Are you thinking of reinventing your customer engagement and reinstating your digital marketing approach? When you are competing with hundreds of reputed and popular brands online, you need to think beyond product quality. Any company that wants to retail online has to focus on their digital commerce architecture. It is nothing new, but it can be a ground-breaking concept for your sales. It can form the foundations of your online retail system.
All the online content a website has depends on its e-commerce architecture. Therefore, you must pick the right CMS to power your site. There can be several approaches to designing and maintaining an e-commerce site. That makes selecting one architecture among the many available ones challenging. The three most effective architectures include experience-led, commerce-led and API-oriented methods. What kind of architecture would you pick to power your digital retail platform?
Why should you revisit your site’s customer experience features?
Research shows that customer-experience oriented e-commerce architectures are most effective. However, the concept can be new to many. A digital experience platform (DXP) powers the customer-experience oriented architectures. It is important because this form of architecture can create a fully immersive experience for the visitors. It is the only way to amalgamate customer relationship with your brand. You might find the other experiences restricted since they do not share customer data sourced from the content marketing strategies, commerce, customer experience, CRM and ERP engines. It can create silos that do not communicate well with each other. Not paying enough attention to customer experience is a major faux pas that you should avoid at all cost.
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In the case of a customer-experience first approach, the DXP feeds all the necessary data to the outside world. While using a DXP, you will enjoy several unique benefits that do not come with other forms of digital commerce architecture. The presence of a DXP enables fine control of the content and accurate content management. Coupling it with personalization can allow you to feed pertaining content to each user. In the event of introduction of new data, you can always set up an A/B test for testing the acceptance and effectiveness of the new content. In short, if you want to enhance your customer experience, adopting a customer-experienced led digital commerce architecture is the smartest way to go about it. It can offer rich experiences across multiple channels including desktops, mobiles, and the Internet of Things.
What makes Sitecore the best option for customer-experience first brands?
Here are a few benefits of leveraging the customer-experience led digital commerce architecture for your site –
It can provide a unified customer experience
Keeping customer data in silos can do no one any good. Your CRM should have access to that data. A DXP led platform like Sitecore can offer seamless and immersive customer experience to all your visitors irrespective of their location and product preferences. Accessing enough customer data in the form of their geo-location, and purchasing history allow the CRM engine to offer relevant products to your customers. Sitecore’s DXP oriented digital platform can extend personalized experienced on Android, iPhone, and other OSx. The CRM and CMS engines can source customer data across several channels including social media, email interactions and land-based POS interactions to perfect the digital marketing strategy of the brand.
Leveraging microservices for customer experience
While choosing customer-experience oriented digital commerce platforms, you need to find out how it interacts or utilizes the microservices. Microservices are 21st century’s answer to the legacy monolithic services. As their name suggests, the monolithic systems are uniform and huge. They can run several functions that share dependencies throughout the system. Since they are a single and massive system, managing it becomes costly as it grows in size. Adding new features and updates become challenging with each extra step. The primary cause of this difficulty is the tight coupling of the elements on the monolithic system.
As a result, the micro-services dependent architecture is becoming popular. They lack the unnecessary complexity of the monolithic systems. Microservices are self-regulating and easy to manage. Developers can create them by pulling each feature and function in independent subsystems. As a result, it is possible to make changes to one subsystem without upsetting the others residing on the same system. The user sees these microservices as one unified system, but in the background, these subsystems communicate via API calls. In the end, the microservice environment is more stable than monolithic systems due to the successful isolation of the subsystem elements.
Independent microservices make extension and addition easy
When working with microservices, the website developers can leverage the isolation of this architecture for extending each subsystem. It can reduce the amount of testing necessary to develop and run an e-commerce site. It allows the users to iterate quickly and accurately in significantly less time. It makes the digital commerce platform scalable and budget-friendly. It is a unique feature of Sitecore that allows the user to extend the platform and add new features to it without wasting time or energy. Any new trends and customer reactions can get the pertaining site-wide response or single page element response depending on the magnitude of the stimuli. The developer of the website can further streamline the extension of new features to customer experiences across several platforms. When using Sitecore, you can use the digital commerce platform for tracking customer behavior through print ad campaigns, social media strategies, email marketing methods, mobile app interactions, and non-core sites.
Sitecore experience is for everyone
While most of the benefits and information we have provided here are about B2C e-commerce, you can leverage a CMS like Sitecore to create powerful B2B websites as well. Working on customer experience naturally boosts the site’s SEO and helps the target audience find the site on Google search results. The commerce functionality of a B2C platform will differ significantly from a B2B platform, but the underlying digital architecture remains the same. Even with a B2B customer-experience led platform, the content will come via a DXP. However, it will depend on the site manager to fine-tune the e-commerce engine functions including repeat orders, organizational data, and varying pricing and shipping rules.
