With customer expectations constantly rising, global organizations are finding it necessary to change the way they interact with their customers. After all—as 32 percent of them will walk away from a brand if they have just one bad experience!
Clearly, improving digital experiences has a tremendous effect on ROI, with 65 percent of U.S. customers citing positive experiences with a brand as more influential than advertising.
Think about it – when you shop online, there’s the first time shopping experience, but also experiences related to recommendations or ads on social media or email. It’s a lot to keep track of, which begs the question – how can brands ensure they’re offering the best digital experience at each and every touchpoint?
This is what digital experience platforms help with immensely.
Digital experience platforms (DXPs) help companies offer the right content at exactly the right time across digital channels, allowing customers to have a cohesive experience regardless of where they are engaging with brands online/offline. At the same time, DXPs also provides customer quick access to information they need. Further, if that DXP is integrated with digital marketing automation, then the possibilities are endless.
If your brand isn’t using a DXP, there is no better time to get on board. Let’s take a look at what a DXP is and how it can be advantageous for your marketing efforts.
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What is a Digital Experience Platform?
That’s all well and good, but if this is the first time you’re hearing the term “digital experience platform,” we need to take a step back and look at what this phrase even means for your business.
First coined by Gartner, a digital experience platform is defined as an “integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy and continually improve websites, portals, mobile apps and other digital experiences. DXPs manage the presentation layer based on the role, security privileges and preferences of an individual. They combine and coordinate applications, including content management, search and navigation, personalization, integration and aggregation, collaboration, workflow, analytics, mobile and multichannel support.
Broadly speaking, these digital technologies help companies solve an increasingly complex problem: meeting the growing expectations of customers. Customers expect personalized, connected experiences that they can access through a range of digital channels (web, mobile, social media) and digital devices (wearables, home devices, digital displays).
When integrated correctly, a digital experience platform can help a customer feel that companies truly care about their challenges by supplying quick, easy access to information customers need. At the same time, these platforms also enable greater data leverage by connecting data points across channels to give brands customer insights for better targeting, personalization and improved ROI.
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Why Do Companies Need a Digital Experience Platform?
The content revolution has exploded across all platforms, devices, and networks. Brands are now able to connect with their customers at every stage of the customer journey through digital experiences that are immersive and interactive. To be effective, this requires coordination between teams who work on different parts of an enterprise’s digital infrastructure.
In many ways, today’s content is the foundation of digital experience. A DXP helps you create content-driven digital journeys, whether that content is an email marketing campaign, a website or user interface, or any other digital touchpoint that engages customers across multiple channels.
Gartner Offers Key Insights into Digital Experience Platforms
When it comes to implementing DXPs, Gartner highlights the following:
- Define your Business Requirements: When defining business processes and content requirements, make sure they are clear so that workflows can be implemented.
- Design a Robust Digital Experience Strategy: To maximize the potential of your content strategy, it is important to design a site taxonomy ahead of time. This will allow you and other team members access into different areas that need more detailed planning as well as customize elements like navigation bars according personalization requirements for various years or customer segmentations.
- Test, Train, and Select a Platform Based on Employee Feedback: To find the best collaboration platforms, establish solid research. Making sure it’s rigorous and tested with multiple pilot groups will lead you in achieving success for your business needs!
- Access Vendor or a Partner’s Support During the Implementation: Insist on a written commitment from the vendor that they will work with your team to address any pain points you have. They can either provide answers for these concerns or commit fully and add requested features into their log in order to address your needs.
- Ensure Regular Upgrades for Better Optimization: Upgrading your platform is a necessary step in order to maintain the best personalized experiences.
A Closer Look at Digital Experience Platform Features
A typical DXP will include a content platform, analytics, personalization, digital asset management, and customer data management. Let’s take a closer look at each of these features:
- Content Platform: Unlike a content management system, a content platform is an important part of a modern tech stack. Instead of being a closed system that cuts your content off from other tools, content platforms aggregate, structure, and deliver content across an organization’s digital footprint – like a more flexible headless MCS. Some also have flexible APIs that enable businesses to build engaging experiences across markets and channels.
- Analytics: An analytics solution helps digital marketers define the business requirements for their DXPs by providing insight into who their customers are (demographics), what they’re looking at (behavior) and how they feel about the brand’s products, services, or even their opinion of the brand itself (sentiment). This data creates an accurate profile of each customer that brands can then use to personalize the shopping experience in real time across any digital channel.
- Personalization: The digital experience platform builds the foundation for digital personalization by aggregating customer data (from websites, apps, CRM databases, digital devices) into a central location. That information then uses machine learning to create an understanding of each user’s interests and needs. It turns vast stores of raw data into actionable intelligence that can be used to tailor content for specific users based on their browsing history.
- Digital Asset Management: In addition to sharing digital assets across channels and devices with digital asset management features, DXPs also typically include search engine optimization tools that help brands efficiently build new content from existing sources. This saves marketers time that they can instead invest in developing customer-specific campaigns.
- Customer Data Management: With customer data management, digital experience platforms allow companies to capture and aggregate information about digital interactions with their brand, such as visits to their website or app usage data. This gives digital marketers a way to create customer journey maps based on actual behavior instead of guesswork.
Top 4 Advantages of DXP Solutions
Overall, the benefit of DXPs are their capabilities in fulfilling customer obsession. Here are some advantages of DXPs:
1. Ability to improve digital experiences: Digital experience platforms enable digital marketers to quickly and efficiently identify digital customer engagement opportunities, such as negative social media reviews or abandoned shopping carts. They also provide the tools necessary for digital marketers to deliver personalized interactions that encourage shoppers to convert. Further, API-first designs allow marketers to maintain complete control over every touchpoint and easily implement content updates and other changes.
2. Collection of customer data: DXPs enable companies to track and analyze customer behavior at every digital touchpoint. This allows you to collect data that shows you how customers are interacting with the brand. This enables customer experience to be continuously optimized and needs to be met.
3. Maximizes digital marketing investments: DXPs have a foundation for digital experience management built directly into their content, so they can be customized for different digital marketing initiatives across any industry. That means a single platform can help a company manage content and its SEO efforts, build automated customer journeys based on online behavior, or even create an omnichannel strategy for delivering cross-channel promotions.
4. Achieves better business outcomes: Digital experience platforms are designed with user experience at the forefront because this creates digital interactions that maintain customer engagement and loyalty.
Don’t Forget: The Best DXP Technologies are Composable
According to the Gartner report “2021 Insight Paper for Application Composition Technology,” “By 2023, 60 percent of mainstream organizations will list composable business as a strategic objective and will seek composability in new application investments.”
One of Gartner’s top strategic trends for 2022, composable applications are built from business-centric modular components that make it easier to use and reuse code. This feature accelerates the time-to-market for new software solutions and can unlock new enterprise value in the process.
A composable DXP, meaning a DXP that is assembled from a series of best-of-breed solutions, is highly recommended to future-proof your technology stack. You can customize and scale your DXP, integrate third-party tools, and your platform can react to external forces such as market changes, for added flexibility. Some monolithic DXPs can result in vendor lock-in to a suite of products that could lead to problems later on, including costly support and customization.
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Partner with Stefanini to Start Building Your DXP
As you rely more on software, platforms, and cloud applications to run your business, you need a strategic partner that has the capabilities to both offer guidance and support throughout the application lifecycle as well as the latest technologies.
Connect with your audience at the right time by leveraging our solutions backed by data science, technology, and strategy. Our digital marketing solutions focus on strategy, data science, media, and advertising and leverage data intelligence to boost business, connect people, and create experiences. Using our expertise, best practices, and statistical techniques, we produce actionable business insights based on data mining and predictive models. Our insights are further solidified through research and analytics.
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