Drive Success with Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Written by Poonam Chandersy

Technical Content Writer

Create an authentic customer-centric experience, use the best-in-class CMS, robust eCommerce, and advanced personalization and marketing automation features with Optimizely. Optimizely offers multiple APIs and extensions, flexible customization, and integration possibilities based on a secure platform.

The Optimizely Digital Experience Platform is an end-to-end, full-stack digital platform service package including content management, digital marketing, enterprise search, and digital commerce in a single cloud service. The platform ensures high availability and performance with the configuration and maintenance of required components.

What is a Digital Experience Platform?

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a platform that provides digital experiences across a broad range of digital touchpoints. Some of the functionalities found in a DXP include content management, eCommerce, personalization, and experimentation. Gartner defines a (DXP) as "an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences."

Digital experience platforms have proven to be an evolution of traditional web content management systems to help map the entire digital customer lifecycle, from content creation to deployment to measurement and iteration. In addition, DXPs handle data management and user experiences so digital marketers can focus on customer needs and engagement.

In a nutshell, DXPs provide a centralized way to help build, manage and optimize digital journeys. Businesses need to have a central experience management platform to drive digital customer experiences across all digital touchpoints in an increasingly digital world. DXPs provide marketers with a robust technology stack for helping to create the best digital experiences for their customers.

Components of a Digital Experience Platform

While DXPs components are still emerging, several features are standard across most DXPs; they include:

  • Content Management – Content is the core of digital experiences, so most DXPs provide content management system (CMS) capabilities. A DXP serves as a central repository for an organization's content. This content can be presented across omnichannel touchpoints, whether on the website, blog, mobile app, social media post, or even an IoT device.
  • Asset Management – A functionality related to content management is digital asset management. As with content, usually in a text form, DXPs also serves as a central repository for digital assets, including images, videos, and audio files used in different contexts. In addition, DXPs utilize cloud infrastructure to provide scalability to match the user's needs.
  • Commerce – Commerce is the heart of any business, and DXPs enable companies to transact on the web by providing eCommerce functionality efficiently. Digital experience platforms handle all the backend work needed to set up a digital storefront, accept payments, and track orders.
  • Customer Relationship Management – Customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities are closely related to commerce. A DXP tracks customer data to build long-term customer relationships and create a personalized experience for every customer.
  • Insights, Analytics & Intelligence – It is not sufficient for a DXP to host content. Modern DXPs also help to provide analytics and insights into user behaviour workflows. Through extensive data analysis and content intelligence technologies, digital experience platforms can provide real-time insights into user behavior and make proactive recommendations for optimizing the experience.
  • Personalization & Automation – Another capability of DXPs is personalization. As the DXP is the central store of user data, DXPs can analyze behavioral data and first-party data to create personalized experiences for each user. In addition, many of these customized experiences can be automated, helping marketers scale their experiences.
  • Experimentation – Advanced digital experience platforms incorporate digital experimentation functionality. This allows users to seamlessly run A/B tests on their content and experiences to optimize experiences and reduce the risk of new changes, using statistical analysis to make data-driven decisions.
  • APIs and integrations – There isn't a single software platform that can do it all. However, the top DXPs provide flexible APIs and an open architecture that can be easily integrated with the best-of-breed solutions for the DXP technology stack to build a complete digital experience platform that suits business needs.

Optimizely as a Digital Experience Platform

Optimizely Content Cloud is a SaaS platform, an excellent example of a DXP. Episerver offers a headless CMS that can manage all digital content and assets and includes a built-in B2B eCommerce functionality for easy online transactions. Optimizely's features include advanced analytics and content intelligence that provide insights into a site's performance and content and offer recommendations on where the content can be improved.

While it uses behavioral analysis and machine learning to provide automated recommendations and personalization, Optimizely also includes digital experimentation so that businesses can run digital experiments across your technology stack. Finally, Optimizely can integrate with popular CRM solutions such as Salesforce and various other marketing automation tools that help to provide a central repository for data from all digital channels.

Conclusion

Optimizely conducted a study on cloud consumption between March and May of 2019, comparing it to the same timeframe in 2020. Customers using Optimizely's cloud infrastructure saw a positive impact by investing in the digital domain. From 2019 to 2020, the average engagement was up by 70%, and the average conversions were up by 43%.

Focusing on customer experiences is a winning strategy in times of uncertainty. Investing in digital is crucial. If you are looking for a way to connect your entire digital journey, personalize experiences and ultimately leverage the digital arm of your business. In that case, Optimizely's DXP is the answer. With over a decade of experience implementing enterprise DXP solutions, let our team of experts at Royal Cyber support your implementation and help you get the most value from your investment. Get in touch with us to learn more!

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