DXP as the engine for your customer data strategy
As digital marketing managers well know; the MarTech space is overwhelmingly broad, full of thousands of technology solutions and vendors, and even more laden with acronyms. From CMS, CRM, DMP, ERP, PIM to MAP, DAM, CDP and on and on and on. It’s difficult to keep up (DTKU).
One of the newer acronym entrants is the Digital Experience Platform (DXP). It’s a solution that’s often misunderstood, in part because of the breadth of capability it offers, but more so because vendors have wrapped the term DXP liberally around their existing products sets.
Is my CMS a DXP?
In short no, but content management is a core part of it. A DXP is a set of multiple technologies that combine to provide a platform for building, managing and optimizing digital experiences.
The purpose of a DXP is to provide a seamless, personalized experience for customers across all digital touchpoints, websites, email, mobile apps, social media, and more.
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) definition
Gartner define a DXP as having the following capabilities:
Natively:
- Content management capabilities for managing various content types, including (but not limited to) textual content, graphics and other rich media, web content, mobile app content, chatbot content, and voice content
- Rich, extensible, interoperable and well-documented production/consumption APIs
- Support for multi experience presentation, orchestration, delivery and assembly of digital experiences via hybrid and/or headless capabilities
- Cloud capabilities; each DXP had to be available for cloud deployment as PaaS (with or without managed services) and/or SaaS
Either natively or via integrations (including with OEMs):
- Account service capabilities, including registration, login and password management with authentication and access control
- Customer data management capabilities
- Customer journey mapping capabilities
- Personalization, analytics and optimization capabilities
- Practical applied AI capabilities
First three capabilities
Despite the detail, the above is an open definition. It’s perhaps easier thinking of a DXP described in three core capabilities.
- Create - edit, manage and deliver your digital content and assets
- Capture - collect and analyse detailed views and interactions with your content and assets
- Optimize - use your data to improve and optimise your content, assets and conversion in real-time
A DXP is not a solution that you would implement in-one-go and most organisations already have some tools and solutions that deliver on the above tasks.
The difference is how coherent and connected those capabilities and solutions are. Interoperability is the value that leading DXP vendors offer, and that composable vendors have built-in via open API’s and integration architectures.
Start your data engines…
Today, as a digital marketer, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your customers and apply that knowledge quickly to improve acquisition, engagement and retention.
When viewed through a lens of data the DXP is more than a production and delivery platform for your content. It is the engine for your customer data strategy.
An engine whose purpose is turn your content and digital information assets into optimisation assets allowing greater customer insight and business performance.
DXP - an engine to turn your information assets into optimisation data.
Your engine requires fuel. Data is the new oil so let’s fill it up with your digital marketing information assets.
- Content - such as marketing, landing and opinion pieces
- Product data - information describing your products
- Customer data - name, age, preferences, behaviour etc
You create your fuel using your CMS, PIM, DAM perhaps also using a CMP tool to coordinate and manage your marketing and campaign creation efforts.
Your fuel is delivered to your customers using the experience delivery capabilities of your DXP. This may be a decoupled front-end or web-store supported by headless delivery API of your CMS or Commerce solution.
Your customers interact, view, engage, click and swipe converting your fuel into a rich level of one-to-one customer behavioural data stored in your CDP.
You can combine that data and analyse it within your CDP transforming your customer data into a series of optimisation assets.
- Segmentation - a distinct set of customers who match one or more data attribute(s)
- Variation - insight to create better and more targeted content
- Hypotheses - enabling the design of experiments to help you best apply insight and learn further
Combine these optimisation assets back in with your fuel, and feedback into your engine and repeat the process. This time watch your engine turn over quicker, fire better and push you towards better outcomes.
Then accelerate towards AI defined CX
A customer data platform will collect valuable first party customer data at scale and will increase the sophistication and speed with which you can act on that data.
It is a key technology that will move you towards the goal of real-time hyper personalised experiences and is the central part or ‘engine’ of a complete Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The data it will help you collect (and own) will act as a foundation for future data-led growth and decision making.
As the use cases for AI defined customer experience take hold, those organisations with rich sources of structured customer data will accelerate away toward greater success.
Don’t get stuck in the slow lane….
This post was first published on LinkedIn Pulse on 16th August 2023 DXP as the engine for your customer data strategy