What Is a Digital Experience Platform and Why Should You Care?

(originally posted on January 23, 2018, updated July 9, 2020)

Digital Experience Platform: A core set of software technologies that orchestrates the creation, delivery and optimization of personalized, content-rich digital experiences anytime, anywhere to delight customers, compel them to action, and enable a company to outperform its competition.

Read this blog post to learn:

• What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
• What is and isn’t included in a DXP?
• How are DXPs being deployed today, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each deployment method?
• What value does a DXP bring to an organization?

For centuries organizations have attempted to differentiate their companies by creating amazing products, establishing creative offers, using effective distribution channels, and/or going to market with competitively priced products. Many companies have succeeded in one or more of these strategies to drive business growth. However, over time competitive forces commoditize these opportunities for differentiation, leaving organizations searching for new ways to out maneuver their competition.

At the same time, the power of buyers has greatly increased with the advent of the Internet, providing direct access to product insight, competitive information and buyer reviews. (e.g., analyst research continues to indicate that more than 60 to 70 percent of the buying decision is made before a buyer even speaks with a salesperson, if they even speak with a salesperson at all during the buying process). The best and most innovative companies have discovered a significant opportunity in this new environment to differentiate their products and services: customer experience. And even in this new era of COVID-19, customer experience will remain a top focus area for marketers.

However, in order for companies to tap into the power of experience as a differentiator, they will need to meet very demanding customer expectations. For example, providing customers with instant access to information in a personalized manner, and providing this information to any channel in a synchronized manner. Jake Sorofman formerly of Gartner correctly indicates that customer experience is the new competitive battlefield.

Wikipedia provides a simple, yet effective description of this term:

“Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship... All of the events experienced by customers before and after a purchase are part of the customer experience.”

Delivering this experience involves participation by all functions organization-wide, such as marketing, sales, customer success, engineering and operations.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience starts with the critical first step of interacting with and acquiring a new customer and/or upselling an existing customer. This step is ultimately responsible for driving new revenue for companies. The digital interaction of companies with their buyers, partners and influencers prior to and during the buying process, specifically including the roles of marketing and sales along with associated support by IT, is defined as the Digital Experience. This experience includes the interaction of companies with buyers, partners and influencers across any and all touchpoints to generate awareness, demand and revenue.

Delivering this digital experience requires the complex interaction of people, processes and technologies across an organization, working in complete harmony to capture the attention of buyers, build trust and compel them to action. The explosive growth of innovative marketing technologies has put this vision in the grasp of organizations both large and small: There has been an over 42,7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in marketing technologies over the past 6 years with over 8,000+ vendors today. (Figure 1)

This growth of innovative technologies coupled with the increasing digital experience demands of buyers has created both challenges and opportunities for marketing and IT teams who must:

• Harness the force of innovation to delight customers and differentiate a company’s products and services
• Deliver an individualized experience for each and every buyer in real-time
• Deliver this experience across any channel in a synchronized manner

Even more challenging, is accomplishing all of this in a scalable manner for enterprises to support thousands or millions of buyers and touch points across multiple countries, websites, languages and business units, all while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and advances in technology. This is the ultimate mission and objective of a digital experience platform (DXP).

More specifically, e-Spirit defines a Digital Experience Platform as follows:

• Digital Experience Platform: A core set of software technologies that orchestrates the creation, delivery and optimization of personalized, content-rich digital experiences anytime, anywhere to delight customers, compel them to action, and enable a company to outperform its competition.

Other industry definitions of a DXP include:

• “Software to manage, deliver, and optimize digital experiences consistently across every phase of the customer life cycle.” - Forrester
• “A digital experience platform (DXP) is a well-integrated and cohesive set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multiexperience customer journeys.” - Gartner

Since a digital experience includes the interaction of companies with buyers, partners and influencers across any and all touchpoints, this experience would not be possible without the creation and delivery of personalized content to any and all channels. Therefore, core components of a DX platform include content management, personalization, and the ability to deliver and orchestrate this content to any channel in a synchronous manner at scale.

In addition to these core components, there are a vast array of technologies needed to support a comprehensive digital experience which a DX platform must be capable of operating with. These technologies, coupled with the above-mentioned core components, make up a company’s “digital experience ecosystem.” Examples of just a few areas in this ecosystem include:

Core components:

• Hybrid Headless Content management
• Personalization
• Omnichannel marketing (e.g., Content-as-a-Service or CaaS - read this blog post to learn all about CaaS)

Additional ecosystem components:

• e-Commerce
• Digital asset management
• Translation
• Customer relationship management
• Marketing automation
• Social media
• Analytics
• Data management platforms
• Video management

The “glue” holding all of these components together and enabling them to interact in a real-time manner is enabled by a layer of interoperability. Key success factors in a DXP that enable this interoperability include:

• Extensive, stable and comprehensive APIs: APIs provide the foundation to "play nice with others," be it the latest and greatest marketing software applications or legacy IT solutions.
• Business level enablement: API level interoperability alone is not enough: A DXP needs to enable business users to interact with and benefit from third-party tools through seamless integration. That is, interoperability from a business user perspective with minimal to no IT involvement for example.
• Microservices-based architecture: This architecture must support scaling and extension when needed, forming the building blocks of an agile digital marketing technology ecosystem. Read more about microservices-based architecture here.

As presented earlier, delivering a compelling digital experience offers companies the opportunity to differentiate from their competition and drive more engagement and revenue. Consideration of ROI for technology purchases to enable these digital experiences is no doubt still important, however, it is not a matter of ‘if’ you need to create these compelling digital experiences for your customers, but how soon you can deliver them. What’s at risk here? Survival. For example, the risk of losing your customers:

Salesforce.com researched customer behavior on websites recently and found that 52 percent of consumers indicated that they are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications to them.

Some benefits of deploying a DX platform to deliver digital experiences are as follows:

The digital experience movement will no doubt continue to evolve with the changing needs of buyers, and companies will need to get more efficient and effective at meeting and exceeding those needs. The most successful organizations will:

• Rapidly identify the explicit and latent needs of their buyers
• Develop the culture and processes to harness the innovation and passion within their own employees and external teams
• Tap into the power of new and innovative technologies

To learn more about digital experience best practices and related technology insights:

• Read about the next generation of the headless CMS: The hybrid CMS
• Learn about 7 common personalization problems and how to overcome them.

Last updated 07.09, 2020 - first published 23.01.2018

Or schedule a demo to see how e-Spirit’s Digital Experience Platform and hybrid headless CMS is helping companies such as Bosch, Belk, Carter’s, ASICS, SIGNA Sports United, BASF, OSRAM, Grohe and many others: