DXP – a must-have in every modern company

In today’s marketing and business environment, various tools and applications are mushrooming. In many instances, companies utilise dozens of different digital products! And this situation can cause some complications. I’m sure you will agree that there is a significant difference between introducing new digital solutions in an uncoordinated way, nearly randomly, and doing so with a long-term vision that takes full integration between all the ecosystem’s ingredients into account and focuses on users and their needs.

The outdated approach to digital activities

The old-fashioned approach to introducing digital products was simple – new products were implemented to satisfy isolated business goals of specific stakeholders within an organisation. Let’s use a simple example:

Suppose your marketing department was given a goal to improve digital presence. For this reason, they ordered a new, more engaging website with a new CMS system. At the same time, the sales team needed to collect and track leads more efficiently. That’s why they demanded a new CRM platform. And yes, both these IT solutions were necessary, but no one thought about integrating them in any way.

This approach, thankfully already outdated, had one important disadvantage: It didn’t take into consideration the big picture of the company. As a result, you ended up with a technical ecosystem that consisted of a number of separate digital products that were completely detached from one another, making it difficult to make the most of these apps and programs.

Today, a more holistic view is becoming prevalent. Companies and agencies are currently starting to treat each of the newly introduced digital products as a part of a broader digital platform supporting various stakeholders and engaging users through various touchpoints.

And this is precisely what Digital Experience Platforms are all about. The DXPs have recently become a name commonly describing a digital IT solution or digital ecosystem that integrates various digital tools and apps in a coordinated way, concentrating on user experience and engagement.

The characteristic of the Digital Experience Platforms

From a business perspective, Digital Experience Platforms are user-focused solutions enabling organisations to make the effective use of:

• Digital touchpoints (mobile, web, AR, IoT)
• Digital products (CMS, e-Commerce, intranet)
• Customer data analysis

From a technical standpoint, Digital Experience Platforms are complex software solutions comprising digital products that are able to exchange data through the one Application Programming Interface (API) layer, with an architecture designed for further extensions (e.g., microservices), and often accompanied by data analytics and optimisation tools.

THE THREE PILLARS OF THE DXP CONCEPT

• User-centricity: Nowadays, keeping customer attention requires a personalised approach. Modern DXPs analyse user data and behaviour to execute sales and marketing activities efficiently. That's why the majority of DXPs offer content recommendations, A/B testing and even some AI-powered techniques that help you fulfil needs of your users.
• Omnichannel: The whole idea behind DXPs is based on their versatility. Today, brands sell and communicate with customers through various channels: Mobile marketing, websites, social media profiles, newsletters etc. The DXPs help you maintain full control over these channels and integrate activities conducted through each of them.
• Elasticity: DXP has to be an open digital ecosystem that’s ready to grow together with the organisation and its needs. Here, the futureproof API-driven architecture is essential. As your company develops (and so does the market), some new components or applications ought to be introduced into a DXP, and they have to exchange data with the other ecosystem’s components. And this is what a fully-fledged DXP guarantees.

Key elements of the DXP

Although every DXP is different and shall reflect the business needs of a concrete organisation, there are elements (solutions) that are often a part of it:

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)

A typical CMS system provides your website (and sometimes applications, too) with the necessary tools that are needed to deliver content. Content Management Systems usually have editorial, reporting, SEO optimisation and administration features.

The DXP offers so much more as it provides content automation and delivery in an omnichannel model, i.e. via websites, newsletters, apps and social media profiles. And because DXPs have analytics modules, they will help you assess the results of your content-related actions.

E-COMMERCE

In the e-commerce sector, there are two significant aspects of the DXPs you ought to be particularly interested in. For starters, e-commerce features provide you with the pre-purchase, fulfilment and product management options. Typically, you also have access to customers’ shopping carts, payment modules and carriers’ management.

Secondly, DXPs facilitate the smart use of customer data, which is extremely helpful concerning product recommendations and widely understood personalisation.

MOBILE

We live in the mobile-first world. If you want to engage users and catch their attention, you have to offer them the best possible mobile experiences. In some cases, reaching mobile users means the need to build a dedicated mobile application that’s fully integrated with the DXP. In other situations, you ought to have the possibility of using various PWA (Progressive Web Apps) or RWD (Responsive Web Design) techniques.

Regardless of the approach towards mobile, the key is to make it integrated with the rest of the digital ecosystem, to collect and learn from customer data flowing through the mobile touchpoint.

ANALYTICS & OPTIMISATION TOOLS

Let’s be honest here. Today, there is no marketing without data analytics. Every decent marketing and sales tool comes with an analytics feature that helps you understand how your efforts influence your customers, what your conversion rates are and what can be done to improve your campaigns. Obviously, marketing data comes from various sources (e.g., Google Analytics, CMS platforms, social media monitoring tools, brand monitoring tools). Thanks to the DXP, you can integrate all your marketing and sales data into one platform, making analytics and optimisation a breeze.

DATA & INTEGRATION LAYER

As you already know, when it comes to DXPs, full integration between various tools and apps is at the very core of this platform. Digital Experience Platforms have to integrate and collect data from all the relevant apps and software that your company uses in order to improve marketing and sales efforts. So this layer is essential. In fact, it’s your starting point regarding DXPs! Without this layer, all that we talk about in this article would not be possible.

Two ways of building the DXP

There are two main approaches to introducing the DXP into an organisation:

• The single-stack approach means building the platform based on either an all-in-one product or a suite of products from the same vendor (hence the name “single-stack”). There are several well-known vendors offering mature solutions suitable for building medium and large-sized DXPs. In their yearly report, Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, recognises five leading DXP providers in alphabetical order: Acquia, Adobe, Optimizely (former Episerver), Liferay and Sitecore.

• The lean approach, on the other hand, means building the platform based on a set of individually chosen digital solutions connected through a tailor-made API-based integration layer. The choice of products (so-called Digital Experience Stack) has to reflect specific business needs and goals of the organisation and often includes a headless CMS (e.g., Contentful) as a content storage and data provider for the end-user touchpoints.

THE DXP APPROACH: SINGLE-STACK An all-in-one DXP offers a suite of products that satisfies most of the customers’ needs, usually consisting of CMS, e-commerce, digital marketing tools and connectors to third-party back-office systems. This approach has both positive and negative consequences. Building a DXP on a suite from one vendor usually means no troubles with integrating various DXP components with each other. In addition, there are fewer places to make mistakes while designing a DXP, since the architecture, as well as major components, are given upfront.

On the other hand, big all-in-one suites may sometimes be perceived as either too extensive or not flexible enough. Fortunately, single-stack vendors usually offer a flexible licencing model allowing organisations to buy and utilise only those components that are needed, with an option to extend the ecosystem in the future. For example, Optimizely is based on three major components:

• Content Cloud: It’s the basic CMS feature that can be extended with
• Commerce Cloud (e-commerce features) and
• Intelligence Cloud (data analytics features)

THE DXP APPROACH: LEAN

Unlike the all-in-one approach, a lean DXP has to be designed from scratch. But it doesn’t mean it has to be a costly or time-consuming endeavour. Actually, in many cases, time-to-market is even shorter! Developing the DXP based on individually chosen components means implementing only the functionality that really brings value in the given situation.

The key success factor here is a well-thought-out API-first architecture integrating platform components and enabling further extensions. However, it is equally important to make a proper choice of products (platform’s components) that offer implementation flexibility and can be easily paired together. For these reasons, lean DXPs are often based on so-called headless solutions, like headless CMS (e.g., Contentful) or headless commerce (e.g., Commercetools, Shopify).

The headless solutions detach user touchpoints from the business logic regardless of what this logic may be. Usually, user touchpoints (like a website’s frontend or a mobile application) have to be tailor-made and connected with the business logic through an API-driven layer. The separation of user touchpoints and business logic makes such an architecture a perfect match for building DXPs. Headless solutions take care of the business logic (e.g., handling orders and transactions) leaving freedom of crafting tailor-made user experience for designers and developers.

In addition, it is relatively simple to connect several headless solutions to the same user touchpoints. For example, an organisation may have a website and mobile application provided with data from both headless CMS and headless commerce.

The Digital Experience Platforms: Summary

In this article, I tackled a lot of questions related to Digital Experience Platforms. Let’s make a quick summary of what we talked about today:

• DXPs are digital ecosystems that enable you to integrate various tools and apps within one comprehensive platform.
• DXPs come with analytics and optimisation features that help you make the most of data you possess and improve your marketing campaigns.
• There are two major approaches to DXPs. You can decide to use a ready-made solution (single-stack approach) or build one entirely from scratch (lean approach).
• Your company can use DXPs whether you run an online store, a marketing agency, or a B2B company. The beauty of this solution lies in its flexibility and versatility. No matter what industry you operate in, a properly designed DXP will help you improve your marketing campaigns.

If you have any questions regarding DXPs, or you are interested in implementing them in your company – drop us a line! We’ve been working with DXPs for several years now, and we simply adore this solution. We’ll do our best to help you find and configure a platform that will completely fulfil your needs and expectations.