As Sitecore announces its acquisition of Boxever and Four51, and Episerver acquires Optimizely, we ask the question – are DXP expansions making the CMO’s lives easier? Geoff Lentin, Chief Growth Officer at Delete / Kagool shares his advice.
Everyone loves an easy life. Humans are hardwired to take mental shortcuts so we conserve energy. It’s one of those annoying hangovers from our ancestral past that benefited us in long dangerous winters. We only exert effort when the benefits outweigh the costs. It’s why we jump on bandwagons and pay more attention to ideas that confirm our existing beliefs. It’s far less effort than re-evaluating our sense of self. But we’re thinking, emotionally fragile creatures now, with wants and workloads, and this conflicts with our heuristics and biases. We need life to be easier, but we want to achieve more. Enter digital experience platforms.
Anyone who’s anyone these days is engineering “meaningful digital experiences at every touchpoint” in the customer journey for their AI-identified audience segments. At scale.
Whatever that means.
If you spend effort fighting through the difficult jargon, though, you’ll see that all this means is that the fancy stuff about your website will help you communicate more efficiently and sell more, to more customers, because it will make your team’s and your customers’ lives easier.
The beauty is that as the tech gets more complicated and the hyperbole more absurd, marketers’ lives become easier, playing right into the hands of your biases.
If you focus on the best of the best, Gartner’s top right quadrant, there’s an exciting theme around acquiring best of breed products to bolster the intelligence of the platforms.
Sitecore bought two products recently; Boxever – a platform that allows precision targeting with rich optimisation of customer interactions across the entire customer experience. AI helps you experiment with personalisation quickly and drives smart recommendations. And Four51, which sounds more like an alien crash landing site than a B2B eCommerce platform.
Four51’s strength is being able to offer genuinely unique and highly customisable experiences for customers, like individual catalogues and pricing for buyers. It’s headless, too, which is all the rage.
You may have also seen that Episerver bought Optimizely. The move adds deep intelligence to how marketing teams can experiment with content to drive sales, conversion, acquisition, and all the other KPIs you’re tracking.
The results of the acquisitive nature of leading DXPs is a further alignment to the modern thinking that the best solution for leading brands is a technology stack that uses best of breed headless products, with AI at the heart of it all.
But all you need to know is that this added complexity makes yours and your customers’ lives easier.
For more information on how Delete / Kagool helps brands make the right platform choices, contact them here.