Episerver Hires New CMO Kirsten Allegri Williams, Launches Intelligence Cloud and Closes Q2 with Double-Digit Growth Driven by Digital Acceleration

Despite global unpredictability caused by the pandemic, customer-centric digital experience company Episerver™ closes Q2 with a 20+% increase in new business and triple-digit growth in its B2B commerce business. In the first half of the year, the company also reliably serviced record page views at the height of COVID-19, and supported more than 60 go-lives for customers further embracing digital experience like Cuisinart™ and Dolby™. To initiate its next phase of growth, Episerver – a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms™ – announces today the hiring of former SAP SuccessFactors™ CMO Kirsten Allegri Williams as its chief marketing officer and introduces the third of its solution pillars with the launch of Intelligence Cloud™.  

As CMO, Allegri Williams will lead global marketing and communications strategy at Episerver, overseeing the brand consolidation for Episerver’s Q4 2019 acquisitions of B2B commerce leader Insite Software™ and content personalization and analytics provider Idio™ – both of which accelerated Episerver’s product roadmap five-plus years and whose teams are fully integrated into the Episerver organization today. Recognized as a “Cool Vendor” in personalization by Gartner, Idio functionality is now seamlessly combined with Episerver’s existing data, recommendations and analytics capabilities to form the just-released Episerver Intelligence Cloud. The new Intelligence Cloud joins Episerver Content Cloud™ and Episerver Commerce Cloud™ to complete the end-to-end digital experience platform.

“What attracted me to Episerver the most was the breadth of its portfolio and how clearly its digital experience solutions are tied to business growth,” said Allegri Williams. “The global crisis is a turning point for every industry. There is an undeniable shift toward digital-first which requires differentiated brand experiences and the need for CMOs, CIOs, and e-commerce leaders to rapidly adapt to changing conditions. Our customers need scalable technology with AI and actionable insights to solve real-world problems and create personalized engagement – we provide that in Episerver Content Cloud, Commerce Cloud and, now, Intelligence Cloud.”   

Episerver Intelligence Cloud cohesively groups Idio and Episerver’s rich website personalization functionality including advanced website content and product recommendations, email content and product recommendations, personalized search and navigation, and a customer data platform (first- and third-party data) – compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

“Customers demand a better toolset to understand and engage their audiences at scale,” said Justin Anovick, chief product officer at Episerver. “In the last few months, it’s never been more critical for brands to adapt to a customer’s in-the-moment needs or risk appearing tone-deaf by serving irrelevant and insensitive recommendations. Through Intelligence Cloud, marketers can understand the emerging needs of their customers and mimic the empathy online that they’d show in face-to-face conversations.”

More than 30 customers have already gone live on Intelligence Cloud, which officially moves Idio from Amazon Web Services™ to the Microsoft Azure™ cloud infrastructure, resulting in sizeable improvements to savings, security, speed and scalability. In the Age of Relevancy, Intelligence Cloud differentiates itself by:

• Removing the guesswork from personalization: Intelligence Cloud offers true AI-based personalization that does not use rules or segments to show the most relevant content to an individual based on who they are, what they are looking for and where they are in their buyer’s journey.
• Maximizing team efficiency: Companies have too much data to analyze and use to anticipate next steps. Episerver AI comes pre-trained to help companies grow their business without growing their workload. Marketers and merchandisers can understand the emerging needs of their customers to show the next-best content, event or product for them.
• Evaluating site content: Intelligence Cloud audits, analyzes and adapts to existing site content to understand how relevant a piece of information is to a specific individual and provides suggestions on content gaps and metrics on content performance.

By putting every customer first, Episerver’s B2C commerce personalization capabilities have boosted Arcadia’s™ average order value by 67%, Cath Kidston’s™ conversion rates by 50% and New Era Caps’™ conversion rates by 64 percent with B2B personalization use cases showing improvements to email open rates (60% uptick for Optos™), content engagement (126% increase for Hewlett Packard Enterprise™) and the number of orders placed through product recommendations (13% lift for Motoral™).

Relevancy matters.