Imagine going into a shop to buy a mountain bike. You’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to a sales rep and after learning all about your requirements, he suggests a bike that suits your needs, so you buy it.The next day you revisit the shop to buy some accessories for your new bike, and the same sales rep welcomes you in, guiding you directly to the relevant section of the shop. Along the way he provides good advice on the accessories that are most appropriate for your needs, and points out which accessories best fit your new ...

Personalisation is the key to providing a great user experience, but it needs to powered by a system which brings the whole customer lifecycle into a centralised platform. Marketing should feed information to Sales, Sales should feed information to Aftersales, and Aftersales should feed information back around to Marketing to start the cycle again for upsells, cross sells and repeat sells. This, and more, is achievable if you use Sitecore, the world’s most powerful website CMS.Sitecore connects your sales and marketing systems: It ...

Putting a form in front of high-quality downloadable content is a great way of capturing leads. This is nothing new. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that if you’re a marketing professional, you’re probably doing this already, and you’ll be using their contact information for lead nurturing activities until they’re ready to buy. But what if the same prospect wants to download more than one piece of content? Do you ask them to complete the same form again for each new piece of content, or perhaps you remove the form altogether?  In my opinion, ...

Without knowing it, your website could be suffering from an information overload, and it’s almost certainly having a negative effect on your sales figures.So what do we mean by an “information overload”?...Filling your website with lots of quality information is generally a good thing – it’s great for improving your rankings in search engines which helps to drive more traffic to your site. However, if the information isn’t in the right place at the right time, it could be diluting the impact of the important content.Consider the following ...

Over the past year you may have noticed how the marketing world has been bombarded by an avalanche of information about the merits of contextual marketing and personalisation.No-one is doubting that to be successful in today's market, your online experience has to mimic a traditional physical experience. But experience is deeply subjective and unique to each individual, so it is very difficult to define precisely.One thing is clear though. A mass approach to marketing won't do any longer, we are living in the age of the consumer, and ...

Contextual Marketing is all about “Providing the right content to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. You may have heard similar statements in the past, but have you ever stopped to think about what that really means? Let’s take a quick look at our definitions:“The right content” – This is simply another way of saying “Relevant Content”. The relevancy of content is subjective, but we’re aiming to provide real content which is genuinely helpful to the prospect. “The right person” – This is all to do with delivering ...

For many organisations, the days of direct mail campaigns are a distant memory. The relatively expensive and comparatively slow method of communication is considered to be so outdated that, to some, even the term itself is enough to cause a cringe.When email was introduced, it quickly because the fastest and most cost effective method of communicating with prospects, and whilst every organisation uses email, not every company has completely thrown the towel in on their postal efforts…and rightly so!A large number of organisations are ...

On 30th Jan, a few of our code-junkies locked themselves in a meeting room and set up their battle stations ready to take part in a 24-hour Sitecore hackathon!For those unfamiliar with the term, a Hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is an event where computer programmers collaborate intensively on a software project.(Above: Picture of team preparing for hackathon)The team of 3 arrived with Beacons, which were given to us by our partners at Localz!A beacon is a device which harnesses the power of low energy Bluetooth ...

We’re proud to announce that 3chillies developer, Andrew Ward has attained the Sitecore Commerce Professional Developer Certification.The 4 day programme, named “Sitecore Commerce powered by Commerce Server” is a new addition to Sitecore’s portfolio of advanced developer training courses. In essence, it exists to ensure that developers have the skills they need to create world-class eCommerce sites.Large eCommerce organisations have set the bar high when it comes to providing a contextual shopping experience: They personalise content ...

Umbraco 8 was launched in February 2019, and was 5 years in the making! Eagerly anticipated by 3chillies and the wider Umbraco community, the codebase was given a thorough and necessary clean-up, in order to make working with Umbraco a lot simpler for developers as well as improve the performance and stability of the CMS, all of which will make it more straightforward for all users to work with Umbraco.Now that the dust has settled and Umbraco 8 has been in use for almost a year, we take a look at the different arguments to remain on 7 or ...