DXP Archives – BlueBolt

26th of June — 2023

How to Choose a Digital Experience Platform

Chris Risner

A t its core, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated set of tools and services that provides personalized, omnichannel engagement at scale.

Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) empower marketing teams to create meaningful customer experiences that build loyalty by providing the ability to speak and listen to a brand’s stakeholders. Companies that capitalize on their powerful DXP software reap the benefits of faster time-to-market, streamlined whole-team marketing workflows, and long-lasting customer relationships. When considering a Digital Experience Platform, there are multiple factors to consider. Here are some of the most important ones:

DXP Integration Capabilities

An excellent DXP should integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack, including your ecommerce platform, marketing automation software, customer relationship management (CRM) system, site search software and other tools. The platform should offer robust APIs and a variety of connectors to make integration as easy and straightforward as possible.

DXP Content Management

The DXP should offer a powerful and flexible content management system (CMS) that allows you to create and manage content. The CMS should support multiple content types, including text, images, videos, and other media. The CMS should also have an intuitive user interface so your team can easily create content and manage your website. It should also offer workflow permissioning so that managers can quickly and securely set user permissions.

DXP Personalization Capabilities

A DXP should enable you to create personalized experiences for your customers based on their preferences, behavior, and other data. The platform should offer tools for creating personalized content, recommendations, and promotions.

Building a more personalized connection with customers

DXP Multichannel Support

A good DXP should support multiple channels, including web, mobile, social media, email, and other channels. It should provide a consistent user experience across all channels and allow customers to interact with your brand seamlessly across multiple touchpoints.

DXP Analytics and Reporting

Digital Experience Platforms should provide robust analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing you to track user behavior, measure engagement, and optimize your digital experiences. The platform should offer real-time analytics, advanced reporting features, and integration with third-party analytics tools.

DXP Scalability and Performance

The right DXP should also be able to handle high traffic volumes and provide fast, responsive experiences for your customers. It should be built on a scalable architecture and offer reliable performance, even under heavy loads.

DXP Security and Compliance

The best Digital Experience Platforms should provide robust security features to protect your data and ensure compliance with industry regulations. It should offer features such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails to help you maintain data security and compliance.

These are just several of the factors our BlueBolt team analyzes when recommending DXP software vendors to our clients. If you are looking at Digital Experience Platforms, our veteran team of developers, designers and business analysts can review your business requirements and make a personalized recommendation for you. We also have a DXP Competitive Marketing Analysis available to download. If we can be of help, kindly fill out this connect with us form and we will get in touch with you.

16th of February — 2023

10 Strategies to Improve Site Search and Conversion Rates

Chris Risner

D id you know that one of the fastest ways to build customer satisfaction and loyalty is to make your website easy to navigate? Consider these statistics… Up to 30% of visitors use a site search box when one is offered.

Also in studies, 15% of total visitors used site search, but these visitors accounted for 45% of all revenue. (Addsearch) Pretty compelling, right? However, while marketers contemplate adding search to websites to best serve customers, the hidden truth is that site search is the path to direct, real-time analytics, direct from the fingertips of your customers. While these statistics sadly won’t entirely replace the need for Google Analytics and making the switch to Google Analytics 4, intel coming from your site search data has no filter between you and your customer. In addition to all these great statistics, here are 10 ways to improve both site search and conversion rates:

Site Search and Conversions

Did you know that site search bar users convert at a rate five to six times higher than their counterparts not using a search engine? Inbox Insights found that customers using site search boxes are strongly signaling their intent to purchase or engage with content when they place a query in a search box.

Cutting Through the Noise with Site Search

Site search can play an important role in your customers’ satisfaction. 30+% of customers use a site search (Addsearch) box to find products and content when one is offered. With customers continually being inundated with digital ads everywhere they look, offering your users that ability to cut through the noise quickly and precisely will lead to higher satisfaction and improved conversions. Offering site search as well as clear navigation on your website is the foundation of building loyalty among your customers.

Quickly Drill Down to the Right Content with Faceted Search

It’s critical to offer faceted search. Filters and facets make it easier for a web user to narrow down what customers need. However, be careful not to provide too many search options, as it can also quickly get overwhelming. When done right, faceted search can help your customers quickly find their desired content and products.

Location Matters – Even with Site Search

Place your search box where a user can find it, according to standard UX site search and conventions. Really, this sounds like common sense, but it needs to be included based on what we’ve seen. Our team strongly suggests search boxes should at least 25 characters wide and put it in an obvious spot on the page, such as in a sticky top navigation bar or a list of faceted search options in the left rail. Over time, you can also A/B test the placement of the search box (experimentation blog) to see which placement users prefer.

Mobile Matters Too

Don’t forget mobile. For companies who have a high level of mobile engagement, optimization is crucial for your website, as well as the search results page. To drive deep customer satisfaction, it’s important to go beyond just having a functional search box for mobile app users. Consider making changes that correspond with having a small screen space, such as limiting the number of facets or the character count of result descriptions.

Don’t Just Search Metadata

Search the actual content and products, not just metadata. Given that metadata is a very short summary of content and products, it stands to reason that only searching metadata would not provide a complete list of search results, especially content results. In a worst-case scenario, you may have the content on your website your customers are looking for, but the details may not be in the metadata, which would return zero results – and force your customer to go search for their needs among your competitors.

Site Search Engages Users

Engage users with search suggestions. After all, customers don’t know what they don’t know. Thanks to predictive text and natural language processing abilities, queries are able to be populated as customers begin typing. Furthermore, the more your customer engages with content on your site or performs searches, the more suggestion recommendations search engines like BravoSquared can make.

Site Search Growth

Create a strategy for how your site search will evolve with your website. Customers’ expectations are constantly evolving in this fast paced, digital world. Social media, blog posts, email campaigns and Google ads are transforming the marketing landscape, but also create a lot of noise. It’s important to create a roadmap of how your search solution capabilities can continually enhance the website user experience – and vice versa.

Real Time Analytics with Site Search

Leverage search activity in your content and ecommerce strategy. Your customers’ search engine queries are analytics showing you what customers want from your site. Analytics do not get any more direct or clear than this. Additionally, queries that return no results or results with low click-through rates is a great indicator of what is not working on your website – and a hint that you either need to revamp this information or abandon it altogether. It’s also possible that your digital offerings have gone stale – and your customers are eager for new content and products.

Optimize Based on Data Direct from Customers

Analyze and optimize continually. Make it a habit to track the impact of every search function change on the total number of conversions. Overtime, this optimization will pay dividends.

Our BlueBolt team believes in the power of site search so much that we created our own search product, BravoSquared. Bravo combines the power of site search with artificial intelligence and machine learning to power relevant results the first time and every time. Bravo also excels at delivering smart product recommendations to help increase your ecommerce metrics. If you have questions about site search, we are always happy to answer them.

Schedule a Complimentary Site Search Consultation

Yes, Please!

24th of January — 2022

Website Testing & Experimentation: Leverage Data with Optimizely

Chris Risner

F or too long, marketing and business executives have been left in the dark as to what their customers really wanted. Yes, some datasets were available based on results from a promotion, but those results often took weeks, if not months, to receive – and were usually only able to be calculated after a campaign was complete.

Good news. Times have changed. The challenge now is to harness the data that is coming at us at the speed of light. Thankfully, software platforms like Optimizely Intelligence Cloud offer a data-driven model of testing and experimentation that creates usable, actionable reports. This also enables your team to prove the ROI of marketing actions, optimize strategies to improve performance and make intelligent, customer focused marketing decisions. In the age of website testing and experimentation, brands can leverage data, thanks to Optimizely more easily than ever.

In practical terms, testing and experimentation with Optimizely Intelligence Cloud empowers you to:

Prove the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
Shutter ineffective strategies and expensive mistakes
Innovate and test new design ideas
Improve campaigns and pages
Assess new marketing plans
Generate informed business decisions

Marketing experimentation is the fastest path towards true digital innovation and, more importantly, standing head and shoulders above your competition.

Website testing with Optimizely Intelligence Cloud

Getting Started with Optimizely Intelligence Cloud

To enable your marketing team to chalk up some quick wins with Optimizely testing and experimentation, their team has put together directions on ten common Optimizely Intelligence Cloud experiments including:

Geographical Differences

Do you want to know what matters to your customers in different parts of the United States? How about the entire world? This is a great experiment to see what content and imagery appeals to consumers in various locations. It’s even more powerful for commerce companies looking to see buying patterns in various geographic areas, as this can drive promotions or entire lines of new business.

CTA’s for New Visitors vs. Subscribers

Delivering clear and compelling content for each of your user personas is critically important, so the team at Optimizely created an experiment that centers around testing content for new users versus subscribers. After all, would you want a loyal customer to be greeted with a “let’s get started” form?

Remove Distractions from the Checkout Funnel

Have you been challenged to improve online sales? One culprit that hinders most sales funnels is distraction. This test enables you to look at a variety of steps where your customers may be getting hung up. Could it be convoluted navigation? Could it be too many steps in your checkout process? There are so many ‘virtual squirrels’ that compete for your customer’s attention. Minimizing the interruptions they face will facilitate them across your goal line.

Optimize Your Pricing Pages

How a pricing or subscription page is arranged can truly deliver the goods for your team. The question is, what styling changes will deliver the magic combination? Prior to testing and experimentation, this was largely anyone’s best guess based on sales results. Fortunately, testing and experimentation takes the guesswork out of the picture leading to higher conversions and increased sales.

Highlight Key Value Propositions

Do you offer multiple purchase choices customers can make, or new offerings you would like to highlight? Would adding a phrase like “most popular” sway your customers to make a choice they may not have made otherwise? The good news is you can test all these variables and get clear answers with multi-variate testing.

Symmetric Messaging

One of the truest marketing sayings is “the devil is in the details.” Many a marketing team has had battles over the tiniest differences in messaging and/or which images should accompany the text. The great thing is that with Optimizely’s ability to test multiple phrasing and pictures through A/B/n testing, teams will now know who gets bragging rights.

Website testing with Optimizely Intelligence Cloud - 4

Personalize Based On Cookies

One of the easier ways to deliver personalized content is to leverage the cookies your users download from your website. However, this can also get a bit over the top creepy. Finding the balance between what is a good use of cookie-based personalization is what testing can help you identify. You may have users who love a highly personalized website or you may have a customer who will jump ship. The only way to know is to hypothesize and evaluate based on actual trials.

Test Promotion Formats

Do you have a promotion that has gone over exceptionally well with your customer base? What would happen if you expanded that promotion from your website into an email or vice versa? When does the promotion reach its limit and run its course with your customer base? All these questions – and more – can be answered with Optimizely.

Optimize a Form

With website forms being a key component of demand gen pipeline, it’s very important for marketers to use them in the most effective way possible. For example, one company in the UK experimented with a long form that asked clients 1-2 questions per page over four pages. They found a 70% increase in their customer base completing the entire form versus having 5-8 questions in a one-page form. As one can imagine, a 70% uptick in form completion can do a lot for pipeline. In their case, it led to a whole new product line offering.

Adding Social Proof

Adding social proof is a theory that examines the impact of whether adding a testimony will influence a customer’s decision to commit. With Optimizely’s multi-variate testing, it’s possible to also add sophistication with cookie-based personalization to test whether a testimonial from the consumers’ geographic area would be more trusted and influence their buying decision.

The good news about these 10 different experiments is that they are truly the tip of the iceberg with Optimizely Intelligence Cloud. The biggest challenge with this powerful platform is to be disciplined and stick to a strategic testing roadmap. Otherwise you may find yourself with a lot of disjointed data making it difficult to build actionable and measurable campaigns. An experienced partner like BlueBolt ensures the platform is implemented properly and enables your team to test often and fail, maximizing your investment for FY22 and beyond.

28th of March — 2021

Optimizely vs. Sitecore – Who wins the Commerce & Content battle?

Jason Lichon

Several enterprise digital experience (DXP) and ecommerce platforms, like Sitecore, lack transparent pricing, can be grueling to use and might leave you susceptible to a devastating data breach. Enter, Optimizely – a more innovative platform built with the modern digital leader in mind.

Fill out the form to download our latest infographic and see exactly why 9,000+ companies trust Optimizely to create unified digital experiences for their customers with speed and simplicity.

Want to learn more about BlueBolt’s work with Optimizely? Contact us.

12th of February — 2021

Congrats to Optimizely from a Longtime User and Fan

Jason Lichon

H aving worked with Optimizely (formerly Episerver) for more than a decade, this came as no surprise for those of us at BlueBolt who have grown to appreciate everything the platform has to offer.

Gartner recently declared (again) that Optimizely is a leader in their Magic Quadrant for DXPs (digital experience platforms). Having worked with Optimizely (formerly Episerver) for more than a decade, this came as no surprise for those of us at BlueBolt who have grown to appreciate everything the platform has to offer. It does, however, serve as an opportunity to reflect on the characteristics of Optimizely that make it such a powerhouse platform.

I first started working with Episerver back in 2011, with version 6 R2 to be precise. Back then, it didn’t have eCommerce functionality and platforms like Azure and AWS were still in their infancy – but I was able to recognize the benefits of the platform. Episerver was already leading the way with innovative features like Visitor Groups, a simple and clean editor experience, and a reputation amongst the .NET developer community as being very straightforward to use, extend, and customize.

As the years have rolled on, the platform has become more mature, embraced the cloud, and really amped up its content personalization capabilities. I’ve also come to appreciate its multi-lingual abilities which are second to none. We’ve been wrapping up work on a site that offers full localization in English, Italian, French and Japanese – and again I’ve been really impressed with how easily the platform handles multiple languages – especially Asian languages.

Something else that separates Optimizely from its competitors is its flexibility. As a developer, I’ve worked with many different CMS and eCommerce platforms – but by far, Optimizely is the most versatile in terms of customization and integration capabilities. This is especially important when you consider the myriad of systems that you typically integrate with: PIMs, ERPs, CRMs, you name it.

Optimizely offers these features, while still providing a best-in-class content editor experience and cloud-based infrastructure; typically, you must sacrifice one or the other. There are many PaaS (platform as a service) vendors out there, but they typically limit your customization and integration capabilities – making them far less suitable for truly enterprise grade eCommerce applications.

So, congratulations to the team at Optimizely! We’re so happy you have again received the accolades that you deserve. We continue to look forward to working with Optimizely as a partner for many years to come!

28th of June — 2017

What is Website Personalization and Why Is It Important?

Chris Risner

C onnecting with customers is the top priority of all marketing material to come out of a business. A company website, when utilized properly, provides a variety of benefits, ranging from e-commerce store and point of sale to literature and media on services provided.

Marketing and customer outreach are two additional aspects of the website. When a client arrives on site, a well designed website works as all quality advertising does. It connects with the customer, highlighting how it can improve their lives or businesses. The most most successful marketing campaigns are finely tuned to meet the personality of a company’s key demographics. That is exactly what website personalization is and why it should be implemented into any business site.

What Exactly is Website Personalization?

Regardless of the form of marketing, a blanket approach attempts to cover all demographics, yet fails to target any. These advertising approaches typically stem from businesses with either an inferior marketing department or a company that does not understand its own target demographic. Instead of going after everyone, a business with proper understanding of its clients should personalize all marketing and outreach methods, to better meet the needs of its customers. Website personalization takes the same approach. It offers a customized experience for visitors, dedicated to meet their individual needs. Personalization highlights products, services, or content that a particular customer might like while connecting to them on a more personal level. By establishing this connection, a potential client becomes more inclined to not only shop or use the website, but return to the site for future needs (Hubspot, 2014).

The Development of Website Personalization

Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon and its nearly $100 billion empire, started from the ground up in the late 1990s. Even in the early infancy of the consumer driven Internet, Mr. Bezos understood the importance of creating a unique experience for all visitors. In 1998, he told the Washington Post the goal of Amazon was not to have one store. Instead, he said “…if we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.” Jeff’s vision took years for technology to catch up to, but now, every individual who visits Amazon has a slightly different user experience. They see product recommendations based not only on previous product searches within Amazon, but on searches performed outside of the service.

The major problem with creating a single website for all customers is major corporations likely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, annually to identify their target audience, understand what they like and determine what sells a product and what doesn’t. All of this information is vital to the development of varying marketing campaigns. Despite all of this, with a static, single website, all of the money spent and valuable knowledge obtained goes right out the window. Instead, with website personalization, a company has the ability to take this valuable data and implement it into the website. This way, much like Amazon and other major online retailers, it becomes possible to provide a unique visitor experience while on the site.

Nothing is (or Should Be) One Size Fits All

Even when a company’s key demographic is universally the same, individual clients and customers are not. They may shop for slightly different items or have different buying habits. This is where individualized personalization really comes into play. While it does not change the aesthetics of a website for every visitor, it does alter what products are showcased. For no retail outlets, the website can provide regionalized weather information, news reports, travel insights based on season and so on. Everything is designed to meet the needs of the individual.

Customer outreach has greatly shifted over the past decade. Individuals now expect a personalized experience, dedicated to providing information more akin to their preferences. With the ability to ask digital assistants (such as services offered through Amazon, Google and Apple) questions and receive instantaneous responses to verbally informing a television what kind of program they are interested in, a customized response is more important now than ever before as it is what customers now expect. Offering this personalized experience through website personalization is what all companies, from small to the enterprise level, should strive for.

How is a Website Personalized?

Data is the friend of any website. Data mined from a visitors can provide valuable insights not only into the key demographics of a site, what advertisements are working and how inbound marketing campaigns are working. Real time data analysis makes it possible to directly affect the way a user experiences a website. The first time a visitor comes to a site the company will not have any information based on the user yet. However, that changes nearly instantaneously. When arriving at a cite, the user’s unique IP address provides them with a unique identity. As they click on different images, display listings or other interact with videos, all of this information is sourced and logged. If a visitor is spending time looking at outdoor lighting on a landscape company’s page, highlighted information on the website can target additional recommendations based on the outdoor lighting the visitor looked at. By taking in and continually analyzing real time data, it becomes possible to offer on-the-fly website personalization for every visitor.

As the same IP address returns to a website, additional information is obtained, which allows fine tuning of the personalization. However, real time data analysis is not the only element when it comes to website personalization. Personalization doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t increase sales. To ensure not only an improved personalized experience but to improve lead generation and sales, additional planning and continual improvements need to take place on the site. Planning for visitors comes from a greater knowledge of a company’s key demographic. By understanding what a visitor is likely to look for or why they are on the site, the entire layout of the website can be altered to better fit the target consumer’s needs.

Lastly, understanding how certain website personalization works and continuously making improvements allows a website to identify what is working and what isn’t. Not all personalization will lead to a potential client purchasing services from the website. If part of the website personalization continually underperforms and does not connect with the customer, it is necessary to adjust, remove or implement other personalization changes to correct the lack of sales generation. All of this becomes possible with the help of continually monitoring website analytics and data (Search Engine Watch, 2014).

The moment a visitor arrives, a website needs to connect with their personal needs, wants and desires. By understanding key demographics, it is possible for a company to setup its website to prove more attractive and beneficial to customers. This acts as a welcome mat, waving the customer in. As the individual spends time on the site, continual data analysis allows for a personalized, custom experience, unique to them and them alone. By taking advantage of website personalization, companies not only connect directly with a potential client, but increase the chance of the customer both making a purchase and returning for future purchases. Due to this, implementing website personalization is a must for all businesses.

If our team can help deliver on your website and personalization projects, please connect with us.

3rd of May — 2017

Top Signs that It is Time for a New Web Content Management System

Chris Risner

I n the modern day, a successful enterprise relies heavily on the flow of digital media. A responsive and high-quality website makes a great first impression on potential customers. Likewise, company employees rely on systems to get relevant data as quickly as possible. An efficient content management system (CMS) is able to juggle both of these realms in order to keep a company running at its best.

Content management systems index and store all of a company’s data so that it can be quickly and easily retrieved by the people who have access to it. An effective CMS is capable of enterprise content management (ECM) as well as web content management (WCM). ECM is primarily concerned with the flow of data between members of a company. WCM on the other hand focuses on the flow of data between an enterprise and potential customers. Both forms of content management need to be as efficient as possible in order for an enterprise to be successful.

However, like all software, sometime a content management system simply needs to be replaced. But how does an enterprise know when it needs to purchase a new content management system?

It All Comes Down to Time

The needs of an enterprise change very rapidly. That is not to say that a new CMS should be purchased every time the needs of the enterprise shift. It does, however, mean that an enterprise needs to keep a watchful eye on their content management system for signs of a degrading service.

When considering to replace a content management system an enterprise should be asking the following questions:

How much has the enterprise grown since the CMS was first installed?
How does the enterprise needs to present itself to potential customers?
Are there any significant flaws in how the current CMS is operating?
Does the current CMS update frequently?

Growth of the Enterprise

The most simple answer for whether or not a company should invest in a new CMS is: Yes. Over time, any successful enterprise will outgrow the systems that worked for it in the beginning. This is because when an enterprise first starts out, it most likely invests in an affordable (i.e cheap) content management system. At this lower level, a cheap content management system fits the need of the enterprise just fine because it has a very low workload. However, as the company grows this cheap CMS can be strained by the sheer amount of data it has to manage.

Naturally, the larger a company grows, the more content it has to archive: transactions, payrolls, et cetera. This content is vital to the operation of the company. If the enterprise grows very rapidly, so too will this backlog of information. If there is too much content for the current CMS to operate it may no longer work as well as it used to.

All of this data inevitably piles up. As an enterprise grows it continuously needs larger and more powerful systems to keep it all in check. Record keeping is crucial to the health of an enterprise – one never knows when a year-old payroll may be needed. As such, this kind of data can not simply be deleted to make room for new data.

Changing a CMS may be more hassle than deleting old data, however in the long run it becomes an impractical and temporary solution. Eventually an enterprise has to upgrade its content management system if it wants to continue to grow. The sooner an enterprise can make the switch, the better off it will be in the long run.

Perception of the Enterprise

Functionality of the CMS

A major sign that a content management system needs replacing is if employees or customers report persistent issues while trying to access the content that the system manages. If content is frequently unavailable or if there is considerable lag while trying to access it then the CMS is likely due for an upgrade.

On the consumer side, longer wait times or frequent errors may be a result of a CMS that is desperately in need a replacement. If too many customers are complaining about long wait times they may decide to take their business elsewhere. So investing in a stronger CMS is a move that not only keeps customers happy – but it keeps the enterprise healthy.

On an employee’s end, a faulty content management system may often lose content or it may take too long for content to be retrieved. The slower the content management system operates, the slower the employee works. To keep employees working at their most efficient an updated CMS is key.

Updates for the CMS

Like all software, a content management system can be updated to improve its functionality. If the developers of the CMS are not updating it, odds are the content management system will become rapidly outdated. Content management is a rapidly changing environment and if updates are nowhere to be found an enterprise could be lagging behind.

Updating the CMS is always a preferable step to purchasing a brand new system. It will save money and hassle that come with changing the content management system altogether. However, if an update does not improve the functionality of the CMS or if there simply is no update then it is time to start looking for a new system.

If our team can help you with your CMS, WCM or DXP, please connect with us.