What Is Sitecore Experience Platform?

Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is a comprehensive solution for delivering modern, seamless digital experiences across multiple channels. It’s the perfect platform for companies that want to access advanced features like multi-site management, omnichannel support, multi-language content, and others.

Enterprises are continually on the lookout for technologies that can improve their operations and online brand presence. In a 2020 Gartner survey on Marketing Technology, 59% of respondents report a preference for an integrated suite approach to Martech, where they can rely primarily on a single vendor to offer a variety of integrated features.

This article will delve into the Sitecore Experience Platform, its features, and enterprise benefits.

Introduction to Sitecore Experience Platform (XP)

Sitecore Experience Platform empowers marketers with digital marketing tools that offer a comprehensive view of customer data, machine learning insights, and tools for personalizing customer experiences across multiple channels. It puts personalized content at the center of website and portal experiences, enabling you to create a truly personalized online experience.

Most marketers have to deal with a humongous amount of data. It is only natural to have a platform to help sort through, manage, and tailor this data to meet the needs of each customer. Similarly, brands require content management tools that are scalable across multiple sites and languages.

Sitecore XP offers several essential functionalities such as multilingual content, enterprise-class search, multi-site management, headless content management , and omnichannel support that’s powerful enough to cater to developer and marketer needs. It’s no wonder that 30% of the Fortune 100 companies use the platform to build ultra-personalized web experiences around the globe.

Why Enterprises Need Sitecore Experience Platform

With Sitecore, you can provide a multichannel experience that drives unprecedented revenue growth and customer loyalty. Consequently, you can deliver your products, articles, promotions, images, emails, push notifications, or SMS messages at just the right time for your customers.

Having a disjointed and siloed digital marketing infrastructure for your enterprise is problematic. The following drawbacks can result from using siloed systems to manage content and interact with customers:

• Content duplication: Having the same content on two channels requires two times the effort without proper integration.
• Incomplete data: Your future decisions depend on the data you collect on customer interactions. You get an incomplete picture of the customer journey if you don’t aggregate all of your customer interaction data in one place. It’s also expensive and challenging to analyze data from disparate sources.
• Inconsistent brand and customer experience: If your website, mobile site, and online store all use different content management systems, they will all likely look different and have distinct interfaces. This complicates the customer experience since people interact with brands via multiple channels before becoming customers. When people switch between channels, you lose them if you don’t provide a consistent experience.

A Closer Look at the Features of Sitecore XP

Sitecore XP comprises a comprehensive list of essential features to marketing teams. Some of these features include:

• Sitecore AI: With Automated Personalization, you can gain insights from consumers’ past interactions with your site. You can enhance your website’s personalization experience using Sitecore AI.
• Sitecore Cortex: This is the machine learning (ML) engine within Sitecore. Using Corex, Sitecore DXP users can analyze any data in the DXP, including their own and data from third parties. The solution provides intelligent insights to help marketers make smarter, more informed decisions.
• Enhanced editing experience: Easy-to-use editor for faster authoring with analytics that provides in-depth insight in real-time.
• Sitecore Experience Database: Big data repository for tracking all user behavior, activity, and traffic. This tool helps to eliminate data silos by aggregating all customer interaction data for better insight.
• Marketing automation: This feature enables you to automate online campaigns within Sitecore. With it, you can streamline manual marketing tasks and automate customer journeys. Additionally, it offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows you to perform several marketing tasks.
• Sitecore Experience Profile: This feature tracks each contact’s lifetime interaction with your brand. It is a database you can use to track your website visitors and contacts, even without knowing their names.
• Sitecore JavaScript Services: This SDK makes it possible to build full-featured Sitecore applications using modern JavaScript frontend frameworks and libraries like React, Vue, and Angular.
• Experience Optimization: This feature enables you to test different content variants that can help you determine which pages, elements, and components are the most effective. With the test results, you can quickly assess the content that works best with your audience. By using this, you can create more effective campaigns.
• Path Analyzer: It helps you create an interactive map that demonstrates the sequential paths contacts take as they explore your site. You can use this to track how users navigate your website, digital assets, and campaigns so you can determine what they are doing and what path they take.

Benefits of Sitecore Experience Platform for Enterprise Marketing Teams

Some of the key enterprise benefits of Sitecore XP include:

Holistic View Into Customer Interactions and Insights

With the death of third-party cookies looming, marketers must start prioritizing first-party data to better understand their customers. Consumers navigate and interact through each page on a website throughout their journey. Identifying trends and patterns during these interactions is crucial to effectively measuring and driving marketing success.

Being the most reliable data available to marketers, enterprises can leverage these first-party data and interactions to provide personalized messaging and offers for their customers. Sitecore XP collects and combines customer data and engagements in real-time across all campaign sources using AI, analytics, and marketing automation capabilities to deliver actionable and insightful insights in real-time to drive effectiveness.

Trend and Pattern Identification Made Simpler and Faster

Businesses should tailor their content to suit each user by analyzing and identifying their patterns and trends. That’s why personalization features prominently in the digital experience platforms of many enterprises today. And yet, 63% of digital marketers in a 2021 Gartner survey say personalization is still a struggle, and only 17% use AI and ML across the board.

With Sitecore AI, enterprises can leverage a top-notch solution to detect visitor trends, segment customers, and customize content and pages to deliver personalized experiences for each customer.

Better Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns offer the most effective approach to reaching customers and identifying leads. They are strategic and organized efforts to promote or gather feedback for your brand, product, or service across several digital touch points.

With Sitecore Marketing Automation, you can leverage a drag and drop functionality to effortlessly set up and facilitate automated marketing campaigns and map out interactions and triggers. Additionally, you can evaluate and segment contacts, identify demographics, and detect contact devices and online behavior.

Enhanced Web Experiences

With your page layouts, images, and content, it’s crucial to continually optimize their performance to help you reach the largest audience possible. Sitecore XP helps continuously optimize digital experiences using ML, testing, analytics, and optimization techniques. You can consistently improve your site rather than changing everything at once periodically.

Global Content Distribution for Diverse Audiences

It can be challenging to manage several multinational websites. Sitecore XP lets you build websites for multiple regions and translate content into several languages to reach users worldwide regardless of their cultural background.

Omnichannel Delivery

Modern consumers now access sites across several channels. In light of these, enterprises have to create and deliver content for all these channels. Sitecore XP offers a broad range of capabilities to deliver highly personalized, omnichannel digital experiences to customers on several digital channels like social media, mobile, web, AR/VR, and IoT devices.

Deliver Enthralling Digital Experiences With Sitecore XP

Upgrading to a modern digital experience platform boosts sales and improves customer satisfaction. Even though content delivery is a core part of digital marketing, there’s still so much more to it.

Most marketers have access to copious amounts of data and wish to do much more to facilitate better customers’ experiences. Sitecore Experience Platform is a comprehensive platform with several digital marketing tools and features to enhance and personalize experiences across channels.

Oshyn is a certified Sitecore Partner equipped with all the tools enterprises need to maximize their content marketing efforts. Our team of Sitecore experts helps companies maximize the value of their marketing efforts and content by implementing Sitecore. We help organizations leverage customer experience strategies, implement granular personalization initiatives, and achieve omnichannel marketing success.

Want to find out more about Sitecore? Check out Oshyn’s approach to Sitecore development.