Tag: experience

Digital Experience Platforms: Overview, Resources, Examples

Experience is kind of the holy grail when it comes to customer interaction, from marketing and sales to customer service and brand loyalty. 

It’s something we all talk about, work toward, and set as a goal, but to some degree, it remains a concept we’re always trying to work for. 

When do we actually achieve a great customer experience in our brands? Is it something we just have to continually improve and build on as new opportunities roll out?

When a customer has a great experience with you, they are more likely to come back and buy again. 

Social media, mobile apps, in-app ads, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and more have promised to help us put experience at the forefront. 

As new options roll out, keeping customer experiences seamless and continuous across all digital platforms grows is highly important. This is where a digital experience platform (or DXP) comes in. 

What Is a Digital Experience Platform? 

Although the specifics vary by the product or vendor, a digital experience platform is a single digital hub that allows a brand to use data and AI to create and deploy custom content experiences for consumers and integrate them for consumption across an array of digital and other ecosystems.

In simpler terms, it’s a platform that lets you create custom experiences informed by your data and lets users experience them everywhere they look. 

Just as important as a definition of what a digital experience platform is what it’s not. A digital experience platform is not just a single experience provider, no matter how revolutionary or innovative. It’s also not just a series of omnichannel brand messages linked together by a series of integrations or pointing to or from a webpage. 

A digital experience platform is integrated and inclusive. It’s often an open-source platform that allows API integrations from various departments, such as sales, to deliver super personal experiences to users. Those features define this type of platform and differentiate it from others, which we will discuss later. 

What Is the Difference Between DXP, CMS, and WEM?

When it comes to content creation and management, the acronyms can start to feel like alphabet soup. DXM, CMS, and WEM have similar purposes but approach it from slightly different angles. 

Let’s look at the other two types of platforms first. 

CMS stands for a content management system. By definition, it’s software that allows you to create, manage, and share your brand’s content. In more everyday terms, it’s a platform that allows you to build your website (and its content, such as pages and blog posts) with a backend interface that doesn’t require writing the code from scratch. 

The interface is user-friendly and welcomes you to plug in your content and go. It also makes it easy for you to search through your content for reuse and resharing, create SEO-friendly content, and more. 

How is it different from WEM, or web engagement management? We can think of WEM as the next generation of content management. It’s about how we interact on the internet and how customers expect brands to interact with them. Differentiating features of web engagement management include customer engagement through conversations, community building, multichannel reach, and automation. 

Where does that leave us with a digital experience platform? It’s essentially a further evolution.

With the rise of AI and big data, we have more and more information for brands to use to deliver content that is more likely to convert. A DXP pulls information in but also delivers across multiple platforms. 

How to Know If You Need a Digital Experience Platform

If your brand has been around for a while, or if you’re used the internet for e-commerce for any amount of time, you have a website, which means you have experience with a content management system. Whether you’ve dipped your toes into WEM environments or are wondering if a DXP is right for you, let’s talk more about who needs one. 

A digital experience platform is about helping you reach people at many touchpoints and controlling the message they receive at those touchpoints. 

It’s also about receiving data from your company and letting it drive the message.

How do you know if a digital experience platform is right for you? Here are a few questions to consider:

  • Do I need more touchpoints with customers?
  • Do I need to bring data from sales, inventory, and other departments into my marketing platform?
  • Do I need to reach customers with custom and consistent messaging at every touchpoint?
  • Do I need a platform to do all these things simultaneously and from one location?
  • Are sales at a point where we can justify investing in and learning a new platform?
  • Do we have the technical support, in-house or contracted, to take on the learning curve of an emerging platform?

A digital experience platform may not be a necessary next step for every brand, but if you’re struggling to keep up with a wide range of integrations and just need a place to take everything to the next level, this may be the right way to go.

Examples of Digital Experience Platform Tools

There are many to consider, but here are a few of the best tools for digital experience.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach is a popular digital experience platform for online commerce, which serves 25 percent of the e-commerce experiences in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its Bloomreach Experience Platform or BrX, as it’s called, features a number of modules, including SEO and merchandising. 

Examples of Digital Experience Platform Tools - Bloomreach

Liferay

Liferay provides a digital experience platform that promises to be custom to your business needs, integrating with where you are today and growing with new features as your business grows. In other words, they boast you can get going with this platform quickly. 

Examples of Digital Experience Platform Tools - Liferay

Core dna

Core dna emphasizes that, with their platform, all your digital marketing components are finally under one roof. You can keep track of the data in one place and make global adjustments from one location as well, rather than keeping up with various integrations and platforms. 

Examples of Digital Experience Platform Tools - Core dna

FirstSpirit DXP

FirstSpirit DXP, from e-Spirit, highlights its ability to integrate with other platforms or tools you may already be using, along with its many features. It also makes sure to note the platform itself does not require deep development or coding knowledge on the user’s end but is approachable and easy to learn. 

Examples of Digital Experience Platform Tools - FirstSpirit

Digital Experience Platform Resources

A digital experience platform is a new concept in a lot of ways, so you may want to do a deeper dive and learn more before you decide whether it’s right for you. There are many resources available to help you get a handle on everything involved and learn how it can help your e-commerce shop. Here are a few to get you started.

An Intro to Digital Experience for Marketing Webinar

If you prefer an audio and visual overview of a digital experience platform, check out the Intro to Digital Experience webinar on YouTube from Progress. This 30-minute video covers all the basics, including what those custom touchpoints for customers look like and why they’re so important. 

The webinar also speaks to the customer journey and how to remain consistent throughout. You’ll learn about how a digital experience platform relates to your CMS and how to take it to the next level. 

Building Digital Experience Platforms Book

Written by Shailesh Kumar Shivakumar and Sourabhh Sethii and bearing the subtitle of “A Guide to Developing Next-Generation Enterprise Applications,” Building Digital Experience Platforms is for the person who is ready to get serious about a digital experience platform and geek out over the features and options available.

While the book goes into various open-source platforms available for creating a DXP, it also dives into the specifics about best practices and what you will want to consider as you design a digital experience platform. It also explores security issues and case studies. 

Operationalizing a Digital Experience (DXP) Platform to Put Customers First Webinar 

If you’re ready to really get into the weeds with what a digital experience platform is all about, this Operationalizing a Digital Experience (DXP) Platform webinar from Lytics has all the research and data you’re looking for. This webinar aims to discuss how companies are using customer data to drive custom experiences to convert. 

It’s presented by Connie Moore, Senior Vice President of Research for Digital Clarity Group, and it covers topics such as why customer data technology is so important, how to put data at the center of your digital experience strategy, and the reasons why all of these topics are exploding in popularity. 

The Rise of the Digital Experience Platform E-Book From Elastic Path

Are you wondering how a digital experience platform would fit in your business, or how it would impact your department and help you interact with other departments across the company? The Rise of the Digital Experience Platform e-book from Elastic Path seeks to help you answer those questions. 

Of course, this is one of those email opt-in methods Elastic Path is using to get you on their email list. Nonetheless, it could be a helpful resource as you seek to wrap your head around what a DXP is all about. It promises tips and strategies for Chief Information Officers and Chief Digital Officers looking to incorporate a digital experience platform.

How Digital Experience Platforms Nurture and Facilitate Lasting Customer Relationships On-Demand Webinar

If you’re still skeptical about how exactly digital experience platforms can help you connect meaningfully with your customers, Bloomreach created a webinar entitled “How Digital Experience Platforms Nurture and Facilitate Lasting Customer Relationships” with Mehmet Olmez, managing director for Accenture Interactive, and Arjé Cahn, CTO of Bloomreach Experience. 

They talk about how a DXP offers more than just multitouch or omnichannel and is the way of the future by seamlessly integrating those touchpoints and making them hyper-personalized. They also talk about how this supports e-commerce marketing and the benefits of having everything together under one digital hub.

Again, this is an email opt-in, so you can expect to get emails following up, but if you’re curious to learn about DXPs from the makers and marketers of digital experience platforms, this one may be worth your time. 

Digital Experience Platform FAQs

What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), and how is it different from a CMS?

A digital experience platform ties in data and AI learning technology to deliver seamless and multilayered touchpoints that are highly customized and relevant to each individual customer.

What does a digital experience platform do?

A digital experience platform or DXP serves as a single hub for e-commerce marketing, pulling in and learning from data from across the company’s ecosystem, including sales, inventory, and more, and then delivering highly customized experiences to shoppers. 

What is a DXP, and why does it matter?

DXP stands for digital experience platform. It’s the next evolution of content management, e-commerce experience solutions, and marketing technology and helps companies stand out as relevant in an increasingly noisy digital world.

What is a good digital experience?

As companies utilize digital experience platforms, good digital experiences for customers are pertinent and timely, meeting their needs and delivering content that ultimately leads to conversions.

Conclusion to Digital Experience Platforms

Customers want experiences with your brand. More importantly, they want really great experiences to keep them coming back for more. This includes everything from searching and coming across your website, to the sales, customer service, and follow-up process. 

As you scale, ensuring a great customer experience can become harder and harder, but building a solid e-commerce website can help. A digital experience platform, or DXP, can provide space to create and automate experiences that will keep them returning. 

Have you interacted with an engaging digital experience platform recently?

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Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience

Don’t worry… your traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) because of the Page Experience algorithm update hasn’t rolled out yet.

But it will in 2021 according to Google.

Due to the coronavirus, they decided to give us all a heads up on the future algorithm update and what it entails… that way you can adjust your website so your traffic doesn’t tank.

So, what’s the Page Experience update and how can you prepare for it?

Page Experience

In Google’s own words, here is what it means…

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.

In other words, they are looking for how usable your website is.

Here’s an example of what they don’t want…

As you can see from the graphic above, the user was trying to click on “No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes, place my order.”

The purpose of this update is to make sure that sites that rank at the top aren’t creating experiences that users hate.

The simplest way to think about this update is that user-friendly sites will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.

But this change is the start of a big shift in SEO.

Why is this update so important?

What sites do you think that Google wants to rank at the top?

Take a guess…

Maybe sites with the best backlinks?

Or sites with the buttoned up on page code?

It’s actually none of those.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.

Here’s what I mean…

When you want to buy athletic shoes, what brand comes to mind?

If I had to guess, I bet you’ll say Nike.

And if you were to get a credit card… I bet Visa, American Express, or Mastercard will come to mind.

This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your brand name on Google and click on your website) impact rankings, which I’ve broken down as one of the most important SEO lessons I learned.

Just look at how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time… the graph below shows the number of people searching for my name over time:

And here is my SEO traffic over time:

As your brand grows so will your SEO traffic.

But that is old news, that’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years now.

Here is the thing though, most sites don’t have large brands and Google knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank.

At my ad agency, when we look at our clients and their growth over time, only 4% have large well-known brands. The other 96% are still seeing traffic growth.

What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most.

And yes, brand queries are one of the ways they can do this, but user experience is another metric.

Over the next few years, I bet you will see many algorithm updates focusing on user experience.

So how do you optimize your user experience?

It’s starts with each page

If you look at the original article Google posted about the future algorithm change, they emphasize “page experience” or “website experience.”

It doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, but instead, I bet they are going to focus on their algorithm from a page-level basis.

Because if you have a few pages on your websites that have a poor experience, but the rest are good, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if many of your pages provide a much better experience than your competition.

Here’s how you optimize your user experience:

Step #1: Optimize your speed and reduce 400 errors

The faster your website loads, the better experience you’ll have.

Go to this page and enter in your URL.

You’ll then see a report that looks like this:

You’ll notice two important aspects of that report that impact user experience that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.

In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both desktop and mobile under 3 seconds.

Ideally you should be in the 1-second range if possible.

Step #2: Compare your experience to your competitions’

You may think you have an amazing user experience, but how does it stake up to your competition?

So go here and type in your biggest competitor.

I want you to go into the navigation and click on “Top Pages.”

You should see a report like this:

The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your competition’s site from an SEO perspective. The pages at the top are the ones with the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing something right.

I want you to go through their top 50 pages. Seriously, their top 50 pages, and look at the user experience of each of those pages.

What is it that they are doing? How does their content quality compare to yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?

For each page that ranks, I also want you to click on “View All” under the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each page ranks for.

When evaluating your competition’s user experience, keep in mind how they are delighting people who search for any of those keywords. This will give you an idea of what you need to do as well.

But your goal shouldn’t be to match your competition, it should be to beat your competition.

Step #3: Analyze your design

Remember the graphic I showed above of what Google doesn’t want? Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my order” due to design issues.

In most cases you won’t have that issue, but you will have other usability issues.

The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Just like this one:

What you can do to find usability issues is run a Crazy Egg test on your site.

Once you log into Crazy Egg, you’ll see a dashboard that looks like this:

On the top right, I want you to click on “Create New” and select “Snapshot.”

Then select “Multiple Snapshots.”

From there, you’ll want to add at least 3 popular URLs on your site. Over time you’ll want to do this with all of your popular pages.

Then you’ll see settings like the image below, you don’t need to do anything here. Just click “Next.”

You’ll then be able to review everything. If it looks good, you can click the “Create Snapshots” button in the bottom right.

Last but not least, you’ll have to install your tracking script.

So, click on “Install Tracking Script.”

Select the option that works for you and then you are off and to the races. For example, for NeilPatel.com I use WordPress so I would select the WordPress option.

Once you are setup, it will take at least a day to see results, if not a bit longer. It depends on your traffic.

If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results within a few hours.

After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar.

Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.

Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people are engaging with your web page.

What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or even scroll that people take. Just look at this example from the NeilPatel.com site.

As you can see, people are clicking on those images above the text. But there is an issue… can you guess what it is?

If you click those images, nothing happens. But for all of those people to click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable and that something should happen when they click on them.

An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks maybe I would take them to a page that goes into detail on each of those features. Or maybe I could expand upon each feature right there on that page.

Once you make the fixes to your page, you will want to re-run a new Crazy Egg snapshot on the same page to see if the changes helped improve the user experience.

Step #4: Install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension

If you haven’t already, install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension.

Here’s why…

When you do a Google search, you’ll see data on each ranking URL.

When you are naturally using Google throughout your day and searching for keywords related to your industry, I want you to look at 2 main metrics in Ubersuggest:

  1. Domain score – the higher the number, the more authority a website has.
  2. Links – the more links a website has, usually the higher it will rank.

So, when you are doing searches, look for sites that have a lower domain score and fewer backlinks than the competition, but yet still rank high.

Chances are, they rank high because of things like user experience. Maybe their text is more appealing than the competition, maybe their bounce rate is lower… it could be a wide variety of reasons, but these are the sites you want to look at and analyze.

In the image above, you see that the result from the AMA ranks higher than Hubspot yet they have fewer links and a lower domain score. So, if you were trying to rank for that keyword, you would want to spend more time analyzing AMA because they are doing something right.

Conclusion

User experience is going to be more and more important over time.

If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.

On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.

Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time.

But what is unique about this update is you have advanced notice, which is nice. So, take the opportunity and fix any usability issues you may have.

What other ways can you make your website more usable?

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