Recently, Sitecore was positioned as a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalisation Magic Quadrant. This ranking identifies which organisations are providing the best personalisation technology, enabling marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about their intent and context.
“We are thrilled to see Gartner recognise Sitecore’s dedication to providing our customers with a strong personalisation and composable digital experience software,” said Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer at Sitecore. “Our customers have gained tremendous value from Sitecore offerings and we’re committed to continuously innovating and improving our offerings and services to help marketers and organisations develop a best-in-class, customer experience.”
Personalisation is arguably the ‘holy grail’ when it comes to making your website perform as a sales tool. You want visitors to get the best customer experience and be pointed towards products or services which are perfect for them. As the Gartner accolade highlights, Sitecore is continuing to be one of the world’s best website platforms to provide this service.
Over the years we’ve been creating Sitecore websites for our clients, we have noticed a shift in approach from the organisation from being a Monolithic DXP (Digital Experience Platform) to embracing composability. A DXP recognises that an online presence is more than just a website – it offers the ability to manage all the online elements for your business from social media channels to analytics, your CRM and ecommerce functions. Through this your customers will enjoy a more personal user experience, which is continually being tailored to meet their own very individual needs.
Sitecore was often perceived as a Monolithic DXP, however, in reality, it’s always been very open to integrating with other systems. Monolithic DXPs are essentially an all-in-one platform, which includes all the technologies a business needs, integrated into a single suite purchased from one vendor. While these solutions are different technologically and function-wise, they all have the same look and feel and integrate seamlessly with each other.
Now, however, we’re seeing this change with Sitecore looking to bring in the best of breed tools from other providers, particularly when this comes to personalisation and it is moving towards a Composable DXP.
As Sitecore explains: “Unlike a traditional (monolithic) DXP, a composable DXP is inherently modular. It is cloud-native and is comprised of best-of-breed SaaS products that leverage microservices architecture and integrate via APIs. Instead of a singular platform, brands access different functions as purpose-built, plug-and-play packaged business capabilities (PBCs). It is helpful to view a composable DXP not as a standalone product, but as a customisable ecosystem that links together multiple products, and which makes modules easy to organise, find and update.”
Sitecore recognised that it’s not worth reinventing the wheel, so it has brought onboard some established products and updated other of its own products. Today, Sitecore DXP is the organisation’s composable solution, allowing customers to select the capabilities they need and add others as time goes on. Arguably, a big move for a business which has stood by its one solution fits all philosophy for a long while. Certainly, the advent of AI is one reason Sitecore has done this as there are already established experts in the field – such as ChatGPT - which the organisation can call upon to help its customers with content creation and personalisation search.
Composability offers a more flexible approach which allows companies to bolt on the tools which they think suit their business best. It could be described as a ‘best of the breed’ strategy, where you choose the best possible digital solutions for your business. Teams can stick with systems they are familiar with and can also bolt on applications which are basically the best available, built by firms which specialise in that business application.
Personalisation has moved on enormously recently. We are used to a website personalising our journey based on where we are viewing the website from and by tracking the journey we make through a website. For instance, if a travel website notes that we are based in the UK, it will typically quote prices in sterling. Then, as we look for budget accommodation, for example, it will send us deals and rooms based on what it perceives to be our budget, rather than luxury hotels and breaks. It might also share news stories with us which reflect where we are based.
Nowadays, there are organisations which take tracking much further and a number of the large website providers are partnering with such companies to tap into their knowledge and provide high level personalistion. For example, they hold blocks of data regarding known IP addresses and this can be added into a Composable DXP to provide additional intelligence about website visitors – thus personalising their journey even more. This could be industry-based information or the size of a business etc.
For example, if you are searching the website of a restaurant exhibition and, using data from your IP address, your DXP can see that you a tableware company, then you’ll see pages which relate to tableware not, for instance, foodstuff supply.
At the Sitecore DX Minneapolis 2023 (held in October 2023) CMSWIRE reported that ‘composability was the subject du jour’. There the company unveiled XM Cloud Plus ‘an extended digital-experience solution that brings together content management, AI-powered search, personalisation, customer data management and analytics’.
“XM Cloud marked a significant moment in Sitecore’s journey when we launched it a year ago,” said Steve Tzikakis, CEO of Sitecore. “Our first-to-market experience offering a cloud-based composable solution resulted in rapid adoption and was the culmination of three years of development with extensive customer input.”
He added that XM Cloud Plus, brings together ‘a proven set of products that gives brands broader capabilities to offer an unrivalled customer experience, while simplifying and accelerating their move to the cloud, and delivering a powerful solution for the thousands of Sitecore XP customers that want additional enterprise capabilities’.
Key features of XM Cloud Plus include content creation and management and AI-powered search and content recommendations. The latter includes dynamic personalisation and targeting strategies, offering omnichannel personalisation, intelligent search recommendations and access to an extensive array of personalisation development tools.
If you’d like to talk further about how personalisation can work for your website, call us at Lake Solutions on: 020 3397 3222.