Creating Omnichannel Experiences through DXP

Let’s say it’s the World Cup, and you’re watching a quarter-finals match of your favorite team from a sports mobile application. Luckily, your team wins, and you rejoice and celebrate on social media. Probably within seconds, you’ll be presented with opportunities and advertisements to purchase all things World Cup such as your favorite team’s jersey or uniform on your mobile phone’s browser, to rewatch the highlights on a website, send reminders to your smartwatch or set up activation for your voice-assistant speaker to update you with the latest news, scores, and sneak-peeks into the teams and matches. What is described, is a level of omnichannel experiences that lives and breaths through digital experiences, or DXP.

For eCommerce and retail brands, creating the ultimate digital experience platform roots in pinpointing the exact customer journeys and experiences that people want, and the touchpoints they interact with in order to complete their customer journey. Yet, as MarTech spaces continue to grow, it’s easy to get lost in a crowd of new technologies and platforms that offer such services. Key decision-makers amongst brands and organizations alike, both technical and non-technical, must understand the essential pillars of a DXP solution, the benefits it reaps towards an omnichannel strategy and the way forwards through a content management system that propels and optimizes their efforts further.

What does DXP mean in the context of omnichannel?

Let’s start from the beginning by first defining what a DXP is. There are several definitions that we can lead by - firstly by Gartner Research, a DXP is quoted as “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.”

Similarly, our Web CMS Glossary also cites DXP as “a piece of technology that incorporates elements of a CMS and provides users with an extendable centralized hub that can be enhanced with other services to improve the creation, management, and delivery of digital experiences across different platforms and devices. DXPs are especially important for omnichannel marketing initiatives.”

Digital transformation and its platforms have consequently contributed to an improved customer experience, with a McKinsey study finding a 20-30% increase in customer satisfaction and economic growth of 20-50% to companies that take on a DXP. Consequently, customer retention rates being 90% higher for omnichannel versus a single-channel experience. In short, it comes down to DXP being a digital experience platform that seeks to democratize and connect consumers to brands with omnichannel capabilities. It is composed of three key parts:

• A content management system
• Content Personalization and translation
• A platform that is automated, web-based, and personalizable

A DXP also seeks to organize and optimize digital experiences across multiple channels and platforms. A DXP is composed of the following different parts:

• Content Management System (CMS) or Content Hub
• Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)
• Collaboration & Workflow Tools
• Analytics and Optimization
• Personalization
• Search & Navigation
• Integrations

A headless content management system, like Storyblok, is exactly an example of that. It allows you to not only create captivating digital experiences through omnichannel means that thus drive customer engagement, but additionally allows you to integrate with other ERPS, marketing automation tools, A/B testing, localization tools, and analytic systems to give you the best-pick and 360° view of your customers, their experiences and your content operations.

Such benefits and pillars are essential in your decision-making process towards creating a DXP geared for omnichannel distribution.

Let’s explore a few pillars that power modern DXP solutions.

The pillar of modern DXP solutions

Content management systems

The first and most essential component of any digital experience platform is a content management system. A CMS software is the foundational tool for creating content-centric experiences, and content management systems are essential for making sure content is consistent and relevant to a given channel. Omnichannel marketing programs need content management systems that integrate with all customer-facing interfaces as well as the business systems (such as CRM, analytics, MarTech software, and so on).

The CMS is responsible for delivering content-centric experiences wherever they interact with consumers. What’s more, CMSs act as centralized content hubs to manage content in a singular location that can be distributed across various channels and devices.

Collaboration is a key opportunity that CMSs give in creating innovative digital experiences that captivate your customers. Through a suite or best-of-breed solution of various products, you can empower your developers and marketers with cherry-picked tools to propel their marketing and content experience efforts and define workflows.

Omnichannel & Personalization Capabilities

Omnichannel and personalization are essential components of a DXP and the CMS that supports it. Omnichannel campaigns can deliver personalized content that resonates and connects with your audience, through insights that the software can pick out and deliver to your campaign/content creation. Websites are no longer the focal point of digital experiences, where the wave of mobile apps and IoT devices is quickly taking over the market. More than ever, it has become essential for brands to keep up in reciprocating such engagement and fluid content that moves with their audience with a level of personalization, regardless of the channel they are on. A headless CMS, for example, allows marketers exactly that - to deliver content to different platforms, channels, and audience personas.

Brands like Timberland, for example, creates a seamless customer experience in their retail locations using near-field communication technology. Near-field communication technology is a type of software that handles data transfer tools such as Apple Pay and Android Pay, allowing uses to tap their mobile devices against a chip dive that connects, and transfers information between the two devices. Rather than using an eCommerce platform, Timberland providers their shoppers a tablet that can be scanned with its products and signage across the shop (Tap Wall) that then shows information about the product or offers. As shoppers continuously scan different products, a personalization software then recognizes the shopper’s habits and provides product suggestions based on their shopping history.

Digital experience platforms and marketing automation

Being able to deliver content-driven experiences that are contextually aware and personalized is essential for achieving holistic omnichannel customer experiences. Personalization brings an experience of interacting with a brand in a way that is personally tailored to your content and preferences and distributed across various devices and channels omnichannel. The result: Brands love to be served with contextualized, personalized, and hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences.

Integrations & Extendibility

A key look-out and pillar to a modern DXP solution is its ability to integrate with other software that fit your needs, and the range of extendibility it has to offer as you grow. For example, if you are an eCommerce brand, you will need an integration with an eCommerce platform that helps optimize your digital experience, as well as localization tools if you were to tap into new markets and audiences, analytics to track your performance and customer data, email newsletter platforms that are automated, returns management, social media on-site displays, and more.

Benefits of a DXP for omnichannel experiences

Having such flexible foundational pillars that makeup a DXP only scratches the surface of what a DXP can truly do for your organization. Some other benefits include:

1. A Single Point of Control

Working with a CMS means a single point of control, with unlimited collaboration. DXPs that live with CMSs provide brands a central and localized point of control to manage and control anything from content, to analytics, eCommerce, APIs, and more. It allows your marketing, product, and development teams to separately work with their designated workflows, while collectively coming together under content, user, and site experience, and more. Such separation means workflows are not disturbed in one path, such as the backend development, meaning when works are done on for example on the backend because of an issue, when ready, can meet with the frontend efforts such as the content and design.

2. Flexible Architecture

Building from a DXP’s single point of control roots from its flexible architecture. Providing such a platform is supported through capabilities in intelligent content, automation, and deployment. This is seen in marketing campaigns for example with multiple cadences, or localization capabilities that automatically recognize a person’s location. A DXP is able to recognize and adapt with a level of personalization in content to the audience’s personal characteristics and recognize what fits best to their content consumption habits. For example, DXPs are able to sift, decipher, and segment data that is influential to data-centric decisions. Such data can include content, marketing messages, images, location, customer profiles and personas, and social media shares.

eCommerce brands especially can reap the benefits of a DXP’s flexible architecture. For example, in its ability to differentiate and identify the specific types of content that are likely to drive loyalty amongst customers, and intelligently organize such content based on personalization data, and deliver such relevant content to each individual customer.

3. Optimized Omnichannel Touchpoints

It’s a fact that DXPs, hand-in-hand with CMSs, enable brands to connect and deploy content across various touchpoints. These optimized omnichannel touchpoints are continuously adapting, with new ways of consumption increasingly hitting the market and adapting into consumer’s lives such as chatbots, voice assistants, mobile, web, VR/AR, or smartwatches. DXPs are built to reach your audience. According to a survey conducted by Aspect Software, businesses that adopted omnichannel strategies achieve a 91% year-over-year increase in customer retention rates compared to organizations that don’t.

4. Personalization & Localization

Hand-in-hand with personalization also comes localization, in tapping into new markets and audiences as you continue to grow, providing a level of personalization through language and lingo to your audience. Personalization AIs are also able to track and measure customer loyalty, learn patterns in analyzing the best content fit or needs that a consumer might need, and determine the best-suited digital experience for them. Take our example from our introduction - you’re most likely going to be targeted with content specific to your interests and needs based on your interactions with brands, content, and your own preferences.

Key Takeaways

Whether you’re already in the market in adopting a DXP or looking to learn more, we believe that a modern CMS should be DXP-ready. With every new omnichannel touchpoint, new ways of consuming content and content delivery, a headless CMS like Storyblok, with its visual editor, can be used to support a DXP architecture, while facilitating content management, collaboration, personalization, localization, and omnichannel capabilities, with the best-of-breed technologies to your needs.

To find out more about how brands use Storyblok to create omnichannel experiences, have a look at our latest case study on ‘How Made People used Storyblok to optimize growth and rebrand for Stronger’.