What is Optimizely and Why Do You Need It?

According to the Global Digital 2022 study, on average we spend around 7 hours a day on the Internet. This is almost 40% of the time we are awake. It is not surprising that the digital space is becoming the main channel of communication for most of the brands. At the same time, consumer demand for highly personalized digital experiences continues to grow. In order to stay afloat and grow, companies need strong tools to build their digital presence. In this article, we will examine one of the best solutions on the DXP market, recognized as the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for years in a row – Optimizely.

What is Optimizely?

Optimizely is a Digital Experience Platform that offers marketers and other teams the ability to fully manage and optimize their digital presence and customer experience across every touchpoint. It brings together solutions for content, commerce, and real-time intelligence that drive personalization at scale. The Optimizely platform is highly customizable, easy to use, and applicable to any market.

What is included in Optimizely?

The Optimizely (formerly Episerver) product suite has offerings for CMS (Content Management System) as well as E-Commerce capabilities, along with a multitude of other useful tools and functionalities. You can pick and choose some of them, or implement them all for the full-stack.

Optimizely Content Cloud 

Optimizely Content Cloud gathers powerful features to manage and control all your website content and support day-to-day marketing tasks. 

Nowadays customers expect targeted content, created specifically for them on various channels and responding to market changes. With Optimizely Content Cloud, your teams will gain the ability for on-page editing, post-scheduling, collaborative content creation, and easy tracking of approval processes. Among other features, you get multi-step web forms, A-B testings, SEO and CRO, social networks integration, and personalization. All this with a user-friendly, intuitive UI. 

Optimizely Commerce Cloud 

Optimizely Commerce Cloud includes everything from the Content Cloud and upgrades it with super efficient features for the e-commerce market. 

It equips your team with the ability to manage products, pricing, inventory, carts, and orders . As well as conducting promotions and discounts with, as always,  a very easy-to-use UI.  

Commerce Cloud is divided into two robust solutions – B2B Commerce Cloud and B2C Commerce Cloud. Both products are equipped with special features tailored to each market approach. The main focus of B2C Commerce Cloud is using the power of artificial intelligence to deliver a personalized commerce experience. In turn, B2B Commerce Cloud is focused on flexibility, complex business process management, and integration.

In addition, Commerce Cloud supports integration with various other E-commerce systems, payment gateways, and marketing automation tools.

Optimizely Customer Data Platform

The Optimizely Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows you to not only understand who your customers are but also anticipate their intentions in real-time and create relevant messages. 

CDP collects and centralizes data about all your customers from different touchpoints, making it available to your teams and other Optimizely services in your toolbox. Enabling them to provide your customers with a unified and personalized experience.

In addition, the powerful segmentation capabilities of Optimizely CDP allow you to segment and target exactly the customer groups you need, whether by their origin, behavior, or their stage in the customer life cycle.

Experimentation

Optimization and experimentation are at the core of the Optimizely product suite. You don’t have to worry about speed or performance – conduct A/B and multivariate testing at any scale, on any device or channel. Now you are fully equipped to make decisions based on reliable real-world data without doubt or guesswork. What makes the Optimizely experimentation platform so unique in the market is that you can run multiple experiments in the same space at the same time using exclusion groups.

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Optimizely Implementation Expertise

Content Recommendations 

Find out which topics and content are generating the most revenue and conversions with Optimizely’s AI-driven recommendation engine. This feature will allow you to analyze all content in real-time with the power of artificial intelligence using natural language processing. Now you can minimize manual work and focus on creating effective content. Gain a deeper understanding of the interests of any given user profile in your CDP and focus your content creation efforts on what your customers care about.

Product Recommendations

Optimizely Product Recommendations tool allows you to apply the full power of personalized recommendations based on the history of each visitor or the actions of similar users. 

Increase conversions, cross-sells, upsells, and maximize cart value with minimal manual configuration. The recommendation mechanism works based on Machine Learning. 

Moreover, Product Recommendation allows you to create suggestions not only based on the website behavior but also taking into account other points of interaction (offline or in-store).

Email Product Recommendations

Shoppers today expect not just a personalized experience, but a seamless personalized experience. This means that you need a personal touch not only on the website but also in other touchpoints, including your email communications. Optimizely’s Email Product Recommendations will allow you to include personalized offers in your email marketing campaigns, as well as transactional and trigger emails – abandoned carts, welcome letters, order confirmations, etc.

Full Stack

Optimizely Full Stack extends content and marketing experimentation to feature rollout and coding. Experiment with each new feature and measure the effectiveness of each release for your customers. With the Full Stack, you can test everything from content to search results and algorithms. 

Flag features to separate code deployment from release, easily turn them on and off to gradually roll out new features, and choose who gets access to them. Measure results and deploy without risks.

The results of the experiments will be presented in real-time based on a statistical engine developed jointly with Stanford University. Your teams will instantly get validated insights enabling them to make decisions at scale.

Optimizely Visitor Intelligence 

Creating an outstanding customer experience depends entirely on how you understand your client. Use Optimizely Visitor Intelligence to get data, analyze, and segment your customers. Create groups based on various criteria – demographics, online and omnichannel consumer behavior (those who have made purchases in online and offline stores). You can then use the created segments for your omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is a powerful editor for creating marketing campaigns, which can be used as part of your Optimizely stack, as well as a standalone product that can be easily integrated into other CMS and E-Commerce systems. Create one-time or complex multi-stage campaigns on various channels: email communication, mobile push, print, and SMS. Analyze results with reports with key metrics and post-click tracking.

Search & Navigation

If visitors can’t find what they need on your site – they leave. With a growing volume of content and product offerings, just a navigation menu is no longer enough. You need powerful search functionality.

Optimizely Search & Navigation gives you that. Its functionality is based on the visitors’ search behavior and website statistics. Using this information, you can add automatic landing pages, responsive navigation, and guided search to increase website traffic and increase your conversion rate.

Personalized Search & Navigation

Personalized search and navigation enhance your search experience. Results and landing pages are now customized based on each visitor’s previous activity and your business rules. Relevance becomes unique, you smoothly guide users to exactly where they need to, reducing the number of steps between start and conversion.

Who’s Using Optimizely?

Optimizely’s services are used and benefit more than 9,000 brands worldwide.

Marketing teams are empowered to continuously improve customer experience, have key questions answered by scientific analysis, and achieve high returns on marketing efforts. Development teams with Optimizely Full Stack enable experimentation with feature rollouts and pre-launch redesigns.

Whatever goals you set for creating your customer experience – you can achieve them with Optimizely. What is important – the robust capabilities of its product suite apply to any industry. Here are just a few examples of brands who already gained success with Optimizely:

• High Tech: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft;
• CPG and Retail: The Gap, Pizza Hut, Royal Canin;
• Healthcare & Pharma: American Physical Therapy Association, EPG Health, American Academy of Pediatrics
• Manufacturing: Yamaha, Dura-Line, ACCO Brands
• Financial services: Visa, Metro Bank, Swinton Insurance
• Technology: Xerox, DocuSign, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Why Do You Need Optimizely?

Above, we talked about the features and benefits of various Optimizely products. 

But what else makes it so special?

All Optimizely tools are designed to be very easy and intuitive for end users. At the same time, behind a simple and friendly UI, lies powerful complex technical algorithms that allow you to automate tasks and push personalization to a whole new level. 

The pricing model of Optimizely services is variable and adapts to your requirements and business goals. 

In addition, the company is constantly developing educational materials and events to help its users grow and learn. Not only within the company’s products but also around basic and trending questions of content management, e-commerce, personalization, and experimentation.

Let’s Discuss!

Feel intrigued by Optimizely? 

First Line Software is proud to be a certified partner of Optimizely for 13 years in a row. 

Our engineering team has completed over 350 Web Content Management (WCM) projects, utilizing more than 40 certified engineers and 200+ architects, project managers, and quality assurance technicians. 

Learn more about First Line Software’s Optimizely Implementation Services or tell us about your project and get a free first consultation from our experts.