Over the past few years we’ve seen a notable shift in enterprise level content management systems’ with the focus clearly moved from content management to online experience management. So what turns a web site visit into an Experience? What new tools are available that can create such an outstanding online experience?
The past: content is king
Until recently, a lot of CMS (content management system) development went into, well: content management features. There was a strong focus on taxonomy and categorization to help organize the site content in the best possible way, as well as the integration of on-site search capabilities and to help users to find the content buried in large sites.
Most CMS today, also offer satisfying solutions for search engine optimization (SEO) and support, not only HTML based content, but provide excellent support for a wide range of rich media files, like video, sound or PDFs.
To improve the publishing experience, workflows have been fine-tuned and sophisticated methods of content and object staging are present in all leading content management systems.
And last but not least, content can also be contributed by the site user via comments, ratings, wikis, forums to just name a few standard out-of-the-box features.
This is all good, however...
The future: online engagement
The result of all this development is that companies that use content management systems can quickly update their web presence and keep the information up to date, without constantly relying on an IT department.
However, even if user generated content has been a step in the right direction, many web sites are still fairly “static”: For example, a user who visits your site 50 times, will see the exact same site that a first-time user sees. Equally, a user that expresses interest in a certain topic through browsing behaviour, will be shown the same on-site banners as any other user.
In real-life, the owner of the grocery store that you visited every week for the past ten years would certainly not welcome you the same way as he did the first time. He would pick up the conversation where he left it off last time, or he would tell you with a proud smile that the item that you were looking for last week is now available. And that is probably why you will come back. Because this guy is engaging with you!
Integrated analytics
The key to this new Experience or engagement challenge in web development is integrated analytics. Real-time analytics that is.
We all know Google Analytics, frequently study our web traffic (or at least we should) and eventually we react to improve the results: Build – Measure – Improve. Right?
Now, imagine that you can get real-time analytics for each individual user, foresee the outcome of a user’s browsing behaviour and have the improvement already in place for that user!
What might seem fictional here does already exist. Leading CMS like the IBM web experience platform or Adobe CQ5 have purchased and integrated the world’s leading analytics tools, Coremetrics and Omniture. And the last big independent analytics software vendor, WebTrends will most probably be bought out in the near future.
Online Experience: The current solution is user segmentation.
User segmentation
Of course you can’t react for each individual user, at least not as long as your user remains anonymous. The current solution is user segmentation. User segmentation allows marketers to define groups, based on their profile, preferences or browsing behaviour.
To use the simple example above, a web site could define two segments: new users and returning users and deliver a different Experience for each.
But of course, segments could be more complex: users who mainly browse a certain category of products, users who come back weekly, users who are subscribed to the newsletter, users who regularly leave comments on blog posts etc.
Real-time personalization
Once integrated analytics are available and your user segments are defined, you can offer personalized and more targeted content.
You will never ever offer a VISA card owner the exact same card with an on-site ad and you won’t ask a subscribed user to subscribe again to the same newsletter, but rather, you will try to pick up the conversation where you left it off at the last visit and offer something complementary to a behaviour – say some basil to go with the fresh tomatoes.
This is certainly not a simple task, but – as a leading example – one company that does this rather well: Amazon. Connect to this web site on different computers and you will find out that you are not confronted with the same content.
User personalization
Something else that we will see more often in the future: The possibility to arrange our own web site. Currently, this is mostly put in place via dashboards, the first page a user sees when he logs into a site. But there are many other possibilities yet to be explored. Maybe in another blog post.
A/B and multi-variant testing
The last “big thing” is the integration of A/B and multi-variant testing in to CMS. How many times in the process of a site’s design, the team can’t agree on a word or a style of a button or a layout.
You can fight it out with arguments and pick one solution (you’re all experts, right?) or you can simply test it. And even test it on different segments: You may find out that each solution works well, but each on a different segment.
What can be expected from the upcoming Kentico 6 release
The importance of user engagement can be seen at the recent purchase of Fatwire by Oracle. Fatwire was, according to Forester Research, the leading online engagement platform. Now it will be integrated into Oracle WebCenter suite, which will most likely make it the most outstanding product on the market.
Kentico is certainly aware of this development. At the Kentico Connection Conference in Denver, Kentico will reveal not only version 6 of its content management system, but also its new product, the Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (Kentico EMS).
While the “standard” version of Kentico will ship with A/B testing, improved e-mail marketing features, user dashboards and improved analytics, only Kentico EMS will provide user segmentation and content personalization.
As I will be attending Kentico Connection, I will be back to tell you about that experience and offer more detailed information on Kentico 6.