

Go to Content > Slots, and select the Slot, then select EDIT.
Select RULES to edit Slot rules.
On the Add Rules tab expand the Person section, and drag the On Experience rule on to the decision tree.
Select the Experiences that should be used to determine which SmartBlocks to show within the Slot.

Advanced

In addition to email content, this is also useful if you have many Slots and want to adjust what’s shown within them all at once, or if you have complicated rule set ups. Within each Slot you can add the Experience Rule only, and create the more complex rule scenario just once.

Control which Experience is shown - Experience rules

Once you have an Experience set up, and a configuration for what to show when someone is assigned to an Experience, you can create rules to determine which Experience is shown.

Go to Content > Experiences, and select the Experience you want to set rules for.
Select ADD TO RULE SET.
From the popover, select CREATE NEW RULE SET.
Enter a name for your rule set and select CONTINUE.

From within the rule set, you can add rules and add Experiences to determine which Experience each person should be on.

Learn more about available rules in Marketing rule types.

Once you have created your rule set, you need to enable it for it to take effect:

Go to Content > Experiences.
Select MANAGE EXPERIENCE RULES.
Select the Status slider to enable the rule set.

Rule sets are evaluated at the point in time the content is being generated.

For web content, this is at the same time the content is being displayed.
For open-time email content, this is at the time the email is opened.
For send-time email content, it is at the point of send.

Use multiple Experiences - Priority order and Takeover

A shopper can be assigned multiple Experiences through the creation of multiple rule sets.

Each rule set is evaluated for the person, and one Experience given per rule set evaluation, which might be the same or different Experiences to previous rule set evaluations.

For Slots, if a shopper has multiple Experiences, they’re evaluated based on the defined Slot Rules, to determine which content to show within the Slot.

For Site Editor configurations, you can use the Priority order and Takeover features to control the Experience content shown on the website.

Experience priority order

The priority order only affects Experiences with Site Editor configurations.

When multiple Experiences are assigned to a shopper, the system works through each Experience, in the priority order, and adds the Site Editor configurations incrementally to build the website page to display.

However, when the system finds a SmartBlock/Slot position that is in the same place as content from a previous Experience, the system does not add the new SmartBlock/Slot to this same position. Only the highest priority Experience content is displayed.

The active priority order that determines the Experience content being shown is displayed on the left-hand side of the Experiences table.

To edit the priority order:

Go to Content > Experiences.
Select CHANGE PRIORITY.
Drag and drop the Experience list items into the priority order you want.

Example

Priority 1: Website Experience A has:
- A banner Slot on the homepage
- A recommendations Slot below the banner
Priority 2: Website Experience B has:
- A banner Slot on the homepage - in the same position as the banner Slot in Experience A.
- A weather Slot at the bottom of the homepage

A shopper is assigned both Experience A and B – they therefore see:

From Experience A: the banner Slot on the homepage
From Experience A: the recommendations Slot below the banner
From Experience B: the weather Slot at the bottom of the homepage

The shopper doesn’t see the banner Slot from Experience B on the homepage, as this is in the same position as the Experience A banner Slot, and Experience A content has higher priority.

Takeover

Takeover only affects Experiences with Site Editor configurations.

A single Experience can be set to the Takeover state. If a shopper is assigned the Experience that is set to Takeover, then only this Site Editor configuration is shown to the customer – no additions are made from any other Experience configurations.

To set an Experience to Takeover: