Why your business needs a digital experience platform (DXP)

Does your company use a digital experience platform? Do you know what a digital experience platform does and how it can benefit your business? In this article, you learn all about the digital customer experience and how you can use a digital experience platform to serve your customers better, and grow your business. 

Key takeaways

• Every interaction customers have with your company online is part of the digital experience

• A digital experience platform helps you interact with customers across their entire digital journey

• Employing a digital experience platform lets you service more touchpoints with more consistent branding and messaging

• You can use a digital experience platform to more precisely target potential customers and create personalized user experiences 

What is the digital customer experience – and why is it important?

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Any interaction with your customers via digital technologies is a digital experience. The digital customer experience encompasses a wide range of touchpoints, including:

• Your website and any other websites on which your products appear

• Mobile apps and advertising

• Social media, including blogs and podcasts

• Email messaging and advertising

• Online advertising, in all its varied forms

• Smart speakers and displays, as well as other IoT devices

• Online customer support interactions

• In-store kiosks

The digital customer experience is about more than exposure to your company, brand or product. It's about engaging the customer with a personalized experience, often in real-time. It's about delivering a holistic message across multiple channels and devices, presenting a consistent brand image while taking advantage of each channel's unique advantages. It's about building a stronger customer relationship wherever the customer comes into contact with you. 

Delivering an exceptional omnichannel customer experience is essential for the success of your business and should be at the forefront of everything you do, from marketing and sales to product development and customer support. Positive digital experiences are richly rewarded, with 86% of consumers reporting that they'll pay more for a better customer experience. Poor digital experiences have an equally negative impact, with one out of three consumers saying they'd walk away from a favorite brand after just one bad experience. 

Knowing the importance of providing a superior customer experience, how do you go about doing so? That's where utilizing a robust digital experience platform comes in. 

What is a digital experience platform – and what does it do?

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a set of technologies that create and deliver messages across the customers' digital journey. A DXP must work across all digital channels, platforms and devices – anywhere that the customer is likely to interact with your company, brand or product. 

A DXP is a natural evolution of – and incorporates – a traditional content management system (CMS). Like a CMS, a DXP manages and delivers your content, but goes beyond that to track and interact with the entire digital customer lifecycle. 

One important feature of a DXP is its ability to serve a consistent message and brand image across the customer's entire digital journey. It serves up content from a central CMS and optimizes that content for each specific channel and digital touchpoint. It can also create a personalized experience for each customer, delivering customer-specific messages and offers based on previous history and other pertinent information. 

A fully-featured DXP includes the following essential components:

• Content management to serve as the central repository for your core content

• Asset management for all your digital assets (images, videos, audio files, etc.)

• Commerce, to enable digital storefronts, payment processing and order tracking

• Customer relationship management, to track, manage and exploit customer data

• Insights and analytics to analyze content and channel performance in real-time

• Personalization and automation, to automatically create custom customer experiences

• Experimentation so you can run A/B tests on your content to optimize performance

• APIs and integrations, to share digital assets with third-party websites and devices

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With the right DXP, you can create a central repository for all your content and digital assets, then serve that content to various digital channels and devices. You can create custom messages for each channel and personalized experiences for individual customers – all while maintaining a consistent brand image. A DXP helps you take full advantage of all important digital channels and better serve your customer base.

How a digital experience platform can help grow your business

While you can market online without a DXP, you won't be able to do as much as fast or as well as you can with one. When considering whether your business is ready to invest in a DXP, some benefits include: 

Servicing more touchpoints

A DXP lets you expand your current activities into more channels and platforms, thus expanding the number of customer touchpoints you can cover. Today, online marketing is more than just online ads and websites; you need to reach customers where they live, which is pretty much everywhere online.

More consistent branding and messaging

Instead of constructing separate campaigns for each channel, you can now deliver a consistent message across every channel you target. A DXP lets you draw on a centralized reservoir of digital content that can then be shared across multiple channels. 

Personalized user experiences

By analyzing user history and behavior, a DXP can adapt in real-time to deliver a personalized experience for each customer. This can be in the form of customized offers, presenting only products of interest to the consumer, or even creating a unique look and feel for each customer. Personalization improves the user experience and leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

More precise targeting

A DXP also lets you intelligently use customer data to target the right consumers for a given product or campaign. This results in a more efficient and effective spend of your marketing dollars. 

Faster time to market

Employing a DXP makes your business more agile. You can accelerate your time to market with new products and initiatives, making your company significantly more competitive. 

Actionable real-time insights

Finally, the data collected by a DXP leads to more robust reporting and analysis, which leads to more actionable insights. Even better, many of these insights are available in real-time, so you can fine-tune your campaigns daily if need be. 

When you need a robust DXP, turn to Optimizely

When you want to create a powerful, consistent and effective omnichannel digital experience for your customers, turn to Optimizely. Our Digital Experience Platform helps you deliver a seamless digital journey for your customers across every possible touchpoint. Our team of experts will help you better engage your customers while enhancing your competitive profile.