DXP Technologies

DXP Platforms 101

There’s a new technology rising in popularity among marketers. This emerging technology is helping marketers engage with customers, partners, and employees better than ever before. A digital experience platform, otherwise known as a DXP is the latest and greatest martech solution helping marketers accomplish their business goals. 

What Is a DXP?

A DXP is a platform that enables a business user to create highly engaging touchpoints within the customer journey. From awareness and consideration to the point of purchase to product usage, different customers have different needs, expectations, and questions at each step - meaning there’s a huge opportunity for marketers to win at these various phases if they can provide content that’s relevant to customers at that specific point in time. 

Having a digital touchpoint drastically increases the customer experience and drives brand loyalty and revenue for a business. And personalizing the digital experience only further helps boost engagement with a brand’s customers. According to Accenture, 96 percent of consumers revealed they are more likely to shop with a brand if they are offered a personalized experience. 

However, personalizing the customer experience goes beyond including a recipient’s name in an email. There are a few steps that go into personalizing the customer experience. 

One of the first steps is to gather zero-party data in order to capture valuable data and segment individuals based on preferences, location, demographics, etc. By segmenting audiences, brands are able to send tailored messaging about specific content or products. 

Personalized messaging can take on many forms. It’s providing shoppers with relevant product recommendations when they’re in-store picking out a new moisturizer. It can be queueing up specific how-to videos on how the customer can best install their product after purchasing it. It can also take on the form of personalized outreach performed by the sales team to capture the attention of prospects. 

The list is endless with ways marketers can create personalized digital experiences for their customers. 

Understanding DXP Technologies 

DXP technologies are a relatively new solution available to businesses to drive revenue and brand awareness. Prior to DXP platforms, marketers would have several options for how they would create digital experiences -  none of them coming anywhere close to the type of results displayed by DXPs. Marketers could outsource the creation of a digital experience to either an agency, IT teams, or other internal resources which would often take a great amount of time and resources. DXPs eliminate this pain point and enable marketers to move fast. 

How Does a DXP Work?

A DXP has various design elements, integrations, and more for marketers to use to create a digital experience. 

It starts out with a marketer having a challenge they’d like to solve. For this example, let’s say a marketer had a business goal of standing out in the aisle. Narrowing down what goal you’re trying to accomplish helps determine what type of digital experience you’ll create. 

Depending on the DXP, this marketer can either build a digital experience from scratch or use a pre-existing template. Once a marketer makes this decision, they can begin creating a digital experience. The first step is usually customizing the branding within the digital experience. Once that’s set up, then the marketer can compile all of the digital assets needed to launch their experience. For this example, this would likely involve product images, product descriptions, a lead generation form, etc. Once the digital experience is ready to launch, the marketer would likely hit publish on their experience and share the activation (whether it’s a URL, QR Code, Near-field Communication (NFC) tag, text code, etc.) and begin marketing their digital experience in their desired channel. 

What Is the Difference Between DXP and CMS? 

If you’re a marketer, you’ve likely heard of a content management system, otherwise known as a CMS. When looking at the difference between a CMS and a DXP, it comes down to the functionality of each platform

A DXP provides the ability for business users to compile digital assets and content to create an experience. A CMS is a centralized location where businesses can store and manage all of their content like images, videos, audio, and more. 

What is a DXP vs Headless CMS? Let’s first answer “What is a Headless CMS,”.  A Headless CMS is essentially just a backend for storing content. So when using a Headless CMS, you need a front-end to display this content. A DXP that integrates to a CMS or has its own CMS capabilities is usually a preferred method for marketers because they can use their own tech stack rather than being locked into using a specific platform. 

What Is a CDP?

A CDP, otherwise known as a customer data platform is a place where marketers can gain a deeper understanding of their customers through visual data. What we mean by that is they can see customer data collected through various channels, including websites, email, and more. 

What is the difference between a CDP and a DXP? A CDP is essentially just a location where marketers can analyze and collect their data. A DXP is a place that offers many options for marketers, including the ability to create digital experiences like landing pages, mobile apps, microsites, etc. But a DXP also provides the ability for marketers to analyze the data collected through these various experience types in the platform as well.

Adobe Experience Platform Documentation

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign - these are all Adobe products marketers most likely know and use on a regular basis to create compelling graphics for their brand. But did you know Adobe has a DXP platform?

What Is Adobe Experience Manager?

The Adobe Experience Manager is a place where business teams can build experiences. One of the things Adobe boasts about is the breadth of its products related to DXPs. For example, if you visit their Adobe Experience Manager page on their website, you’ll see multiple callouts for products like their CMS, digital asset manager (DAM), and much more. 

Adobe Experience platform jobs are becoming increasingly popular these days. That’s because Adobe Experience Manager is often described as challenging to set up. Many marketing teams will actually outsource the management of their Adobe Experience Manager to third parties because it takes too much time and effort on their part. 

Unlike Adobe Experience Manager, Lumavate does not require intense set-up and can be easily managed by anyone within the business. Creating digital experiences within Lumavate is also significantly easier than Adobe Experience Manager. The Lumavate platform was built by marketers for marketers, so we have firsthand experience with the requirements needed for a DXP to meet a marketer’s needs. Lumavate also includes the ability for business teams to integrate to their CMS or use Lumavate’s content management system. 

Experience Cloud Salesforce Trailhead

Ask anyone in sales or marketing if they have heard of Salesforce, and your answer will be an outstanding, “yes”. Salesforce is a household name at this point and enables businesses to get a holistic view of their pipeline, customer base, emails, and a wide variety of other areas. 

Salesforce offers a wide variety of different products available to sales and marketing teams, including a DXP named the Salesforce Experience Cloud. 

What Is a Salesforce Experience Cloud?

While many businesses may be familiar with Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, it may be a surprise to many to learn that business teams can build digital experiences on the SaaS giant’s platform too. 

When looking at the various Salesforce Experience Cloud examples online, you can get a better picture of what you can build using the SaaS platform. Some examples of what you can build on the Salesforce Experience Cloud include help centers, account portals, and storefronts. 

Salesforce Experience Cloud Pricing isn’t as cost-effective as other DXP solutions. Licenses for Salesforce can be costly and can deter many businesses away from using Salesforce as their DXP solution. Salesforce pricing is segmented by member, meaning each unique user that wants to utilize the platform will need a license. This can get expensive, especially for companies at the enterprise level. Comparatively, Lumavate’s pricing allows for unlimited users of its platform and instead prices based on the number of unique monthly visitors to the digital experiences, giving businesses more flexibility. 

Lumavate has an integration to Salesforce, making it possible for businesses to reduce the number of Salesforce licenses. With Lumavate, teams can easily submit and update data stored in Salesforce. 

Salesforce Trailhead

There is Experience Cloud Salesforce documentation on how to build an experience using Salesforce, but some may still get caught up in the process. Salesforce has additional resources available to its customers, including a program called Trailhead. Essentially, each one of Salesforce’s products has a “trail” or a course that explains the fundamentals and best practices for various topics. Depending on your desired level of learning, one can get certified on the Salesforce platform and earn different badges that pertain to subjects related to Salesforce’s products. 

The digital experience Salesforce Trailhead program has essentially three programs: getting started, engaging with customers, and engaging with partners. Each is estimated to take around 15 minutes to complete. 

Unlike Salesforce, Lumavate offers on-demand training and documentation on how to build digital experiences. One interested in learning more about how to best use Lumavate does not need to enroll in an academy or pay an additional price to get the help needed. 

What Is the Difference Between Salesforce Community Cloud and Experience Cloud?

The Salesforce Community Cloud and the Experience Cloud both work the same in that they are both able to be built out by business teams. They both offer business users a way to create a digital element to connect with their customers using the Salesforce platform. 

Where the two Salesforce products differ is in the end use case. The Salesforce Community Cloud is where business teams can build a portal for example for a community group. In the example used on Salesforce’s website, they’ve included a discussion board and a community feed within their portal. The Experience Cloud differs from the Community Cloud, in several ways. The Experience Cloud is used to create digital experiences, not community portals. The digital experiences created on the Experience Cloud include 

The Salesforce Experience cloud is a low-code DXP, meaning there is still some coding required to create a digital experience and a strong understanding of the Salesforce data structure is a necessity. Lumavate, on the other hand, is a no-code DXP for marketers. Investing in a no-code solution does not take away the ability to customize a digital experience to its fullest potential. The Lumavate Platform enables marketers to fully customize the branding of a digital experience to meet their needs and allows for high levels of personalization. Having a low-code solution is not necessary for creating highly engaging and personalized experiences. It only tacks on valuable time to a marketer’s speed-to-market. 

A Deep-dive Into the Sitecore DXP

When evaluating various DXP technologies, one of the DXP examples that pops up quite frequently on Google is Sitecore.

Sitecore is a DXP platform that has been included in the DXP Gartner Magic Quadrant in its most recent report. For those unfamiliar, the Gartner DXP Magic Quadrant 2022 listed many examples of DXP technologies and evaluated them to help business users select a vendor.  Gartner evaluates a multitude of different software, not just DXPs. The DXP Sitecore was evaluated in the Gartner research and obtained many four stars. 

What Is an Example of a DXP? 

Lumavate is an example of a DXP used by marketers. Lumavate works with some of the world’s most well-known brands to create engaging and personalized digital experiences for customers, partners, and employees. Brands like Roche, Delta Faucet, Trinchero Family Estates, and Cummins harness the power of Lumavate’s Platform to drive revenue and brand awareness for their business. 

Lumavate differs from the other DXP technologies available in the market for many reasons. One of the big differentiators for Lumavates is our product releases. Every two weeks we push out new platform functionality, as well as new design elements and integrations. 

Another differentiator for Lumavate is the brevity of our functionality. Lumavate has the following functionality available for marketers:

Ready to get started building digital experiences using Lumavate? Create a free account, or book a 30-minute demo with a digital experience expert to learn more about how Lumavate can help your business. 

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