How can e-commerce marketing teams deliver great omnichannel shopping experiences while cutting costs?

Creating and optimising content for eCommerce websites can be time-consuming, and expensive. The bigger the company, the more costs rise. In this article, Beth Norton, Director of Content Marketing at Amplience looks at how digital experience platforms are helping eCommerce marketing teams to scale as they grow, and how they make the launch of exciting digital personalised experiences easy to manage and control. 

Everyone wants to do more for less, and right now keeping costs down is a priority. It can be expensive and time-consuming to create and optimise content for eCommerce websites, but all online retailers and brands want their customers to enjoy a seamless omnichannel shopping experience. 

The answer to the conundrum is to use a digital experience platform (DXP). 

eCommerce companies of every size will benefit, but larger organisations where the cost of scaling content can quickly escalate, will find that DXPs allow them to expand according to their requirements and rapidly deliver memorable digital experiences for their customers. 

A composable DXP, what’s that?

Gartner explains that a digital experience platform is an ‘integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.’

Putting this more simply, a DXP combines a range of solutions that allow retailers and brands to create and manage content and provide personalised digital experiences across multiple channels on a variety of touchpoints - from smartphones to laptops. To do this successfully, DXPs use MACH (microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless) technologies. And it is the use of APIs to connect the different tool suites and platforms, and the range of tools that a company chooses to ‘compose’ – depending on budget, and need – that lies at the core of its success. 

While a retailer or brand can scale up, or scale down their integrated tools, a DXP will ordinarily bring together a Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM), a Content Management System (CMS), analytics, and social media functionality. 

What can a DXP do for you?

One of the main benefits of a DXP is that it can bring down business expenditure. According to PwC, companies that adopt cloud-based content management systems can expect to see a 30-50% reduction in IT costs.

But on top of that, a DXP also unifies an online retailer’s tech stack, improves their brand consistency and allows them to harness their customer data from a single source.

We all know the importance of delivering omnichannel content, but a DXP really does help to ensure customers experience a seamless service whether they are interacting on the web, on social channels or on mobile apps. Marketing teams can easily incorporate new customer touchpoints facilitated by APIs and ensure a high quality digital experience is delivered consistently. 

Instead of managing and maintaining multiple platforms in the tech stack, retailers can streamline their digital operations through an integrated DXP, simplifying processes for both the development and the marketing teams and freeing up their time for other important projects. 

All business evolve, and DXPs are designed to flex to meet the needs of retail businesses as they grow. This means that those companies can quickly react to opportunities and consumer demands without worrying about whether their digital content can keep up. 

Retailers will save time and resources, and improve operational efficiency, while meeting their business goals.

Personalisation and brand consistency matter

Personalisation is fundamental to successful shopping experiences, and all retailers strive to ensure their services are finely tuned, leading to positive customer interactions, basket conversions and long-term loyalty. 

By integrating multiple analytics tools into a DXP, retailers can benefit from it becoming their primary source of customer data. Whether they want information about the preferences of their customers, their shopping habits or their interests, the DXP will deliver the data. This is a powerful feature, allowing retailers and brands to customise the shopping experiences they offer and boost conversions. 

And in the list of what matters most, a consistent experience across channels is in the top five.  Customers who have received a great service will come back regardless of whether it’s on a retailer’s Instagram page, or their website, or if they find the retailer on Facebook first. What matters is that they recognise the brand, they remember the experience they had previously, and they feel confident that they can browse, order and buy whether they’re using a social platform or an app. 

An all-in-one DXP has the power to unify a retailer’s tech stack, and best of all, it helps marketers to deliver the kind of digital experience that customers expect time and time again. 

A boost to the business

Data is at the heart of a retailer’s customer service, and by using a DXP, marketers can tap into valuable information about customer behaviours, site analytics, social media engagement and inventory levels. With this level of insight, it becomes straightforward to see patterns and key performance drivers that will inform decisions about marketing, and how the business can move on to the next step towards growth. 

So, if you are thinking about how to support your digital content as you grow and want to be sure you are consistently meeting your customers’ expectations, consider a Digital Experience Platform as an important step in your expansion. 

By Beth Norton

Director of Content Marketing 

Amplience