Digital Experience Platform Companies List

Companies today are in a race to deliver the types of digital experiences that customers want. Customer expectations have few roadblocks: whether they’re using smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops, they expect the kind of digital customer experience they’re accustomed to getting from places like Amazon or social media sales channels.

Company marketing departments, however, do face hurdles. Many companies have reached the end of what they can do using their monolithic marketing platforms that were designed to suit the needs of the previous decade. This has left them struggling to deliver the kind of digital experiences customers want and expect. Cumbersome, siloed, and outdated digital platforms simply cannot respond quickly enough to changing market demands and escalating customer expectations. What successful companies have in their toolkit is a robust digital experience platform.

What Is a Digital Experience?

The digital experience can be described as the aggregate of a customer's digital-based interactions with a company, brand, or product. It might include emails, text messages with the call center, social media content, videos on YouTube, reviews on third-party sites, content on a company's website including blogs, video content from trade shows, digital product manuals, interaction with a mobile app, or even video chat with a company's representatives. Because the touchpoints are so numerous, there is a nearly infinite variety of ways to build a digital experience for a customer. How you build that experience, of course, will depend on the customers' preferences and needs. The more assets you have at your disposal, the better your ability is to build these personalized customer experiences.

As digital assets become more numerous, the chances of creating and managing digital experiences manually diminish substantially. Customers are too important to experiment upon, and positive customer experiences drive all-important repeat business. One negative customer interaction experience can result in lost business, bad word of mouth, and reputational damage that will harm the company for years to come. Many marketing studies have found that customers are significantly more likely to share the news of a poor experience than a positive one. For this reason, brands today must trust their digital experience reputations to reliable technology solutions rather than to chance.

What Is a Digital Experience Platform?

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a software solution that allows users to tap into their content management system (CMS) to quickly produce and manage a wide variety of multimedia digital experiences for customers and partners. These experiences might include websites, landing pages, microsites, videos, digital product guides, and social media content that can be shared in a timely manner across the entire customer journey.

Typically, a DXP allows a company to build out the front-end design of the digital experience using material stored in the back end. Good digital experience solutions will make it easy for anyone in the company to create digital marketing experiences without coding knowledge or the help of the IT department. This significantly increases the timeliness and relevance of digital offerings, improving the marketing department's flexibility and agility.

Many DXPs also offer complementary content management capabilities that allow companies to create, manage, and reuse relevant marketing content such as images, logos, documents, videos, reviews, product descriptions, documentation, and more. It’s important to note that some products marketed as DXPs offer only content management system functionality, which is essentially just content storage, while others offer a full digital asset management solution that includes the tools needed to easily turn those assets into customer experiences.

Choosing Key DXP Functionality

To truly understand digital experience manager platform functionality, it’s important to differentiate it from content management systems or digital asset management (DAM). CMS and DAM software are solutions used to store, create, and edit digital content. A CMS might be as simple as Dropbox, a place to centrally store content and allow multiple users to access it across the network. A DXP is designed to work in conjunction with the CMS to manage digital experiences across a wide variety of digital touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

For true DXP functionality, the solution should allow business users to build and iterate on digital experiences without the need to use code, in an easy drag-and-drop manner. Ideally, it should have a built-in Content Management System or Digital Asset Management feature, as well as integrated analytics capabilities, so users can effectively monitor the effectiveness of the digital experiences they are offering and quickly make changes based on data and customer feedback.

Today, digital marketing is about personalization, so this is an important feature for a DXP. Many digital platforms for marketing on offer today will offer some level of personalization. Personalization in the digital experience examples might include changing content to reflect where the customer is in the customer journey, from initial contact to closing the sale to post-sales follow-up or altering digital content to reflect a customer’s vertical industry needs.

Some DXPs will also include a built-in Customer Data Platform (CDP), which will collect, manage and “clean” customer data, adding it to the valuable stash of content companies maintain today to improve the digital experience, though CDP functionality varies widely within DXP solutions.

Finally, some DXP solutions include e-commerce functionality to allow companies to extend the DXP to the actual selling process, built-in Product Information Management (PIM) solutions, text messaging capabilities, form builders, custom integrations with other solutions, and more. The functionality your organization requires will be determined by your business and marketing needs, the size of your company, your marketing campaigns, and your customers’ needs.

What Does a DXP Do?

Since your organization is operating in 2024, chances are good it has a wide variety of digital assets already created, including websites, landing pages, microsites, digital product guides and manuals, photographs and videos, previous marketing campaigns, customer testimonials, social media content, and more. It’s not enough to possess this information, however; you need an agile solution that allows you to put it to work quickly and effectively in response to changing customer and market needs and create and store new content as needed.

Using Digital Experience Platform (DXP) software, users can create and manage all these assets and use them to build effective digital experiences across the entire customer journey. Extra features and functionality aside, at its core, a DXP must provide a way for users to build out the front-end designs of a digital experience. But more importantly, these solutions must have a way to do so easily by non-IT personnel. If a company’s DXP solution requires technical personnel to create the solutions – alongside their other important duties related to day-to-day operations – marketing departments will forever struggle to keep up as they wait on the IT department’s ever-expanding priority list.

The best digital experience platform examples such as Lumavate are completely no-code and allow anyone in the business to build out a compelling front-end design for any digital experience. (They also allow new and remote employees to be onboarded quickly, eliminating the kinds of delays that can hamper operations.) They can do this because the DXP is integrated with a Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Asset Management (DAM) built right into the platform, allowing the DXP to tap those solutions for the necessary up-to-date resources to create the right experience at the right time. The solution’s built-in personalization capabilities allow the employee to build an experience that is relevant to a customer, a current event, a time of year, a brand change, a new product introduction, an industry, or a special marketing campaign.

An Overview of the Digital Experience Team

It’s worth noting who typically uses and “owns” a DXP. Successful companies will have a digital experience team – sometimes called a digital team or web team -- that is responsible for the creation and management of all digital experiences within an organization, including email, social media, websites, search engine optimization, analytics, and more. This team often works collaboratively with product management, brand marketing, events, and advertising, and is accountable for developing and implementing the digital experience strategy that is critical to a positive customer journey. The team is often led by a digital experience manager or a person who is ultimately accountable for all the company’s digital experiences.

DXP vs CMS

It’s important to examine the differences between a DXP and a CMS, as there is some overlap between the terms. A CMS will store information, but it does not provide any type of front-end user experience that enables marketers and other employees to easily turn the information into robust digital experiences. A DXP, on the other hand, will take the information stored in the CMS and allow users to build and iterate on digital experiences with an easy-to-use front-end builder that is intuitive and doesn’t require code. Ideally, the solution will offer templates to help more novice users get started while allowing more experienced users to create campaigns and content from scratch.

The best digital experience platforms have a built-in CMS or Digital Asset Management (DAM) feature to eliminate the possibility that poor integration will reduce the effectiveness of the DXP and that information is fully shareable and functional to all workers authorized to use the system. (For security purposes, this is also an important feature, as you don’t want unauthorized users creating a mess with your content.) A full-featured DXP also eliminates the need to invest in multiple solutions, which reduces costs significantly, both in capital expenditure and manpower for maintenance and integration.

What Are the Benefits of a DXP?

The benefits of digital platforms are numerous, but they can vary depending on the type and brand of solution chosen. In general, they include:

• Ease of use. The best DXP platforms should make it easy for any business user to create or iterate on digital experiences without the need to use code.
• Built-in content and asset management. Most DXPs will offer a built-in Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Asset Management (DAM) functionality allowing for all-in-one functionality. The DXP front end is supported by the CMS or DAM back end, allowing content and digital assets to be easily pulled into digital experiences.
• Build-in analytics. Do your digital experiences resonate with customers? The addition of built-in analytics or integration with a leading third-party analytics platform allows companies to easily examine the effectiveness of the digital experiences they create, allowing them to adjust future campaigns based on what they learned from previous initiatives.
• Personalization capabilities. Digital experiences should never be one-size-fits-all, so the best DXP companies will offer a multitude of options for personalization, including by customer media preferences, where the customer is in the customer journey, or by the needs of the customer’s vertical industry.
  
  

Other DXP technologies may offer additional benefits and functionalities. Lumavate’s DXP provides an expanded portfolio of features, including:

• Quick implementation. Lumavate’s platform can be up and running in less than a day.
• Expansive functionality. Lumavate is a full-featured solution that provides a DXP, DAM, Product Information Management (PIM) solution, form builder, text messaging, and more than 40 integrations with other popular solutions, all within one platform. Lumavate’s solution is continually updated, with new product functionality released approximately every two weeks.
• Affordability. Lumavate’s solution is 75 percent more cost-effective than competitive solutions, making it affordable for companies of all sizes.
• No need for technical resources. Because Lumavate’s platform is fully no-code, it can be used by anyone, eliminating the need for technical resources.
• Purpose-built for manufacturing. Lumavate understands the needs of manufacturing marketers. The platform was specifically designed with the needs of manufacturers in mind, helping them to centralize product information and digital assets and create compelling digital product experiences.
  
  

What Are the Different Types of DXPs?

Companies looking for a digital experience platform will find that there are a variety of solutions available on the market from different technology providers. The cost, size, type, and functionality of these solutions will vary, so it’s important that companies understand their needs and budgets before they begin shopping for a solution from the list of digital platforms.

It’s worthwhile to note that there are different philosophies among DXP solutions providers regarding product functionality. Some companies provide very à la carte solutions with the understanding that buyers may wish to pick and choose functionality from different third-party (or fourth-party) solution providers and integrate them. Others are geared toward buyers who want a fully integrated solution that contains all the features necessary to create customized digital experiences in one platform.

As an example, the digital platform company might integrate into a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, but it might not integrate into a competitive third-party solution for digital asset management. This type of DXP could potentially be limiting because it locks users into a single solution for all aspects of the digital experience strategy. 

Another DXP might offer core functionality for the front-end solution for digital experiences but integrates with select third-party solutions for other functionality such as content or digital asset management, analytics, personalization, and more. Many buyers might find this kind of solution appealing because it allows them to choose best-of-breed solutions for additional functionality. It can, however, become an expensive option because of the need to purchase multiple solutions. 

The third type of DXP offers built-in functionality similar to the first type, but it also integrates easily with competitive third-party solutions. This type of DXP solution provides users with the most flexibility because they can benefit from the combination of the DXP’s built-in functionality as well as third-party solutions the business might already be using, allowing them to connect to their existing tech stack within minutes. Lumavate is one of the few DXP platforms to offer this level of flexibility when compared to other digital platforms for marketing.

What Is an Example of a Digital Experience Platform?

Today, the top digital experience platform companies list in USA include Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Liferay, Acquia Digital Experience Platform, Optimizely, and more. Each of these digital experience platform examples share a common goal: they allow business users to build digital experiences, either from a single location or as an online portal for employees.

How they differ lies in their structure, their features, and their functionality. Some solutions in the list of digital platforms require more technical resources for implementation than others. For example, Adobe DXP requires technical resources and often labor provided by outside consultants for the initial implementation. Lumavate’s DXP solution, however, can be easily set up within minutes by anyone on the marketing team, making it far more cost-effective than the Adobe Digital Experience Platform.

Lumavate’s easy-to-use Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides digital marketing teams with all the tools they need to create and optimize digital product experiences quickly and easily, allowing them to meet customer expectations when, where, and how they arise. Lumavate puts the power of creating, managing, and iterating digital product experiences in the hands of marketers with less fuss, less expense, and more creative flexibility.