In today’s saturated world of marketing data, the customer remains at the centre of what marketers do. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) often face higher expectations from their management and customers regarding personalizing marketing data for optimizing the marketing dollar.

Fact Check!

1. According to a Forbes Insights and Epsilon survey, 81% of marketers said they face data quality challenges, with missing or incomplete data being the top issue.
2. A KPMG survey found that 59% of organizations struggle with integrating data from multiple sources, leading to inconsistent and unreliable data.
3. McKinsey reported that poor data quality affects 90% of organizations and can result in incorrect business decisions, decreased operational efficiency and poor customer satisfaction.
4. Statista’s survey showed that 47% of organizations identify the lack of data standardization as a major challenge in managing customer data.

Price Question: Is there a solution? Which search query yields around 1 million results on Google?

Zaius, Optimizely’s newest acquisition in 2021, was formerly a big player in the CDP industry. To strengthen its digital experience platform capabilities, the firm integrated Zaius’ product into the Optimizely platform and renamed it as Optimizely Data Platform.

How Optimizely’s Data Platform Can Help Solve Customer Data Challenges

ODP stands for Optimizely Data Platform. It’s a CDP, a tool that stores and creates unified customer profiles. With the ODP, companies can see what users are doing on multiple platforms – including their websites and apps – in a holistic, single view.

By using the Optimizely Data Platform, you can enhance the customer experience by incorporating rich content and insights into your data, eliminating the need to spend countless hours on data retrieval and customization. The ODP enables you to streamline your work with these four processes:

Collecting data: The ODP collects data from almost any program, including CRM (customer relationship management) tools, payment systems, and email campaigns.

Governing data: The ODP can evaluate and classify incoming data’s validity by ensuring that the collected data adheres to both open-source and proprietary data standards. The platform can be used to set up restricted access to certain data based on customer privacy regulations.

Synthesizing data: The ODP segments data into groups for ease of access and analysis. With the ability to segment customers, real-time updates to customer profiles can be made as the ODP continually synthesizes data. Additionally, the ODP can identify existing customers within anonymous profiles by searching for specific shopping patterns, which can then be integrated with existing data to create a comprehensive customer profile.

Activating data: The ODP can be linked to all software involved in customer communication, sales, and analysis, such as CRMs, social media accounts, websites and landing pages, as well as data analysis and visualization tools. The platform allows for immediate and direct interaction with the software your team uses daily.

What are the advantages of ODP?

As the Thought Leader of Optimizely Data Platform, I want to walk you through the advantages of the ODP, which is designed to help you deliver the best possible customer experience and drive business growth.

Build Unified Customer Profiles

At the heart of ODP lies its ability to build unified customer profiles, providing a central hub to bring together data from your entire ecosystem. Our platform ingests first-party data and standardizes it by matching individual customer IDs from different systems and combining them into a single, consistent, and accurate customer profile.

Integration has never been easier with over 50 pre-built connectors, including Optimizely DXP, Magento, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Mailchimp. And with the ability to combine visitor search and page navigation data, you can gain deeper insights into your customers’ preferences and behaviours. ODP also leverages identity stitching to match unique IDs in different systems for anonymous IDs, allowing you to see customer profiles in a single view.

With the platform constantly collecting and updating data, you can be sure that your customer profiles are always up-to-date and evolving.

Deliver personalized experiences

Personalization has become the baseline service of the digital economy, and ODP is at the forefront of this trend. With AI and machine learning woven into the platform, data is constantly being collected, organized, and updated in real time, providing increased visibility into your customer profiles.

This allows for dynamic personalization of the web experience based on your customers’ behaviour and empowers you to drive personalization strategies with personalized messages, content, and product recommendations. Our platform also offers 125 pre-configured recipes, making it easier to start with personalization efforts like abandoned cart email campaigns.

Also, journey orchestration, including email and SMS campaigns, allows you to meet your customers where they are with the right message at the right time. With AI and machine learning-driven predictions, you can easily anticipate customer behaviour and create relevant messaging to transform data into valuable customer engagement.

Enable You To Provide More Actionable Insights

ODP reforms customer profile data to support a wide range of marketing processes and systems, including CRM, analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, content creation, and social media outreach. This allows you to create different segments based on customer behaviour and preferences and take advantage of these segments through diversified content, targeted abandoned cart emails, omnichannel campaigns, social media ads, and personalized exit pop-ups.

With data being shared in a harmonized way, you have access to data science-driven insights that provide a better understanding of each customer’s lifetime value and average order value, enabling you to increase customer satisfaction.

The Data Core Service

For Optimizely cloud customers, the Data Core Service is a free option to help you transition to a Customer Data Platform and centralize your data. The DCS only harmonizes data from Optimizely products, ingests data via REST APIs, and provides view-only analytics. The DCS is subject to a monthly active user limit of 250,000, but you can easily upgrade to the ODP for more features and capabilities.

In conclusion, the Optimizely Data Platform offers a comprehensive solution for customer data management, enabling you to unify customer profiles, deliver personalized experiences, and provide actionable insights. If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to our ODP experts today!

A new year means new projects and marketing strategies, but how do you want to improve your key systems in 2023? We’ve put together this overview to help every Optimizely CMS/DXP user think about the precious aspects.  

Released in November 2021, .NET 6 marks the latest update in the .NET Core product line. .NET 5 is faster and performs better than the older ASP .NET 4 stack version. Also, Microsoft no longer supports older framework versions, including security enhancements. 

Source: Microsoft

February 2022, Optimizely released version 12.4.0 CMS Core packages (Minor version release), with no breaking changes in APIs. You’re contemplating the pros and cons of updating your website to Optimizely Content Cloud (CMS) Version 12 and Commerce Cloud Version 14.

According to a Forrester study, a composite business experienced a 286% return on investment (ROI) and $1.5 million in savings over three years, owing to higher developer productivity and enhanced site performance on Optimizely DXP.

Why are we talking about upgrading?

Optimizely DXP is currently built on Microsoft’s .Net framework, which Microsoft is phasing out with the release of .Net 6. Built upon Microsoft’s .NET Core branch of .NET, .Net 6 represents a complete rewrite of the platform without technical debt, focusing on performance modernization and cross-platform support.

All products built on the .Net framework must migrate eventually – Microsoft will no longer invest in research and development in previous versions, creating risk and performance issues over time for those who don’t migrate.

As a Leader in 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms Report, Optimizely stays at the forefront of technical innovation to offer customers the most powerful digital experience platform.

The newest releases of both Optimizely CMS V12 and Commerce Cloud V14 include a core code update to .Net 6 to continue leveraging Microsoft’s modern architecture and maximize this important technical partnership.

Prerequisites for Upgrade: Upgrading Optimizely CMS 11 To 12 and Commerce 13 To 14

Continuing to streamline and evolve many digital innovation products, ensure your solution is ready to upgrade.

1. Additional development environment from Optimizely DXP.
2. Integration and preproduction environment.
3. DXC Service environment upgrade support from Optimizely DXP
4. Optimizely hosts CMS 12 websites in Linux environment which has lot of performance and optimizations over legacy Windows box.
5. Audit trails and compatibility study of your application DLLs .NET 6 support, its backward compatibility, CMS, and commerce supported versions and trade-offs.

Advantages of Optimizely CMS 12 and Commerce 14

So, the performance of .NET 6 is better than that of its predecessors, and it is not surprising that the CMS upgrade also brings significant performance increases. Optimizely predicts 4x quicker response times! Yes, it’s become a bit of a cliche in the web development industry, but who wouldn’t utilize such performance advantages as a key selling point?

1. NET 5, .NET 6 performance are impressively fast
2. 4X better response time
3. 5X faster site and commerce operation
4. 3X more server request handling

Commerce version 14 has a new admin interface for commerce manager, and CMS version 12 has headless styles deployments support. This customizable feature for headless deployment allows you to integrate your Optimizely CMS 12 website with numerous applications such as ecommerce, translations connector, and more. REST APIs were built to facilitate compatibility between applications built in a different technology than ASP.NET. This means code can be written once for various uses and applications, making it a flexible, efficient, and effective solution.

You can move your legacy front-end presentation layer to native Optimizely SDK (React SDK, VueJS SDK, ASP.NET SDK) for headless implementation. This will help make the front end fast, new feature implementation, and seamless rollouts.

1. Microsoft is no longer investing in the ASP.NET 4 stack
2. .NET 5 stack! .NET 6 performance are impressively fast
3. CMS 12, and Commerce 14 have new features, commerce manager and headless deployments support

The effort involved with upgrading one or more Optimizely websites will depend on the number of customized features, integrations, plugins, and experience of the developers.

So, what’s your next step then?

Notes:

1. https://www.optimizely.com/insights/forrester-tei-experimentation/
2. https://www.optimizely.com/insights/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-digital-experience-platforms/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=PP-GL-22-02-GartnerMQDXPPartner-3520&utm_content=Whereoware
3. https://docs.developers.optimizely.com/content-cloud/v12.0.0-content-cloud/docs/why-upgrade-to-content-cloud-cms-12
4. https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/archive/-net-core-preview/upgrading-commerce-14/breaking-changes-commerce-14/