Digital Experience Platform - An Ultimate Guide
It’s not easy to impress, engage and retain modern customers by beating the cut-throat competition. Every business is trying extremely hard to win customers’ trust by adopting new approaches and the latest technologies. The Digital Experience Platform guide helps organizations gain a competitive edge and increase customer engagement by enabling them with highly contextualized digital experiences.
Today, tech-savvy customers do not make buying decisions just like that. They conduct thorough research and then buy the product that meets their specific expectations.
Implementation of a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps you drive customer engagement in many ways.
DXP allows brands to stay relevant to customers’ needs by creating, optimizing, and delivering personalized experiences. It also facilitates organizations to deliver consistent and consolidated digital experiences across multiple touchpoints.
In this post, I have covered almost all the aspects related to Digital Experience Platform Development. I assure you this blog enables you with exclusive insights into Digital Experience Platform Development that help you understand the essence of DXP for your business.
Table of Content
- What is Digital Experience?
- What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
- Evolution of Digital Experience Platforms: Shift from CMS to WEM to DXP
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities
- Types of Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
- Most Important Features of Digital Experience Platform
- Core Components of A Modern DXP
- What are the Key Characteristics of a Digital Experience Platform
- Benefits of Digital Experience Platform
- How to boost customer acquisition and retention through the Digital Experience Platform?
- How does a Digital Experience Platform work with AI?
- How Digital Experience Platform helps you meet the expectations of today’s customers?
- Do I need a Digital Experience Platform?
- When do I need to implement a Digital Experience Platform?
- How Much Does a Digital Experience Platform Cost?
- Popular Digital Experience Platform Trends to watch out for 2021
- How to Choose a Digital Experience Platform
- Questions to prepare before choosing a DXP
- Top 5 Digital Experience Platforms that you should consider for your business
- How to get started with Digital Experience Platform Strategy?
- How is Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform the right choice for you?
So, shall we get started?
Let’s begin with the Digital Experience Platform definition.
What is Digital Experience?
Let’s understand a digital experience from the very basic level through the Digital Experience Platform guide.
A digital experience refers to integrations that your target audience has with your bra through different online platforms. They receive the online experiences by browsing your website, posting on social media, sighing up for a newsletter, reading blog posts, checking out your online catalogs, brochures, flyers, and more.
By designing exclusive online experiences, companies can keep the customer engaged with the brand. It enables the customers with an amicable buyer journey that involves an easy-to-use platform with intuitive navigation and a clear call to action that encourages customers to make instant purchase decisions.
To deliver enriched digital experiences to shoppers, companies need to go the extra mile. It’s not enough to have an online presence just through a website. It is highly required to manage and optimize digital presence to stay ahead of the competition. This is where organizations need a robust Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
Below are a few examples that facilitate you with the different ways of creating superb digital experiences.
- Host a virtual event or webinar
- Plan an email marketing campaign
- Develop a mobile app to support varied phases of the customer journey
- Design an interactive infographic
- Integrating a chatbot in your website and mobile app
- Offering discounts for signing up for your newsletters
- Increasing in retargeting ads
- Creating a poll or quiz on your website or mobile app
- Creating microsite for product launch
- Creating eBook and whitepaper
Digital experiences are also known as digital customer experiences that encompass all the online interactions a customer has with your brand through varied devices and digital channels.
Devices involve:
- Computer
- Mobile
- Tablet
- Laptop, and more
Channels consist of:
- Website
- In-store kiosk
- Online adverting
- Social media
- Your branded website and any affiliated websites
- Online reviews
The digital experience empowers the customer journey starting from discovery to evaluation through purchase and on to post-purchase advocacy and support. Every output channel at every phase of the customer journey is a part of the digital experience.
I guess we have enough understanding of digital experience.
Now, it’s time to go ahead with the main topic of the Digital Experience Platform guide.
Yes, you get it right. Let’s start exploring the Digital Experience Platform and its robust capabilities and hidden potential that drive immense success and growth for an organization.
What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
The simple definition of a Digital Experience Platform is it’s a highly advanced Content Management System (CMS) that allows organizations to track customers’ activities, locations, and interactions throughout the entire buying journey.
With the help of DXP, companies deliver targeted content to the intended buyers along with extremely personalized and compelling customer experiences based on the customer profile, across a broad range of digital touchpoints.
Here is a definition from Gartner that consists of a technical point of view for DXP.
Gartner defines, “A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.”
DXP allows brands to develop and deploy websites, mobile apps, portals, and other digital platforms and continually improve them to create better experiences.
Moreover, the Digital Experience Platform manages the presentation layers based on preferences, security privileges, and the role of each individual. It enables you with the facilities of content management, personalization, workflow, collaboration, multichannel support, aggregation, integration, mobile support, search and navigation, and more features.
To learn about DXP in detail, you can visit What is Digital Experience Platform – A Brief on How can PIMCORE’s CaaS deliver Outstanding DXP?
Are you interested to build a tailored Digital Experience Platform that addresses your specific business needs and ensures driving immense customer engagement and revenue to your business?
Evolution of Digital Experience Platforms: Shift from CMS to WEM to DXP
Before two decades, companies struggled to inform customers about their products and services. Later on, Content Management Systems (CMS) are invented to help brands in selling and promoting their wide variety of products or services. The CMS has allowed companies to create and publish content related to their offerings on their websites.
After that, Web Experience Management (WEM) came into existence. It allows organizations to deliver content to eCommerce and marketing channels. It also involves analytic capabilities to understand customer behavior and serve their needs in a better way.
In today’s competitive world, delivering content across your different customer touchpoints such as websites, mobile apps, emails, social media, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality devices, customer portals, digital signage, POS systems, etc. is not enough. To improve customer engagement, you need to connect your content with the experience.
Customers use multiple devices during their buying process. Therefore, along with content, make sure you deliver a connected, consistent, and continuous experience to buyers that helps them to make the right buying decisions.
To enable the customers with a compelling experience across all the channels, companies have started adopting the Digital Experience Platform.
Let’s have a profound understanding of each CMS, WEM, and DXP one by one.
Content Management System (CMS)
The term itself indicates Content Management System allows companies to manage content on desktop computers and mobile apps. It allows companies to create, manage, and track content, images, videos, data, and other collaterals required for online presence. Thus, it helps companies to maintain consistency of content and voice across their different online domains.
CMS also facilitates you with version control and management as well as authoring workflow to maintain consistency in your large-scale global sites. CMS is also known as Web Content Management (WCM).
If you want to learn about the difference between CMS and DXP, you can visit CMS vs. DXP – How Both are Different From Each Other?
Web Experience Management (WEM)
With the emergence of new customer touchpoints, Web Experience Management was introduced to manage cross-channel functionality for data and content. It allows the different business units of the company to share information digitally.
WEM introduced role-based personalization. It enables you with greater insights into customer behavior by collecting the data. It defines the consumer persona and allows for creating and delivering the content more consistently across all online and offline channels to the target audience.
Through the Web Experience Management system, you can share content, logic, data, and other components across varied channels consistently.
These systems allow companies to automatically create personalized, tailored, and cross-channel communication for each customer.
Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
Nowadays, it is quite impossible to gain customer attention through Content Management Systems and Web Experience Management due to the highly dynamic requirements of the buyers.
Digital Experience Platform allows you to create fully integrated multi-channel marketing experiences. Businesses can deliver the content to different touchpoints including in-store, online, eCommerce systems, kiosks, customer portals, billboards, and more.
Compelling digital experiences are no longer just a way to drive customer engagement. However, it is quite essential to earn customer loyalty and satisfaction in the post-acquisition phase.
With the increasing usage of backend applications, the digital journey has expanded. These backend applications are necessary for your different teams to manage their operations seamlessly and effectively. Companies need to integrate these backend systems to enable customers with a consistent experience from acquisition to consultation.
Gone are the days when digital platforms are required and used by the marketing team. Now, different teams of the company need to use digital solutions to improve their productivity, streamline business operations, and generate better revenue.
Implementation of the Digital Experience Platform allows you to create and deliver a connected and consistent digital experience to your consumer-facing and internal digital solution.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities
All the modem DXP come with integrated AI and ML capabilities. It processes and analyzes customers’ browsing, search, and buying histories along with their demographics, interactions, and locations. It becomes easier for companies to predict which product the customer is interested in.
DXP also helps them to design the personalization strategy accordingly. You can deliver relevant content and opportunities to the target audience while they are about to make a buying decision.
Therefore, DXP is a level-up solution than a CMS or WEM. It helps the brands to deliver digital experiences across all the intended customer touchpoints and on any device.
Do you want to make the right choice from the CMS, WEM, and DXP that meets your organizational needs and budget?
5 Types of Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
There are different types of Digital Experience Platforms available in the market. And, all the DXPs are not alike. The modern DXP evolved from different types of systems based on a business’s specific use cases over a period of time.
In this Digital Experience Platform Guide, we are going to discuss five basic types of Digital Experience Platforms
1. Open DXPs
Open DXP is a platform that works as a connecting bridge of digital experiences by integrating different products from multiple vendors or partners together. It helps the vendors to access all the essential data from a single platform and perform the required actions from Open DXP.
If you are an organization that already has a strong online presence and own varied digital experience products, you can get maximum benefits from Open DXP.
2. Closed DXPs
A Closed DXP is a one-stop solution that contains all the important components of DXP. The major differences that define Closed DXP are, that all the components are maintained by a single vendor as well as it offers limited integrations with other applications and solutions.
Every business has some specific objectives that they want to attain through DXP implementation. Based on the organizational goals, entrepreneurs need to choose from Open DXP and Closed DXP.
For example, a company can go with Closed DXP if they do not want to invest in multiple vendors. They can buy the DXP from a single vendor that contains all the essential components. As it allows for limited integrations, you might face difficulties in managing customer experiences effectively.
While selecting the Open DXP, companies can integrate any number of systems with the platform. However, they need to connect with multiple vendors to get access to all the essential components of Open DXP. It ensures delivering excellent experiences but that is after connecting all the experience toolsets seamlessly. Open DXP drives more flexibility to a company’s future.
Make a wise choice after analyzing all different aspects of Open DXP and Closed DXP and evaluate their potential in the context of your business needs.
Based on the company’s precise use cases, DXP has divided itself into three further categories.
3. CMS DXPs
Marketing advertising agencies and creative firms are involved in B2C initiatives. To perform these activities, they need a solution that has more advanced capabilities than basic CMS.
These systems allow you to collect the customer data that is used for customer segmentation later on. CMS DXPs help companies to solve the issues related to customer acquisition.
Challenges addressed by CMS DXPs
- Targeting offers
- Generating interest and awareness
- Improving purchases
CSM DXPs are highly used in B2C businesses such as retail, fashion, etc. where the sales cycle tends to be transactional and short and target audiences are larger in volume.
The popular CMS DXPs facilitate business with a wide range of features.
Important features of CMS DXPs
- Web-based analytics
- User segmentation
- Email campaigns
- Advertising campaigns
With the help of features like analytics and persona-based segmentation, you can meet your pre-purchase consumer-facing endeavors such as demand generation, delivering personalized promotions, customer acquisition, and accelerating sales funnels easily.
Some of the CMS DXPs contain commerce capabilities, while others offer portal-like features such as logged-in experiences. All these features and capabilities eventually empower your partnership and customer acquisition strategy.
4. Portal DXPs
Portal DXPs are primarily designed for B2C and B2B firms in the manufacturing and fintech domains to manage post-sales CRM and customer support activities. The main objective of these companies was to earn customer retention, loyalty, and renewal.
This type of Digital Experience Platform also supports digital workplace scenarios where you can consider traditional intranets. Well, digital workplace solutions are more dynamic and engaging than the intranet. Portal DXP can work in sync with any of your workplace solutions effortlessly.
You have the flexibility to integrate these portals with any of your existing enterprise systems and any third-party applications or software. Moreover, it allows you to integrate your corporate intranet portals to provide support to suppliers and partners.
Portal DXP enables you with a full digital transformation strategy that allows you to leverage the maximum potential of your internal and external resources. Through all these, Portal Digital Experience Platform Development helps you create and deliver strong customer experiences.
Important features of Portal DXP
- Workflow automation
- Mobile support
- Content Management System
According to Forrester, the right Portal DXP contains integration capabilities that are important for the digital transformation of your business. The Portal DXP allows for the management of reusable modules and services when you need to evolve your strategy quickly.
5. Commercial DXPs
Commercial DXPs are highly used by retail businesses to push their promotional content to their eCommerce websites. It is also suitable for online shopping.
Important features of Commerce DXPs
- Inventory management
- Shopping cart
- Fulfillment
- Check-out
- Payment integration
While looking for a Digital Experience Platform, it is not compulsory that you will have these features built-in. But, you should pick the one that allows you to integrate these features into your Digital Experience Platform Development.
Generally, DXP is related to the content but they contribute significantly to your online commerce endeavor.
For example; when you launch a product on an eCommerce website, marketplaces, website, and other online platforms, you need to use content management to support the promotion of products in the catalog.
Are you in a dilemma which one is the perfect suit for your DXP needs from CMS, portal, and commercial Digital Experience Platforms?
6 Most Important Features of Digital Experience Platform
Implement a Digital Experience Platform that allows you to create a unified and seamless digital experience that helps you manage, deliver and optimize the contextualized and personalized digital experiences to every customer across each touchpoint.
Ensure the platform delivers the GrapcQL-API-based headless content delivery approach. With the headless approach, brands can have a decoupled web content management strategy or go hybrid to avail benefits from the best of both worlds with a modular DXP.
Many Digital Experience Platforms are available out there in the market. They all offer a wide range of features. You need to pick the one with the features you need the most. The platform should allow you to integrate any enterprise systems and third-party applications and develop custom features to meet your specific business needs.
In this Digital Experience Platform guide, you can have a lit of the most essential features that every business that wants to deliver stunning digital experiences should consider.
1. Web Content Management
Advanced DXP is capable of managing multiple sites with multi-lingual and mobile-friendly content y providing a web content management system. Unleash the power of content by managing all your content from a single platform using a robust web content management platform. A scalable CMS empowers experience-driven sites and content-rich portals.
DXP with flexible content architecture allows for independent content management, authoring, and API-led delivery of data that enables you to connect content to other apps/sites quickly. To create outstanding digital experiences, it offers powerful omnichannel orchestration.
Track your content everywhere through delivery, standardized authoring, and analytics to fasten the content optimization cycle.
Below are the advanced capabilities of Web Content Management features
- WYSIWYG & Usability
- Multi-Lingual
- Multi-Site Management
- Personalization
- Content-Commerce
- SEO & Marketing Toolbox
- Mobile Friendly
2. Headless Content Management
An advanced DXP offers headless content management that enables brands to do easier, faster, and more effective content management. Distribute your content across different channels using API-driven headless content management.
The platform works as the content-centric heart of a modern marketing technology stack. It unified data in a single repository that makes content easily accessible to the users and integrates it with your existing IT ecosystem seamlessly. Headless content management offers the smartest way to manage your content. Thus, pick a DXP that comes with built-in headless content management.
Below are the advanced capabilities of Headless Content Management features
- Content platform
- Agile workflows
- Flexible content data models
- API-based content delivery
- Unlimited content types, users, workflows & API calls
3. Multi-channel Delivery
Digital Experience Platform offers a multi-channel delivery feature to automate publishing processes across channels and devices for accuracy and consistency. It allows brands to communicate with customers seamlessly.
Below are the advanced capabilities of multichannel delivery features
- Multichannel publishing
- Mobile Marketing
- Print Publishing
- Marketing Automation
- Content-as-a-Service
- Commerce Integration
4. Personalization & Analytics
A Digital Experience Platform builds personalized and compelling digital experiences using analytics to build customer loyalty by delivering a positive brand experience. Drive tremendous customer engagement based on KPIs delivered from business intelligence infrastructure and web analytics.
Below are the advanced capabilities of the personalization feature
- Behavioral Targeting
- User Profiling
- Data Collecting
- Analytics Integration
5. Print Publishing
Revolutionized your traditional printing processes for creating price sheets, personalized sales and marketing collaterals, and product catalogs. Connect content with the data of Master Data Management (MDM), Product Information Management (PIM), and Digital Asset Management (DAM) frameworks seamlessly using the Digital Experience Platform.
It facilitates organizations with varied business benefits such as brand consistency, time-saving, cost-saving, error reduction, up-to-date publications, and boosted internal productivity.
Below are the advanced capabilities of the print publishing feature
- Compatible workflow
- Adobe InDesign Integration
6. PIM Integration
Integrate a hyper-flexible and agile product information management platform that contains functionality with 40+ high-performance data styles. It allows for managing all the product data related centrally. By integrating with DXP, companies can have smart management of product-related information and consumer-centric data that helps improve buyers’ journeys, increase conversion, and boost sales and revenue.
Below are the advanced capabilities of the Product Information Management feature
- Data Modeling
- Data Management
- Data Quality Management
- Workflow Management
- Digital Asset Management
- Omnichannel Publishing
- Apps and Data Integration
- Product Experience Portal
- Product Data Syndication
- Marketplace Integration
- Product Feed Management
- Enterprise Translation Management
- Microsoft/Adobe Integration
- Enterprise Print Publishing
Do you want to build a robust DXP with the avant-garde features that streamline your varied marketing efforts and increase customer conversion significantly with least manual intervention?
5 Core Components of A Modern DXP
A Digital Experience Platform contains a plethora of components that make the solution compatible to work with any IT environment and deliver the expected output. Many DXPs are available in the market that is developed by different vendors. Each platform has a certain set of components at its core. So choosing the best fit becomes challenging for you.
Am I right?
Through the Digital Experience Platform guide, you can learn about the most crucial components that one should look for in a DXP. Ensure enormous business success by picking the platform that has the below-listed capabilities at its core.
1. Openness
An excellent DXP comes with the ability to connect to 3rd party systems or applications so communication can flow seamlessly between DXP and the systems. The openness of DXP comes in the form of data being able to flow out and in easily.
2. API-first Architecture
An advanced DXP provides a powerful collection of APIs that DXP programmers can connect to their front-end applications. By developing the API-based architecture of DXP, brands can leverage business flexibility and consume modularity, and experience an ability to iterate as consumer behavior and market demand as the user expectations evolve.
3. AI-powered Algorithms
Artificial Intelligence transforms the way business operates. DXP assists the company to share stunning experiences across different touchpoints from doing grunt work that facilitates personalization to exploring hidden insights within data.
4. Strong Data Foundation
To create and deliver scaling personalized digital experiences, DXP is needed. It’s a platform that comes with a profound understanding of products and customers. At the core of the Digital Experience Platform, there must have a strong foundation of data.
5. Advanced Tools and Capabilities
With the help of an advanced Digital Experience Platform, businesses can create personalized and optimized experiences effortlessly. The DXP should contain features like content management, channel management, search management, digital merchandising, testing and targeting, recommendations, insights, and more.
What are the Key Characteristics of a Digital Experience Platform
By considering the specific requirements of the stakeholders, brands should have well-defined priorities and agreements. Based on these requirements, companies should select the right DXP. No matter what DXP you select for your company, flexibility will be the highest priority. Discover other extremely important characteristics of an advanced DXP.
Content Management System
A Content Management System (CMS) is the base of every Digital Experience platform. Using the powerful CMS capabilities of DXP, companies run websites and perform varied editorial operations effectively.
You might be thinking about why to go for DXP and not for CMS if the foundation of DXP is CMS. Read CMS vs. DXP – How Both are Different From Each Other? to get exclusive insights into the differentiation between both platforms.
Commerce
To create compelling end-to-end shopping experiences for your target audience, you need a robust eCommerce engine that can be integrated with the content. DXP provides you with award-winning solutions that contain both commerce and content capabilities.
With the Digital Experience Platform, companies can manage inventory, orders, pricing, promotions, and so on from a centralized portal.
Analytics
To deliver superb digital experiences, it is essential for the organizer to collect the data from every iteration that happens across every online and offline channel of the brands. It helps them get a clear picture of the expectations, requirements, and challenges of your customers as well as constantly changing market trends.
If you cannot transform this data into actions, then the data is useless for your business. There is no meaning in drowning the data without gaining real insights out of it and taking the right actions at the right time that drives results.
Pick the Digital Experience Platform that comes with analytics capabilities to facilitate you with actionable insights.
Future-proof
As your business grows you need to extend the capabilities of DXP. Thus, it is essential to choose DXP that can be easily extensible. If the platform is not scalable and extensible from the original scopes, it will be difficult for the organizations to support marketing automation, digital asset management, product information management, or other platforms.
Before making a selection ensure the DXP supports different platforms and applications as well as can easily be a part of your existing IT ecosystem.
Cost
There are different ways of evaluating the cost of ownership for the Digital Experience Platform. You can consider multiple options such as licensing, subscription, professional services, and other fees. You can go with the most suitable option that helps you attain organizational benefits. Select a DXP that helps you attain exceptional ROI.
Security & Compliance
This is a default expectation when selecting a Digital Experience Platform. The platform must provide high-level security during every operation. International organizations need to maintain compliance with privacy regulations across the globe to increase the reliability of the company.
Interoperability
Interoperability is a vital part of any digital solution. The Digital Experience Platform should easily be integrated with 3rd party solutions and applications.
Do you want to develop a DXP that comes with all the above-listed characteristics & helps you create astonishing customer experiences through advanced capabilities of the solution?
7 Benefits of Digital Experience Platform
Implementation of the Digital Experience Platform enables you with several lucrative benefits. Let’s talk about them one by one in this Digital Experience Platform guide.
1. Improve customer experience across multiple touchpoints
With the emergence of multiple digital platforms, it becomes convenient and easier for brands to reach their target audience. They are utilizing the maximum potential of websites, mobile apps, emails, social media, chatbots, and in-person interactions too.
Digital Experience Platform helps companies to maintain their brand consistency across all the output channels. DXP allows you to utilize the personalization capabilities to drive tremendous customer engagement.
The advanced platforms come with built-in capabilities of data analytics and trend analysis to help you with customer behavior tracking across every critical touchpoint. Later on, it helps you to understand customer expectations and meet them effortlessly.
2. DXP is a smart investment for every business
To manage different business operations, companies need to develop and deploy different software.
For example; organizations use Content Management Systems (CMS) to create and manage digital content, portals for content aggregation, campaign management to run various digital campaigns effectively, analytics for tracking customer behavior, and more.
Earlier, to address all these needs, companies needed to deploy separate software which required considerable investment.
Digital Experience Platform is the one-stop solution for all such needs. It allows you to integrate different software and applications under a single platform. It allows you to access the updated data all the time across all your systems. Offering an integrated approach, DXP allows you to develop a responsive application as well.
Undoubtedly, instead of investing in 5 to 8 different software, it’s a smart move to invest in an advanced DXP that enables you with all the robust capabilities.
3. Reduce time-to-market using AI
Today’s customers are getting smarter with each passing day. To meet their changing expectations, companies need to understand their mindset. To get insights into your customer’s needs, you need to analyze relevant data.
You can learn about your customers by tracking their contact information, social media interactions, preferences, purchase history, demographics, communication information, browsing data, and more. The study of your customers enables you with actionable insights that add incredible value to your business.
By integrating Artificial Intelligence into your DXP, you can perform this analysis seamlessly. The technology helps you identify important customer information from a large chunk of customer-related data.
The amalgamation of AI and DXP allows the companies to work on updated, accurate, and consistent information about the customers on the fly.
4. Boost business productivity
Generating better revenue is the ultimate goal of all organizations. This can be achieved only through an increasing number of customers and their retention. Digital Experience Platform plays a critical role when it comes to delivering compelling customer experiences.
The advanced DXPs allow you to utilize content and commerce elements to deliver a desirable customer experience and attract targeted users.
Additionally, DXP is a flexible system that permits companies to integrate their existing enterprise systems and third-party applications through APIs. So, when you need to introduce a new service in the future, it becomes easier for you to integrate it into the platform. This simplifies business operations like never before.
Leveraging the content, commerce, and integration capabilities of the Digital Experience Platform, brands improve conversion rate, increase sales, and reduce operational costs respectively. In the end, all this contributes to improving your overall business productivity.
5. Address all the customer pain points successfully
When customers interact with any of your digital platform/s, they become your prospects. Their conversion from prospects to loyal customers is a journey. To create a successful marketing strategy you need to track their interactions across your sales and marketing channels at every stage. This is not a one-time job, make it your standard practice to pave the path of success.
DXP enables companies to have complete control over analyzing all the channels through which their target audience interacts with the brand. It helps you to understand your customers’ needs and challenges.
DXP provides you the measurable data that you can utilize in making a stronger marketing strategy.
The customer data helps you figure out the customer pain points through their interactions across different channels and design a customer journey mapping strategy. Based on your customer’s pain points, you can propose the relevant products and services to them.
6. Get exclusive insights about your customer activities
DXP enables organizations with a single interface where you can have a consolidated view of all the customer interactions and activities across all the customer touchpoints.
This information enables the management team with actionable insights and makes effective strategic decisions. The right business decisions ensure the success of your brand.
This clearly depicts how the Digital Experience Platform is essential to stay ahead in today’s competitive business space.
By analyzing the customers’ interactions and activities, you can easily predict future trends and offer them more relevant and accurate recommendations. Thus, by offering a thorough analysis of customer behavior, DXP helps companies attain improved customer loyalty, better customer engagement, and ensure higher retention.
7. Connect the business
Well, DXP is a very advanced system but it is not sufficient to address all your business requirements. You need to deploy some other software as well.
For example; you need to use an eCommerce solution to manage transactions and inventory, marketing software to bring customers to the door, customer support solutions to provide quick support to the existing customers, and more.
You can connect DXP with any of your business solutions. It uses APIs to organize and aggregate the data to define and deliver the right experience to the customers every time they interact with your brand.
Technical benefits of Digital Experience Platform to customers and organizations
| DXP Capabilities | Benefits to Customers | Benefits to Organizations |
|---|---|---|
| Personalization | Each touchpoint creates the right value for customers. For instance; you have filled out an online inquiry form to avail of certain products or services. When an executive of the service provider contacts you, they already have the data about you through that online form. | The flexibility of integration in any enterprise system or 3rd party apps such as CRM, marketing, social media, etc. enables brands with a complete view of each customer. With help of Machine Learning and an intuitive dashboard provided deep insight into customer behavior. |
| Flexible architecture | Improved experience on all the preferred channels. | Provides microservices architecture and hybrid headless to deliver the same content across multiple channels. Reduces the burden on your marketing team for creating more content to deliver a better customer experience. |
| Adaptability | Connect when they want and how they want. | DXP allows you to integrate and adopt the new technologies and connect with your target audience as new technologies are introduced or digital maturity increases. |
| Integrated control center | Experience a connected and consistent journey across all the touchpoints. | Leverage the right mixture of customer data, analytics, and omnichannel content to create compelling experiences that improve customer retention. |
Do you want to leverage all the business and technical benefits listed above by developing and implementing a feature-rich Digital Experience platform?
How to boost customer acquisition and retention through the Digital Experience Platform?
Personalization
Personalization is about improving customer engagement. It can be achieved through the right mixture of a great design and consistent customer experience. You can drive customer engagement by sharing this amalgamation across different customer touchpoints starting from one-to-all to one-to-one approaches. It is the best way to move from a generalized to a personalized approach.
Digital Experience Platforms enable you with exclusive customer insights and behavioral data that help the brands to create relevant and individualized interactions.
Implementation of DXP solution helps you recognize optimal experiences for each customer and modify the digital presence of your organization accordingly.
Make sure your internal teams are aligned with the implementation of the personalization strategy. To enable customers with a higher value, you need to ensure the buyers are getting the same experiences across all the sales and marketing channels.
In most organizations, it is believed that personalization is the responsibility of the marketing department solely. Well, that’s not the case. It is true that personalization is driven by the marketing team but it won’t be effective without alignment with their teams of the organization.
All the teams are equally responsible for designing the personalization strategy as it is strongly connected with the approach, implementation, aim, and overall optimization strategy of your company.
Through the Digital Experience Platform, you can collect a wide range of data such as purchase patterns, sessions, customer profiles, website visits, transaction history, and more data. You can analyze this data, understand the customer behavior and accordingly enrich the personalization strategy.
How Digital Experience Platform supports personalization?
- Connects siloed engagements
- Allows for real-time decisions making
- Drives agility in marketing personalization
- Leverages machine learning and predictive analytics
- Uses location-sensing such as beacon-based technologies
Image credit: pimcore.com
Interoperability
To leverage optimum digital engagement, companies need to establish interoperability between the systems. This is not a choice for an organization but it’s mandatory to attain the expected success. Management and technical teams cannot collaborate on organizational, technological, and strategic levels without establishing interoperability between the digital commerce platform and Web Content Management (WCM) technologies.
The proliferation of data repositories and Web Content Management can result in inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the product of content management. It allows the brands to deliver fragmented customer experiences.
Interoperability enables the IT leaders to bring different departments that are performing varied customer-facing functions separately such as email marketing, customer engagement centers, website management, retail stores, digital commerce, and more. It becomes easy for the team to attain a shared vision around digital commerce and WCM.
Basically, interoperability is all about bringing all these different systems together.
How to create an interoperability strategy?
While defining interoperability strategy, you need to
Start with your ultimate goal
Define an ideal scenario from your viewpoint where the maximum collaboration of systems, processes, and teams takes place in order to attain expected business results and overcome all the hurdles. Do all these with a customer-centered mind.
Develop a data repository
Create a centralized repository for all your existing data silos and manage the data of different functions such as websites, digital marketing, digital commerce, and more consumer-facing platforms where you need to deploy the content. Compare the cost required by WCM to align the systems with the cost of maintaining numerous silos.
Take action on the data
Design a rough strategy for achieving a compelling customer experience and improved ROI. Check out whether your existing data silos effectively support that new data repository or not. Usually, sticking to the silos will not be compatible with your long-term growth strategy.
Advantages of a good interoperability
- Enhanced contextualization
- Improved relevance of delivered customer experience
- Cross channel continuity and a non-disrupted customer journey
- Improved user experience or storefront
- Address the complex cross-channel and marketing requirements
Image credit: pimcore.com
Advanced CMS
To enable the customer with the best experiences, organizations have been constantly investing in advanced marketing technologies, innovation, and personalization. With the help of Content Management Systems, you can create and deliver consistent, seamless, and unified customer experiences through rich media and content throughout their buying journey.
Digital Experience Platform also helps them in transforming their eCommerce operations too. The platform helps companies to create requisite transformative influences over their target audience in two ways.
Contextualization
Contextualization in content is the key to personalization. Understand the perspective of your customers and deliver consistent and highly relevant experiences to them across different customer touchpoints.
Creating contextual content is critical. You can’t make the content for commerce so impactful if the context of the target audience is unknown to you.
Over a period of time companies have realized, in the convention processes, that customers do not see any difference in their buying journey starting from discovery to purchase to order fulfillment. Contextualization offers bespoke experiences and real-time personalization.
By enabling customers with contextual content for commerce, you can scale their experiences all the time.
Image Credit: pimcore.com
Analytics
Customers prefer to buy from companies that identify, remember, and provide them the recommendations and offers. To achieve this, marketers need to get insights about the most valuable aspects for the customers using visitor features, create limitless segmentation to understand the actual reason for interactions, and analyze cross-visit data and visit trends.
Image Credit: pimcore.com
To understand your customer, you need to be clear about
- How do customers interact with your brand?
- Are these conversations related to research, inquiries, and abandonment?
- What are the outcomes and learning?
- What are the other better ways to optimize customer engagement?
- Is it possible for you to measure all the experiences?
- Have you considered the multi-channel attribution model in order to impact every engagement across different channels?
By integrating advanced analytics into your Content Management System and portal, you can address all your queries by improving customers’ lifetime value and boosting customer-centric innovations at the same time.
Do you want to build an advanced CMS that contains the capabilities of contextualization and analytics?
AI-based content management
Because of the increasing need for personalization, B2B and B2C organizations have started adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. The popularity of AI is increasing due to its outstanding capabilities that contribute significantly to improving customer experience. AI also helps brands in addressing the changing needs of content management and digital interactions.
Consideration of AI allows companies to automate the process of creating customer personalization. The technology analyzes the different content journeys taken by your target audience and provides you insights into their preferences and interests.
With the data, it becomes easier for you to design an effective personalization strategy and deliver an amazing customer experience.
For example; a customer is not responding to one type of personalization approach. Integrate AI in your Web Content Management that automatically tracks what your targeted audience is viewing. Thus, you can test, analyze, and enrich the experiences on a continuous basis.
These days, most Web Content Management systems work as a data hub where all the data is gathered from different sources, transformed and merged with other relevant data, pushed to different channels, and more. It also offers functionality such as image tagging when an image is uploaded.
With AI, WCM allows you to create and publish related content. This content should be based on the analysis of customers’ sentiments.
Content-as-a-Service
Since the essence of multichannel increases for the customer journey, content becomes the top priority to ensure the digital success of your business. Thus, CaaS comes into the picture.
CaaS stands for Content-as-a-Service. These days, to drive customer engagement from different sources, brands need to distribute relevant content across different applications such as websites, mobiles, connected devices, smart TVs, and more customer touchpoints that your target audience is still exploring.
CaaS is a platform where content is delivered via APIs and made accessible through web services. It also involves all the content-based eCommerce and transactional processes.
Here’re the three main approaches for content delivery. Let’s have a brief introduction to all of them.
Traditional CMS
The traditional CMS is also known as coupled CMS. It has a strong connection between the CMS and the delivery layer. A presentation layer is also incorporated into this type of CMS that is required for assembling and delivering web pages.
It results in a solo development platform and a standard presentation that restricts building more user interactions.
Headless CMS
Headless CMS focuses on the back-end part. It provides a set of tools for the content creators to get their workflows readily consumed in a CaaS environment. It does not have a presentation layer.
Headless CMS sends the content to the different systems with the help of APIs as and when your frontend system sends requests for the content.
Hybrid CMS
Hybrid CMS is also popular as decoupled CMS. In this type of CMS, the content is accessed and managed separately through the CMS API, just like headless CMS. It does not have frontend delivery capabilities if you need it.
Decoupled CMS and Headless CMS ensure that content repositories can be accessed directly from APIs. It also makes sure the content is delivered to the target audience through any technology and application.
Content-as-a-Service uses Headless CMS. It addresses the requirements of business users and allows for collaboration throughout the content life cycle starting from strategy to planning to analytics to authoring to optimization. It eliminates the content silos automatically and assures a smooth flow of content to deliver consistent customer experiences across multiple touchpoints.
Flexible architecture
Web Content Management architecture-related decisions are critical. It can have massive implications for WCM stability and performance. Every architecture has a solid vision, strategy, and implementation plans based on the specific business needs of an organization. The architecture of WCM depends on
- How a business is modeled?
- How the digital ecosystem of a business is structured?
- How does the business utilize the potential of WCM?
Most advanced WCM addresses the needs of rich digital interactions on the web, mobile, social and other platforms. To meet the specific requirements of the different channels, developers adopt an API-driven approach to empower content management technology. In simple words, developers have started adopting headless and decoupled content management systems instead of traditional architecture.
Traditional WCM architecture
In the traditional WCM architecture, codebase and frontend display functionality are coupled with the admin portal and backend.
Decoupled WCM architecture
Decoupled WCM architecture conceals the admin or backend layer from the presentation or display layer. It publishes the flat files to third-party destinations with the help of APIs. When it comes to multi-channel dissemination, it helps a lot.
Headless WCM architecture
The specialty of headless architecture is it is specifically designed to manage API-driven experiences. For example; APIs do all the heavy lifting activities. Thus, headless is the best-suited architecture for multi-domain environments. Offering API connectivity, headless WCM provides businesses with multiple options to pull content from different systems.
The Web Content Management platform is architected squarely depending on the kind of projects you consider under WCM.
Do you want to select the right architecture for your Web Content Management systems for traditional, decoupled, and headless?
How does a Digital Experience Platform work with AI?
These days, it is highly essential to deliver compelling custom experiences across different customer touchpoints. Businesses have to collect data from multiple sources. Also, you need to deal with the growing customer base along with the increasing number of products and services.
How do you maintain all these criteria and improve all of them?
Artificial Intelligent helps you to create and deliver innovative experiences along with personalization and generating hidden insights within your data.
The amalgamation of AI and DXP allows you access to data from every customer touchpoint and tool. AI helps you a lot understand and improve customer experiences starting from acquisition to loyalty.
Contextual personalization
Companies can consider personalization through both role-based and experience-based. AI-enabled experiences offer a wide range of elements to the companies such as store location maps, regional contact numbers, product grids, and more. To apply personalization to these elements, you can design the rules manually.
For example; a visitor that visits a marketplace website from his home through his desktop has completely different requirements when he visits the mobile apps of the same marketplace while he is abroad.
When you try to manage all these micro journeys for each and every visitor manually, there are chances you probably miss some of them. Eventually, this converts into a business loss.
Considering Artificial Intelligence you can take contextual personalization to the next level where you can consider customer behavior, device use, every piece of content, and the right conversion path to explore, learn, deliver and learn again. This pattern allows the brands to enable the prospective buyer with better experiences and ultimately generate better outcomes.
All the latest Digital Experience Platform contains AI capabilities that help you to learn about your visitors on an ongoing basis and improve their experience automatically and continuously.
Semantic search
The search query of each buyer is not the same. Their context might be the same but the keywords they use are different. Thus, the concept of semantic search is evolved. It is quite difficult to manage these different keyword combinations manually.
Considering AI for the semantic search, you can deliver highly relevant results, for any query, at any scale. Let your users view the information they are looking for and engage them on your site or app for a long time.
Machine and man
The use of AI is not just limited to utilizing the connected data to enable the customers with the information they are looking for. It also helps you to get clarity on what your target audiences are looking for.
You might have questions about how to measure the impact of the experience delivered. For this, you can take the help of some metrics.
With Artificial Intelligence, you can open the door to new business opportunities by getting insights through data and analyzing the latest trends and buying patterns. A thorough analysis of the data helps your team to refine its strategies to boost customer engagement, conversions, and retention by generating better revenue at the same time.
Well, the way AI collects, analyzes, and delivers better customer experiences automatically, it seems like in the future human intervention is not needed for these jobs. But, in the current phase, human efforts are quite necessary.
Artificial Intelligence fine-tunes your search, empowers personalization, and provides you insights into your customers and market trends. It gives space to your people to focus more on more innovative ideas and creativity to create a compelling digital experience that enables you with a competitive edge.
Do you want to get better insights into how AI empowers your Digital Experience Platform?
How Digital Experience Platform helps you meet the expectations of today’s customers?
Today’s customer demands are quite dynamic. Also, before making a purchase, they have multiple preferences and criteria in their mind. They perform enough research before buying their products to ensure they get the best products at the best price.
To meet the highly dynamic and frequently changing demands of your customers, you can take the help of the Digital Experience Platform. Let’s see how a DXP helps you in engaging and retain customers through this Digital Experience Platform guide.
Enables you with actionable insights
Digital Experience Platform connects your different internal systems with varied digital channels. Along with collecting, managing, analyzing, and distributing the data from mobile, web, and social media, DXP also takes care of your in-store, e-commerce portal, customer portals, and billboard data.
Using the DXP, you can perform various customer data-related tasks such as data capturing, profiling, and processing. If performed collectively, all these activities provide a 360-degree view of your customers. This improves your customer service significantly.
For example; if a customer shares a bad experience with your product or service, DXP enables you with customer history so that you can understand their buying journey and service gap and improve the service quality. It also helps your sales team understand the interest and preferences of potential customers before calling.
Seamless integration with other systems
By connecting DXP with your existing enterprise systems, third-party applications, or other tools and software, you can track buyers’ history, map their journey, and identify the critical bottleneck.
With better insights into your customer behavior, you can redesign your business practices. This helps you create and deliver an excellent customer experience.
Make customer-oriented decisions
Businesses need to use the tools and technologies that are best for the business and are required by the different teams to perform their respective tasks effectively. Digital Experience Platform is an open-source entity so it will be quite easy for you to connect it with any of your systems and solutions.
In the future, if you are required to switch to another tool and update the existing software, you can easily do it without being worried about DXP.
When you apply this to your marketing tools and software, it allows you to leverage agile marketing and improve personalization in manageable steps.
Leverage optimal use of content
Quality content is a critical part of any organization. Especially, when it comes to personalization. DXP allows you to coordinate your content and reuse the content across different channels and environments by decoupling the presentation layer from the content and its metadata. Reuse of the content saves your investment and enables you with better results.
Digital Experience Platform can be used by both B2C and B2B customers. Both B2B and B2C companies can create seamless experiences that bring loyalty, connection, and meaning.
Do you want to drive tremendous customer engagement by meeting their expectations through a Digital Experience Platform?
Do I need a Digital Experience Platform?
Every business that wants to get the benefits of a fully connected experience should consider the Digital Experience Platform.
Most companies want to continue with CMS and are not ready to move ahead with DXP. But, the adoption of DXP depends on your organizational needs.
The Content Management System enables you with the features of content management, workflow management, version management, authorization, and other features.
All these capabilities are already there in the Digital Experience Platform. But, the essence of DXP lies in it allowing brands to connect with diverse audiences through multiple touchpoints.
Digital Experience Platform allows companies to integrate any number of backend systems. It allows marketers to design and deliver highly differentiated and personalized customer experiences.
While deciding whether you need a DXP or not, I would suggest not just thinking about the current condition of your brand. Think of the next 5 years. Analyze what benefits you can gain by developing and implementing a customer DXP and how it supports and empowers your business.
When do I need to implement a Digital Experience Platform?
Well, you can implement the right DXP now only. But again, it depends on where your company is right now. However, you can consider the platform now. In today’s competitive edge, if businesses do not keep pace with the changing digital world, there are chances they are left behind.
Based on the digital maturity of your organization, you can go with a CMS for now. But, select a CMS that enables you with a pathway to grow into a DXP.
When your goal is to attain better customer engagement through digital transformation, you need to consider a CMS that can scale easily, has a wide variety of APIs for fluid integrations and can be deployed on the cloud.
As and when your organization, teams, and digital capabilities get mature, you can add more advanced features and functionality that end up implementing a DXP.
But, if you are one of the companies that are looking forward to achieving tremendous growth, then the Digital Experience Platform is the must-have digital platform for you.
A Digital Experience Platform streamlines and consolidates marketing and content-related processes and data. It also eliminates redundancy and ensures the ability to integrate fluidly.
DXP implementation processes can also be a catalyst for breaking down silos, streamlining processes, and organizing teams.
Signs that you need a Digital Experience Platform
- Need to deal with a diverse audience and multiple touchpoints
- Multiple front-end tools and back-end systems are in silos along with experience
- Invested a significant stake in digital space
- Developers and marketers in your organization are desperate to innovate with highly differentiated customer experiences
- Investing a considerable amount of time, money, and resources in integrating digital solutions that don’t work effectively together
As we have already discussed earlier in this post, the integration of AI has completely changed and simplified the way DXP works. It has simplified various jobs whether it’s about automatically identifying the visitors’ trends, using natural language processing to tag content, modifying pages, and creating customer segments. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) improve customer insights, the organization’s ROI, and overall productivity.
Organizations do not only need to focus on downstream needs such as data collection and experience delivery. They also need to consider upstream needs that involve collaborative content creation and digital asset management. To enable brands with an end-to-end content management system, DXP allows for fluid integration with other systems.
Implementation of the Digital Experience Platform has transformed the way you operate the business. It enables you with opportunities like customer-oriented engagement and risk of disruption for organizations of any size and domain. Thus, DXP is essential to meet the changing needs of today’s digital space.
Do you think your organization is ready to adopt the next level of digital transformation by implementing a Digital Experience Platform?
How Much Does a Digital Experience Platform Cost?
When choosing a Digital Experience Platform for your business, you can either go for a ready-to-use platform or create a tailored DXP platform that is specifically designed for your business and contains all the features that your business needs.
If you select any ready-to-use DXP, there will be a pre-defined cost for platform subscriptions, licensing, and other fees.
In case you are interested in considering the development of a custom DXP, the cost of a DXP depends on the features and functionality you want to cover in the solution. Compared to other digital platforms, DXP is more expensive due to the constantly increasing functionality that they offer.
Small companies need access to limited features so the cost of DXP that they need is between $7000 to $17000.
On the other hand, large-scale organizations need the Digital Experience Platform that comes with plenty of features and functionality that streamline multiple operations related to the content, marketing, and sales. For big brands, the cost of DXP is from $20000 to $50000.
These are the approx. Pricing of the DXP. The more features, integration, and configuration you need, the price will be higher. To get the exact pricing of your custom DXP, connect with our DXP experts. Discuss your requirements with our team and we will provide the exact costing of your DXP based on your pre-defined needs.
Top 5 Digital Experience Platform Trends to watch out for 2022
Brands that are seeking to reach out to a larger target audience have started considering advanced technologies like AI and ML. It helps companies to create and deliver contextual experiences and personalized content for the target audience to meet the changing demands of the customers.
The importance of the Digital Experience Platform is going to increase only. Thus, in the Digital Experience Platform guide, I have covered a few most essential DXP trends that assure your decision for DXP implementation will enable you with amazing benefits.
1. Digitally integrated business
Connected data is the key to the success of any business. Through a modular approach, you can streamline operational processes and workflows across all the tools and teams.
Implementation of DXP provides you with better insights into how the jobs performed by each team impact the other departments and the company as a whole. It also ensures providing cohesive customer experiences across multiple touchpoints.
When you pair your Digital Experience Platform with marketing automation tools, it becomes way easier for you to promote your products and services to customers without the need for constant moderation.
2. Customer Privacy
Since the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is established there is a drastic change in the way companies ensure customer privacy. It’s no longer an issue related to the marketing department. All the departments of the organization including customer support, sales, lead generation, and human resources need to change the data policy.
These days, it is very important for brands to protect and respect customer data privacy to win the customers’ trust. By ensuring customer data privacy, you can gain a huge competitive advantage.
3. Artificial Intelligence
Undoubtedly, AI contains so many amazing capabilities within it including highly effective data analytics. It enables companies with detailed insights into customer behavior and provides accurate predictions about the buyers.
AI helps brands in a smarter way by processing and analyzing the data and identifying the required actions. Algorithm dominating search engine optimization is one of the most common examples.
4. Voice assistance
Consumers are looking for voice-based assistance these days to simplify their searches. However, make sure, it provides the best values.
Integrate a voice assistance solution that allows you to create content that serves the human speech pattern. This type of interactivity will impact the UI design specifically for web-based systems and mobile apps.
5. Be open to new tech trend adoption
To keep the business up and running smoothly, companies need to adopt the changes that occurred in the business world to be future-proof and run the business constantly.
The largest and latest change that has impacted the business world significantly is the adoption of microservices and cloud platforms. Both tech inventions enable the brands and tech world with scalability and agility for processes and systems.
By adopting the latest technologies, you can address many business necessities such as voice technologies, data analytics, AI, ML, and more.
Do you want to build a Digital Experience Platform that allows you to keep pace with the latest technology trends?
How to choose a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
Many Digital Experience Platforms are available in the market. So, selecting the right one is a challenging job for any business. Especially, when you do not have basic knowledge of DXP such as what are the essential features, benefits, components, etc. a DXP provides.
Check out the below list that provides you with essential aspects of DXP.
- Ensure the DXP has advanced security features
- Select a platform that provides extreme customization and flexibility
- Make sure the platform offers good and quick customer support
- The platform should be extremely scalable
- DXP allows the integration of any of your existing enterprise systems and 3rd party applications or software
Apart from the above-listed aspects, there are many things companies need to consider while adopting a DXP solution.
The most common scenario is companies get attracted to the features offered by the platform and the company’s mission takes the back seat. Well, this should not be the case. Brands should stay focused on their unique business needs and explore the features that meet the precise needs of the brands.
Make sure you are integrating features and functionality not because they are currently trending but because they help you develop a better digital experience.
Firstly, define milestones and goals for your organization and then look for a suitable digital experience platform that helps you attain all your business objectives.
Through the Digital Experience Platform guide, I am going to unveil a few strategies and tips for selecting the right Digital Experience Platform for your company.
User Journey
Every DXP is not right for you. Before making a choice of a DXP and executing a digital experience strategy, it is advisable to understand your customers’ buying journey. Get insights into how your customers interact with your brand through different online and offline channels.
Analyze what products or services they are looking for, what devices they are using, and how they interact through channels and devices. It helps get a better idea that which technologies should be a priority to drive more customer engagement and ensure consistent business growth.
Create a user journey map based on the current capabilities that will help you identify the gaps. You need to select a DXP that fills these gaps and is the best digital Experience Platform for your organization.
Agility
The most critical part of DXP that businesses should consider is how quickly the platform allows you to get to market and its ability to adapt to your specific business needs.
As market demand keeps changing swiftly, facilitate your target audience with the most advanced and innovative digital experience that they haven’t thought of. Offering outdated experiences, there are chances you lose your customers. So, implement a DXP that is quickly adaptable by your company.
Integrations
As the tech world is blooming with the emergence of a lot of advanced tools and technologies, it is highly required that the DXP allows to integration with the technologies that empower content management, eCommerce, and personalization strategies to deliver consistent and excellent omnichannel experiences.
If you are using a legacy system, then you might be facing challenges to create great digital experiences through a monolithic piece of the platform. With such solutions, you keep struggling to meet the changing demands and expectations of today’s tech-savvy customers. It also costs your organization to keep the solution running flawlessly. Eventually, it affects negatively to your ability to compete and innovate.
Considering a feature-packed Digital Experience Platform, companies can integrate the technologies and leverage the MACH methodology.
Are you aware of the MACH approach? If not, then let’s understand it.
MACH is an acronym for the technologies that are developed based on four modern principles.
Microservices
Microservices are applications that can be easily scaled, maintained, and deployed independently to facilitate customers with infinite services.
API
API is an abbreviation for Application Programming (API) Interface. The technology connects different services to design a composable ecosystem that can be rearranged as and when required.
Cloud
Cloud-native platforms are delivered as a service by a vendor. It allows limitless scalability that‘s still affordable.
Headless infrastructure
Headless technology is popular as it decouples the presentation layer and logic. The headless architecture allows for channel-independent service delivery and endless integrations.
When all the above-listed components come together in a digital experience platform, it becomes easier for the marketing team to create personalized omnichannel digital experiences.
6 Questions to prepare before choosing a DXP
If you have just started exploring the different digital experience platforms for your business, do some analysis first. You must get the answer to these six questions to get clarity on your business objectives and project requirements.
1. What business objectives do you want to achieve through the Digital Experience Platform?
Digital experience platform implementation should not be part of your business agenda. It should be considered to empower your digital strategy. Thus, brands need to set the business objectives at the very first stage, define the roadmap, strategies, and role for DXP, then look for the right DXP that helps you attain all the business objectives seamlessly.
2. What capabilities do you need to meet your business objectives?
You might aspire to achieve excellence in omnichannel, analytics, and eCommerce delivery. This list might be longer. Create the list of your requirements, and identify and group the requirements for which you already own all the required capabilities and the needs for which you need to acquire the capabilities.
3. What are the key stakeholders?
Determine a small group of individuals to discuss and guide the decisions.
4. What is unique about the digital experience that you curate for your customers?
Understand the needs of your publishing environment and marketing campaigns. Based on the evaluation select a DXP. Make sure it addresses your business requirements and aligns with the organization’s current workflows.
5. What does the existing marketing technology stack look like?
Before selecting a digital experience platform, conduct a thorough review of your current marketing technology stack. List down who the company uses which part of the technology task, which stages of the purchase cycle every component supports, and any existing connections within the stack.
Along with marketing technologies, think about other technologies too such as ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, and so on that you need to integrate with DXP. This is very essential information that helps you plan, deploy, and adoption of a reliable Digital Experience Platform.
6. What type of analytical insight do you need from DXP to make strategic business decisions?
Understand the real picture of the data that you want to collect and use the insights that the data reveals. It helps you choose the best Digital Experience Platform.
Are you ready to select and implement a right Digital Experience Platform that empower your ultimate business goals and marketing strategy?
Top 5 Digital Experience Platforms that you should consider for your business
There are many Digital Experience Platforms available in the market. More options, more confusion. The Digital Experience Platform guide contains the list of some so the most popular and reliable Digital Experience platforms that you can consider for your business.
Pimcore
Pimcore allows you to create and deliver a seamless and unified digital experience. It manages, optimizes, and delivers contextualized and personalized experiences to each target audience across every customer touchpoint.
It enables you with a decoupled web content management strategy and headless content delivery approach. Pimcore allows you to build hybrid DXP systems to gain the benefits of both worlds.
With Pimcore DXP, you can ensure cross-channel continuity throughout the whole digital experience and customer journey. It contains customer journey analytics and customer data management as complementary systems.
It also allows you to integrate and scale any of your existing enterprise systems and third-party applications and software or marketing software stake.
Key features of Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform
- Web content management
- Headless content management
- Multi-channel delivery
- Personalization and analytics
- Web2Print
- Integrated PIM module, and more…
Benefits offered by Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform
- Leverage the perfect amalgamation of content, commerce, and contextualization
- Create extremely customized, relevant, and personalized experiences to improve your behavioral targeting
- Advanced marketing technologies streamline data, processes, and operations to address the needs of your target audience
- DXP can be connected with eCommerce systems seamlessly to improve the ROI of B2C or B2B businesses
- Leverage single source and multi-channel publishing
Adobe Experience Management
Leverage the Adobe Experience Platform to bring your data into action. It’s an open-source system that transforms all your Abode and non-Adobe data and creates robust customer profiles. You can update these profiles in real-time and also utilize AI-driven insights to deliver the right experience across multiple channels.
Key features of Adobe Experience Platform
- Behavior-driven insights
- Intelligent optimization
- Real-time personalization
- Customer journeys at scale
- Real-time customer profile
- Data science workshop
- Query service, and more…
Benefits offered by Adobe Experience Management
- Maintain and update the customer data in real-time
- Deliver a unified cross-device and cross-channel experience
- Create and deliver improved tailored experiences to boost customer satisfaction
- Deliver personalized experiences through mobile apps
- Seamless integration with other customer experience management capabilities and technologies
- Store information in a centralized repository and eliminate data silos
Acquia
Acquia enables brands with a robust Digital Experience Platform that helps companies to engage customers, improve conversions, and stand out your business from competitors. They offer products like Marketing Cloud and Drupal Cloud that allow companies to create and deliver cutting-edge digital experiences across multiple channels, at any scale quickly.
Key features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform
- Autoscaling
- CMS integration
- Multi-site management
- Custom access management
- Workflow automation
- Multilingual content management
- Performance monitoring and reporting
- Integration of a variety of tools and systems, and more…
Benefits of Acquia Digital Experience Platform
- Drive tremendous traffic on your website
- Improve customer engagement and conversation
- Empower your marketing efforts by harnessing the potential of Machine Learning
- Grow your business by automating and organizing the customer journey
Sitecore
It provides a powerful Content Management System for small-scale businesses to start with. Sitecore enables you with advanced features like marketing automation, customer data, AI, analytics, and many other capabilities to define customer journeys along with personalized content across any channel, in real-time.
Key features of Sitecore Experience Platform
- Conquer omnichannel delivery
- Cross channels campaigns
- Experience editor
- Marketing automation
- Personalization with AI
- Seamless integration
- Omnichannel distribution, and more…
Benefits of Sitecore Experience Platform
- Best in class content personalization
- Powerful cloud
- AI-powered marketing automation
- Holistic end-to-end ecosystem
- Unparalleled content management
- Insight-driven online storefront
- Omnichannel content delivery
- Single platform management
Liferay
Liferay allows you to build a solution that delivers fast, secure and connected digital experiences to your target audience. It allows companies to enable customers with personalized experiences throughout their buying journey.
It is designed in such a way that it works seamlessly within your existing business processes and technologies. Using the Liferay platform, you can develop intranets, websites, partner portals, integration platforms, and customer portals.
Key features of Liferay Digital Experience Platform
- Identity management
- Personal data management
- User management
- Content modeling
- Enterprise DAM
- Online document editing
- Automatic versioning
- Auto-tagging, and more…
Benefits of Liferay Digital Experience Platform
- Create unified customer experiences
- Streamline varied business processes
- Empower your digital strategy
Do you want to select the right Digital Experience Platform from the above list?
How to get started with Digital Experience Platform Strategy?
If you think your organization is ready to leverage digital transformation by adopting a robust Digital Experience Platform, then you need to develop a content-driven website or an eCommerce platform.
A website and commerce solution is the customer touchpoint where your target audience interacts frequently. Thus, it will work as the strongest foundation of the Digital Experience Platform.
The next thing that you need to take care of while choosing a DXP is who your target audience is. You need to define whether you need a commercial, portal, or CMS DXP (as listed in this post only).
Selecting the right DXP is a critical job as you need to consider more criteria such as your business size, specific business needs, and customer touchpoints.
How is Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform the right choice for you?
Pimcore is an open-source Digital Experience Platform that is built using a modular set of technologies. It ensures delivering personalized and targeted experiences to an edge variety of target audiences. It contains advanced functionality such as multichannel publishing and a user-friendly single source.
It offers Web Content Management that allows you to manage and compose the content as well as deliver multifaceted and complex digital experiences across different digital channels such as web, mobile apps, social media, IoT, AI-powered conversational interfaces, digital marketplaces, in-store experience, and more.
Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform allows you to integrate different systems and equipped you with a consolidated platform for Product Information Management (PIM), eCommerce, Web Content Management (WCM), and Digital Asset Management (DAM).
The Digital Experience Platform of Pimcore comes with some amazing inherent capabilities like creating a tailored design for each of your websites while ensuring their control through a single interface in order to deliver compelling content and commerce experiences.
Leveraging the analytical capabilities of Pimcore’s DXP, you can create a unified customer profile based on third-party or first-party data streams such as CRM data, on-site user behavior, conversions, and more.
Tags: