A digital experience platform (DXP) unifies marketing, content management, and e-commerce into a single platform, enabling consistent omnichannel experiences for the user. It is a tremendously powerful tool if built right.
Thinking about building or modernizing your DXP? Here are five common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
1. Not thinking big enough
A DXP is your digital storefront; it’s a window into your company. What vision do you have for your platform? What are your users looking for? What experiences will truly delight them?
Too often, DXP initiatives are launched to achieve enterprise business goals, such as streamlining content across channels, gaining efficiencies, or making it easy for marketers to update and manage content. A DXP can help you achieve all that, but as you embark on this journey, you can achieve so much more, and often with a similar amount of funding if you consider related issues.
So, if you are launching a new platform, or migrating from an old one, consider:
- Improving your conversation rate and better conveying your brand by updating your designs and tone of voice
- Differentiating yourself from competitors and offering a better experience
- Displaying content customers deem critical to decision-making in an easily accessible way
- Reducing user clicks, and data inputs or simplifying onboarding or checkout processes
- Optimizing your internal processes to deliver better customer experience
- Redesigning your architectural and data models to improve performance and scalability
Having trouble figuring out where to invest to achieve the best outcomes? Check out our Digital Ops Funding Matrix – a framework to help prioritize strategic initiatives and manage investment decisions.
2. Rightsizing Marketing Technology (Martech)
Martech is the common term used to describe a suite of technologies that enable the marketing team to successfully achieve their goals. These include customer relationship management (CRM) tools, search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools, platform analytics, etc.
When building a digital experience platform, Martech either takes a disproportionate role if the DXP initiative is driven by Marketing or is relegated to an afterthought in tech-centric organizations.
Finding the right balance between Digital and Marketing needs is crucial. A good approach aims to break down silos between Marketing and Digital, involving all parties from ideation to delivery and beyond while building the platform in a way that enables everyone to perform their tasks optimally. To do this, it’s important to look at end-to-end data and process flows and aims to minimize bottlenecks and interdependencies.
3. Picking an all-in-one solution
There are many ways to build DXP platforms, and while all-in-one solutions might be appealing, picking a Ferrari if you need a Land Rover will be both expensive and impractical; most all-in-one platform solutions have heavy drawbacks, including being slower than open ecosystems, difficulty finding talent, opinionated approach to content and architecture that you have to work around, or difficulties in integrating with your broader ecosystem. Furthermore, they tend to specialize and be strong in some areas but weak in others.
At Rangle, we prefer to go with best-in-class solutions, looking at each element of the DXP. Our recent article on headless CMS platforms goes more in-depth about all the elements to consider when selecting a headless CMS.
By building your DXP this way, you’ll have loosely-coupled elements, allowing you to easily upgrade or change specific components of your platform, invest more in some areas and less in others, and tailor the platform to your needs.
Start assessing your needs by doing an end-to-end review of how you operate today and, ideally, how you’d like to optimize your flows in the future. It’s important to consider elements such as how content is created and approved, how often content is updated and by whom, how the data will flow to backend systems or interfaces with third-party APIs, how to manage risks around security and privacy, or how technology decisions can impact performance and SEO.
4. Neglecting data
On the unauthenticated experience, a key benefit of a DXP is the amount of data that it can gather on user interaction through multiple channels; that data, if used properly, can fuel your company’s growth and success.
From the authenticated lens, good data flows, management, and abstraction will enable customers to access accurate, up-to-date information in a responsive and user-friendly way, improving sales, and minimizing calls to your support center.
Therefore, it’s critical to put data at the center of your strategy and to have a solid change management plan in place to guide your team on the changes happening at the data layer and how to effectively take advantage of the potential that a DXP offers.
5. Lack of a continuous strategy to scale and adapt
As we mentioned, a DXP is your digital storefront. Therefore, it’s imperative to continuously monitor, review, and adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs.
What we see often see is maintenance occurring in a mechanical fashion, delivering features that, while interesting, ultimately end up falling short of end-user expectations as competitors continue to innovate.
A digital experience platform needs to be customer-centric and needs to be able to quickly scale and change. Consider using a design system and composable architecture to build your platform. Consider also putting in place feedback mechanisms to gather input from your customers, review analytics, and create processes that promote experimentation and innovation.
Thinking of implementing or migrating your DXP? Partner with Rangle and build your DXP the right way!
