What is a Digital Experience Cloud?

Since they first appeared a decade ago, much has been postulated about what ‘Digital Experience Clouds’ are supposed to achieve.

While Big Data is seemingly ‘all the rage’ in the digital marketing and tech worlds, the technology that seems to be capturing the attention of enterprise marketers, is the ability to organise and measure customer data sets obtained from their web properties.

Historically, organisations had separate repositories for their web, sales and marketing information and few formalised systems to consolidate or leverage that data. Now, in the same manner as the customer journey is changing, so too is how customer data is managed and deployed. One of these changes is an ’experience cloud’ that consolidates and processes customer data, their digital experience, along with ‘personalisation’, ultimately creating an effective, intelligent vehicle to understand and deliver customer journeys, as well as attaining business value.

The Progress® Sitefinity™ Digital Experience Cloud (DEC) provides data for opportunity improvement, while the Progress® Sitefinity™ CMS (content management system), enables marketers to personalize and optimise marketing programmes, or restructure web properties on the fly to guide visitors on a personalised customer journey.

Taking charge

The release of Sitefinity CMS version 8.0 (in March 2015), enables the platform to integrate with the standalone Sitefinity DEC.  This now provides organisations with what is best termed, a ‘digital marketing command centre’.

The Sitefinity DEC is equipped with data connectors that retrieve customer interactions and information from a variety of sources: Sitefinity CMS, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, mobile applications, Salesforce.com and other sources. This in turn provides the marketing team with customer intelligence through the entire contacts database that is accumulated from cross-channel data, persona profiling and detailed user profiles.

Seven activities defining digital experience management

The following seven activities make up the critical path for a successful “Experience Cloud”, However, I must stress that it is an ever morphing environment that requires constant commitment to responding to these changes and amending content accordingly.

1. Define conversions, touchpoints, persona profiles and lead scoring models.
2. Examine reports and recommendations.
3. Act upon the insights.
4. Configure content personalisation.
5. Perform targeted email and personalisation campaigns.
6. Modify and amend content as required.
7. Return to one.

So how does one go about using the Sitefinity DEC? Read our next blog to find out.

KRS is an authorised Sitefinity^TM reseller and development partner.