Online marketing and digital commerce have opened up new and exciting opportunities like never before. Quite easily, though, these opportunities can turn into obstacles when trying to coordinate multiple systems, channels and campaigns.
By Nick Durrant, MD of Bluegrass Digital
When running a retail business online, there is obviously a lot happening at once: updating customer and product information, monitoring stock status, creating campaigns and landing pages, optimising SEO and conversion rates, handling payments, delivery and customer service.
Yet these processes are often fragmented. This makes it difficult to perform quickly and consistently across all channels, and to capitalise on promotions and short-term opportunities.
Episerver Digital Experience Cloud is a unified content, marketing and digital commerce platform. It helps organisations create unique digital experience for their customers, with measurable business results. The platform also integrates with Microsoft Dynamics AX, so you can deliver an omni-channel retail experience that is easily managed through one interface.
Providing outstanding experiences for your customers and maximising sales has just become a whole lot easier. Episerver Digital Experience Cloud can now be connected with the full functionality of Microsoft Dynamics AX, thanks to the Avensia Storefront Connecter. Avensia Storefront is the final piece of the puzzle to remove the gap between instore and online experience.
With Avensia Storefront, customer information, orders and data – such as stock status and campaigns – are available in real time across all channels and managed from one single system. The connector imports all product catalogue information from Dynamics AX into Episerver’s platform after validating and transforming it into full featured e-commerce information.
Businesses can now easily provide an omni-channel retail experience, including online shopping, an augmented in-store experience, and mobile shopping. They can save up to 40% of the total project cost and out-of-the-box Dynamics AX integration gets them up and running in 90 days.
More importantly, flexible consumption pricing enables customers to pay for the capacity they use, and scale up and down as needed.
The promise of a unified omni-channel experience that drives top-line growth is an attractive one, but until now it has proved frustratingly difficult and costly to achieve. Episerver Digital Experience Cloud changes this, it allows businesses to create customer experiences that work on any device.
Every piece of content one adds is automatically optimised on the page and across PC, mobile and tablet screens. As you’re updating product content, articles and landing pages, you can instantly preview it in real time on multiple screen formats to see what your content and customers’ experience will look like in any campaign, on any device.
The Digital Experience Cloud also extends into your native Apps, with powerful APIs and online preview of the App experience. Create a consistent brand experiences, the Digital
Experience Cloud lets you easily extend your visual brand across all devices.
Also save time by building pages and product presentations once – the solution automatically reconfigures pages to create an enjoyable customer experience for all screens and devices.
Furthermore, Digital Experience Cloud enables businesses to connect the online and store experiences with the ‘click & collect’ feature, it allows customers to collect their orders from their preferred store.
Easily and immediately personalise product content by customer, market, acquisition path and channel to create highly targeted promotions based on demographics, locations, purchase history, behavioural data, device usage and much more.
Episerver Digital Experience Cloud simplifies the task of showing the right products to the right customers at the right time. One can sell across different markets and brands with a single catalogue to maximise earning from cross merchandising.
You can also create and enrich new product ranges instantly and showcase your products through different experiences. And you can automatically generate personalised product recommendations based on behavioural data, freeing you from the need to build and maintain multiple rules.
Business owners can now boost their average order value by automatically analysing visitor behaviour and using this insight to upsell and cross-sell merchandise. They can also improve search results using best bets and behavioural optimisation of search results and product listings.
They have full control over how products are presented, and can make instantaneous changes to improve conversions, including full product information personalisation. Additionally, they can place editorial, promotional and guiding content anywhere throughout the site, including deep product pages, listings, and checkout flows.
Optimising campaigns, landing pages and product presentations can be a time-consuming task, but the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud provides tools to automatically test and optimise any content and campaign and use the data to drive more sales.
The platform has a self-optimising multivariate testing feature that intelligently learns which content or feature block works best with specific customer segments, and automatically displays that more often to help one improve performance over time.
Get an instant view of how your experience is performing by performing A/B tests on pages, products, promotions, text and design elements. You can set a single goal or group several goals into one campaign to get a complete view of their performance.
Improve SEO with SEO insights that are built into every page and provide real-time advice to improve one’s search ranking and ensure content is always optimised for the targeted keywords that one creates.
Also, improve paid search conversions and organic search placement with automatic landing pages that creates contextual listings with a combination of brands, product types, and other product properties, with the ability to add editorial information to any landing page.
Digital commerce is not only about the opportunity to grow revenue, to scale up and to expand into new markets – it is also about streamlining operations.
Episerver Digital Experience Cloud has been proven to increase operational efficiencies drastically, by reducing time spent on product management, merchandising and running campaigns, by efficiently supporting internal operations, and by connecting into all back-end business systems.
Digital marketing and digital commerce usually involve several different systems and environments. Both environments and responsibilities are fragmented, making it hard to ensure optimal performance and short response times.
With Episerver Digital Experience Cloud, you can instead focus on creating experiences for your customers, not on complicated infrastructure and licenses. And since global scalability is built in, you don’t need to worry about traffic peaks, new markets or changing needs – the platform is always on, and always ready for customers.