The term ‘digital experience platform’ (DXP) might imply it’s your one-stop-shop that delivers your entire digital experience, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
With thousands of different technologies and solutions on the market, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the options. Deciding on the best combination of different solutions, or a ‘suite’ of technologies from one vendor, depends on your goals and what type of customer journey you wish to build or customer engagement to offer.
Creating the DXP that is right for you starts with selecting a set of tools, paired with smart decision-making layers on the front-end. And no matter how advanced these systems may be, you still need the right expertise in order to successfully connect all your data to your smart software.
Without well-structured customer data and segmentation, your software won’t be able to optimize its work. Structuring your data is vital for building a richer and personalized customer experience that is targeted at the right segment. You need to capture the relationships between customers and products, and be aware of which stage of your digital experience they’re in. Fortunately, machine learning will continue to make software smarter.
This element of the DXP is your single point of truth for all images and media. Digital assets should be in high resolution, so they can be easily adapted, transformed, or transcoded for various distribution channels. Metadata for your assets should be detailed and customer-centric.
The WCMS an essential part of your presentation layer. The term DXP was originally used for this specific technology sector, but this element alone doesn’t paint the complete picture anymore. With a WCMS you’re able to manage content on both a single channel or on multiple digital channels, by using various management solutions all based on the same core repository.
A PIM is comparable to a structured database that stores and manages your product data. And while this element is especially relevant for product companies and retailers, it can be used to present basically anything and everything to your audience. The data it manages will be aligned with your digital assets and customer data, and can be brought together in targeted campaigns. Read more about PIM and Data Management →
The more you capture and discover about your customers, the better you can target your messaging and craft a digital experience to match their wishes and preferences.
Multi-channel marketing is complicated, but with the right tools you can easily run and manage cross-channel campaigns. The technology also needs to be aware of time and location, so that targeted messages can be delivered while someone is shopping in your store.
This software helps manage marketing resources, such as content, campaigns, schedules, and budgets.
While your WCMS can support you in the creation of mobile applications (e.g. responsive web applications), more specialised mobile middleware has proven to be "smarter" than your CMS in certain cases. It can connect to your customer data in real-time and deliver tailored messages to a mobile visitor based on their history, GPS location, or other time-related information.
At any given point, you may need to implement new tools for exchanging data. APIs act as brokers of information and deliver content from multiple repositories to multiple channels.
Data governance is the specification of decision rights. It functions as an accountability framework that ensures the appropriate behaviour in the valuation, creation, consumption, and control of data and analytics.
With our demo, you will get insights into the use cases we implemented for our customers and their results and see for yourself what a DXP can do for your business.
"Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7x more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience." (Forrester)
Below we go over a comparison of the best vendors according to Gartner, along with their specific strengths and cautions.
Adobe is based in San Jose, California, U.S. and can be considered as a Leader in the DXP market.
Its DXP is the Adobe Experience Cloud, which includes analytics, personalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and other capabilities. Adobe has a global presence in terms of its internal capacity, partners and system integrator channel.
Its DXP is most often used for B2C use cases, and to a lesser extent for B2B.
Strengths
Cautions
Bloomreach is based in Mountain View, California, U.S. and is recognized as a visionary vendor in the DXP space.
Its DXP is called Bloomreach Experience (brX). It’s available as a hybrid cloud offering – providing some elements as SaaS, others as PaaS – and is used for both B2B and B2C use cases.
Bloomreach focuses on positioning its DXP as a front end for digital commerce scenarios.
Strengths
Cautions
SAP is based in Walldorf, Germany.
It has a global presence, serves multiple industries, and is a serious contender in the DXP market. However, they lack the vision of the current market leaders and as a result may struggle to fully meet future demands from a technology or business perspective.
Its DXP is the SAP Cloud Platform and can be used for B2E (business-to-employee), in addition to certain B2B and B2C use cases.
Strengths
Cautions
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