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Why Optimizely is the perfect solution for any growing or enterprise business
Last year I wrote a piece about Episerver and why your business needs a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) to ensure your customers’ needs are met and that their expectations of you are exceeded.
After spending time looking at the DXP ecosystem I know how making the choice of DXP can be bewildering – balancing license fees against anticipated ROI, features against need, and ensuring your invaluable first party data can be used to best advantage.
In the last year the market has developed and so have the available products. For Episerver the development has come through the joining with, and rebranding as, Optimizely. I’ve been under the hood of the new offering and it’s way more than just a name change.
By creating a compelling platform with Experimentation, Marketing and Commerce as its three core pillars, the platform is now designed to allow your business to grow at scale.
From my perspective the combination of the above with a top-drawer content management system allowing for advanced authoring and layout makes Optimizely a compelling choice. It allows you to create a website that can grow through learnings and iterations based on how your users are interacting with it.
So here are four key advantages to the platform from where I see it:
1. A one-stop shop
The main selling point of Optimizely: it’s a flexible one-stop shop with a fully integrated stack and the ability to seamlessly integrate content, commerce, personalisation, search and analytics. On top of that there are features such as headless and a cloud offering. You can use the CMS as a coupled, decoupled or as a headless architecture that delivers elastic scalability at super high speed and with robust security.
2. Advanced personalisation
Working on the Mazda.co.uk site I’ve seen the results of personalisation first hand and the resulting uplift in conversions is something any business would want.
In the new Optimizely offering AI-driven product and content recommendations give a personalised experience to each user. The AI behind the scenes can automatically predict the interests and intent of every individual, enabling the delivery of hyper-relevant and engaging content.
It’s much the same with products in commerce: AI can be used to increase up-sells and cross-sells. Customer experience is not simply transactional but can offer conversion though a personalised brand experience. Customers now have expectations on how well a brand should know them. Brands should show an understanding of a customer and not just show a new user the same content as a returning one.
3. Open yet integrated
Having worked in web technologies for over a decade I’m fully aware of – and yes on occasion have been guilty of – building sprawling Frankenstein’s monster sites. Not any more!
Optimizely’s seamless platform is both fully integrated and fully open for maximum flexibility. Unified content, commerce, intelligence and experimentation capabilities are surrounded by thoughtful integrations and 800 passionate partners. Optimizely provides a completely seamless buying experience to end-customers, throughout the buying journey and however they want to engage. The platform combines content, commerce, intelligence and experimentation capabilities to optimise a digital experience.
4. Best-in-class optimisation helps make the sophisticated simple
Over the last decade I’ve witnessed the growing importance of data and how it can drive powerful insights which bring real value. We’ve always said that a digital product is something that's alive and should always be changing to meet user needs.
Gone are the days when we’d dust our hands and say “finished”. The ability to test and learn, and optimise against those learnings is something I’ve always been passionate about.
Now Optimizely’s first-of-its-kind connected AI enables digital teams to deliver personalised, individualised experiences for each and every customer. That means we are now able to build experiences that get smarter the more customers use them.
Optimizely customers can move from guesswork to a data-driven approach based on outcomes. This allows customers to create and optimise all in one place with advanced content, commerce, intelligence and experimentation capabilities.
So is Optimizely the right choice for your business? It certainly provides a world-class CMS system that’s easy to use and gives developers like me and designers an opportunity to create great websites.
A strong commerce offering can amplify any web store's presence. Having a CMS and commerce core offering and then combining with personalisation can lead to engaged and returning users.
From where I sit – as a web developer who wants to deliver the best – it’s the perfect solution for any growing or enterprise business.
