Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) delivers a consistent and seamless experience to customers across all digital touchpoints. It helps organisations eliminate the need for separate platforms to manage websites, create and schedule media posts and run campaigns. Sitecore Experience Platform has evolved over recent years. Sitecore 9.2 is the most current version of the platform, offering a multitude of services and features. By operating as a headless CMS, it allows the omni-channel offering to reach the market.
Sitecore collects the customer experience data to allow personalisation in real-time. The way the platform collects data on users allows for a single view of each customer, this allows marketers to deliver the best, most relevant, experience to its users.
Sitecore has maintained its leading position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, with XP scoring highly in the most recent report. As a Sitecore Platinum Partner, 100% aligned with the platform, we look to make use of all the features available to us. Delivering a complete feature-enabled Sitecore project for each of our customers. This empowers our customers to track every interaction of the user base through the Experience Platform.
What are the key features that benefit organisations?
Sitecore is constantly evolving in line with technological advancements and changing customer trends. This means with each update comes new and innovative tools.
There are a range of advanced features and functionalities that make it a leading digital experience platform. By harnessing all the Sitecore features on offer, organisations have a powerful set of tools to deliver a sophisticated digital strategy. Sitecore helps enterprises produce impressive results that boost revenue.
The core features and functionalities of Sitecore Experience Platform
- Marketing automation – Sitecore has marketing automation built into the platform, with an easy to use drag and drop interface that lets users easily set up automated marketing campaigns.
- Single view of individual customers – Organisations can now see specific customer page visits, social media mentions, emails open rates and what customers have purchased. This means brands can easily see where users are in their customer journey.
- Multinational website coverage – Maintaining many multinational websites can be challenging. Sitecore can produce multinational websites Meaning content can be in multiple languages with easy translation integration.
- Flexible A/B and Multivariate Testing – Testing is easy to perform with Sitecore. Sitecore A/B and Multivariate testing helps discover which content is underperforming and which needs to be refined.
- Greater control – Sitecore offers one control centre that manages all touch points. Rather than having multiple platforms to manage each customer touchpoint, greater control can be offered on wide scale campaigns.
Sitecore Experience Platform and Sitecore xDB
Sitecore xDB connects with the Sitecore Experience Platform providing a single source of lifetime customer intelligence. Data collected from users’ visits and website interactions will contribute to a stronger customer relationship. This fits conveniently with our content first approach, designed to connect business objectives with user experience.
One of the earlier quotes from Sitecore, when they first released the Experience Platform, was:
“From day one, we have been building out the Sitecore Experience Platform so that every channel interaction, every bit of customer insight, every automation, works together so that marketers can drive a seamless real-time experience for customers. The Sitecore Experience Database removes any limits marketers and IT face when working with previously disconnected data.”
When you look at what the latest version of the experience platform delivers, it’s clear they are doing everything to evolve this, already, in global scale, experience platform:
- There is a Personalisation Dashboard to show all personalisation activities in a single place.
- A Content hub content marketing and digital asset management brings us closer to an entire content life-cycle from within Sitecore.
- Sitecore is GDPR compliant. Deleting contact records efficiently to avoid that PII scenario.
The integration of Content Hub and Sitecore Experience Platform
We see the starts of the integration between Content Hub and Sitecore Experience Platform. This is where they are looking to bring together and unify the full content lifecycle from within Sitecore.
The way they have looked to achieve this is by providing to connectors:
- Sitecore Connect™ for Sitecore DAM0.0
- Sitecore Connect™ for Sitecore CMP 1.0.0
If we look at some of the other areas of the Experience Platform that have evolved/been introduced over recent times, one of those areas is the introduction of Identity Server, which is decoupling the “login” functionality away from the main Sitecore implementation into its own “identity server” micro-service. It allows for Single-Sign-on to be implemented across the Sitecore services and applications. The approach here, micro-services, is in-line with what Sitecore are wanting to achieve, a micro-service-based architecture.
Introducing xConnect
Finally, lets mention Sitecore xConnect, another feature that has been introduced to the Experience Platform. xConnect is a single, unified API that centralises data and supports the Internet of Things. It resulted from a bid to bring separate elements together and simplify the customer retention process. In Sitecore 9, isolated data became a flexible tool to be used for insights and return on investment.
The tool’s most impressive feature for marketers to take full advantage of, is its ability to record customer interactions and communicate them back to the CRM.
Are you ready to learn more about Sitecore Experience Platform?
Sitecore is a leading digital experience platform used by leading organisations globally. We’re an experienced Sitecore Platinum Partner with over 20 years’ experience in helping organisations meet their digital goals. We have one of the largest teams of Sitecore specialists, which include four internationally recognised Sitecore Most Valued Professionals (MVP’s).
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