What is a digital experience platform, and how does it differ from a CDP?

Today’s typical customer journey is more complex than ever. Thanks to the proliferation of devices like smartphones and tablets, people are connecting with brands and making purchasing decisions in a wide range of different ways. In the past, these touchpoints were essentially limited to the telephone, the mail, or through basic Internet options like visiting a website.

Now, you can add in email, instant messaging, social media sites, and more.

Yet at the same time, the goal of any successful business has not changed – they need to meet customers where they are on their own journeys, making sure that someone always has the content they need to move further down the sales funnel towards an eventual purchase. The fact that the journey is more complicated and the sales funnel is longer than ever has made this goal exceedingly difficult.

Because of that, marketers must develop a scalable, omnichannel strategy for both data collection and the content delivery that data will eventually drive. Only then will they be able to see these new customer touchpoints for what they are – an opportunity, as opposed to a burden.

Many organizations are turning to modern technology in order to help accomplish precisely that. Two of the main types of tools being used are called digital experience platforms (DXPs) and customer data platforms (CDPs). Both are unique, but they’re also capable of helping to meet these demands in a wide range of different ways that are absolutely worth exploring.

Technology that puts the customer first

But first, it’s important to gain a better understanding of the larger goal that a DXP and a CDP help to accomplish: they put the customers first, where they belong.

These days, people don’t just want better products and services from the businesses they purchase from. They want better experiences in general. This includes things like using a social networking site for customer support purposes as opposed to picking up the phone and giving you a call. This means an increased preference for high quality, relevant content posted to a place like your blog that offers legitimate insight and value without necessarily asking for anything in return.

More than anything, this means leaning into an experience that is created on the customer’s terms, not necessarily on yours.

The only way it is possible to get to that point is through a deep, rich understanding of who your ideal customers are. If the goal is to get “the right message in front of the right person at the right time,” it stands to reason that you need to know as much as you can about who that person actually is. At that point, you won’t have to worry about developing “the right message” because your customers will have already shown you what they like, what they don’t, what they want more of, etc.

This insight can also help you not just determine what type of content to publish based on your audience, but which channels to publish it on. This is how the data contained in a CDP ultimately helps fuel your efforts with a DXP. At that point, regardless of how complex the customer journey becomes, you’ll still know what you need to do to optimize everything around the people you’ve dedicated yourself to serving in the first place.

Digital Experience Platform vs. Customer Data Platform

It can be helpful to think of both a DXP and a CDP as two key platforms that offer unique features, but that are ultimately used for integrated purposes.

• A digital experience platform is a solution that helps to not only build and manage more organic digital experiences across a wide array of channels, but it also helps with the long-term optimization of those experiences as well.
• A customer data platform is a type of system that uses in-depth analysis and personalized data to attempt to simplify the marketing process as much as possible. It helps collect and interpret data so that the most accurate customer profiles can be created.

In this context, a CDP would be a tool used to take all the real data that your business and its customers are creating on a daily basis and turn it into actionable insight. It’s a way to not only uncover trends and patterns that you otherwise may have missed, but to make informed decisions based on them.

That insight can then be used to make more logical choices based on the digital experiences you’re creating with a DXP. The end result is a personalized digital experience that feels like it was custom-built for your audience, because it largely was. Even though these tools do two different things, together they make up the core technologies that you will use to communicate with your target audiences more effectively than ever.

Content Management System vs. Digital Experience Platform

Note that one tool that a DXP should not be confused with is called a content management system, or CMS for short.

A CMS is a tool built for the purposes of helping people create, manage, and modify content that exists on a place like a business website – all without the need for highly technical knowledge or programming skills. For the sake of example, let’s say that your business wants to publish 10 posts a week, every week, on its blog. That’s 40 posts per month. Rather than manually trying to figure out which writers are working on which topics, what stage each piece is in, when everything will be published and similar concerns, a CMS is a tool that can accomplish all of this in one easy-to-use place. All workflows are completed within the same platform. It can also assist with editing pieces that are already live, too.

So while the type of content that you post to your website or elsewhere online is an important part of the digital experience you’re offering, it is also just one part of a much larger story. Like a CDP, a CMS helps effectively manage the individual portions of that story that all then feed into the larger “whole” being created with the digital experience platform.

Considerations for upgrading to a DXP

If your business is thinking about upgrading to a DXP to help empower your own efforts, there are a few key things you’ll want to keep in mind.

At a bare minimum, any DXP you choose must support personalization, analytics and ongoing optimization when it comes to digital experiences. There should also be tools pertaining to customer data management as well. To that end, you’ll also want to make sure that your DXP is able to integrate with any other essential tools that you’re using, especially for the purposes of customer data. If it isn’t, you run the risk of creating data silos.

Indeed, integration is one of the key things to look out for in a DXP solution so be mindful of which APIs your chosen platform supports. An API essentially acts as a “connector” between two pieces of software, allowing data to flow from one to the other. Think back to how a CDP “feeds into” what you’re doing with a DXP. Now, imagine a situation where your CDP couldn’t “talk” to your DXP at all. Any insight contained in it was trapped there and data would likely have to be duplicated manually, leading to quality issues. That’s what integration helps you avoid.

In terms of personalization, look for platforms that leverage features like artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is a great way to leverage automated personalization, which can speed up results and also free up the valuable time of employees to focus on more important matters.

When it comes to analytics and optimization, a DXP should include features like A/B testing capabilities, for example. This is when you try out two different versions of an ad or piece of content to smaller audiences and then, once you determine which is more effective, you roll that out to the rest of your audience. All of this will continue to help you better understand your customers and their journeys so that you can optimize as often as you’re able to.

Other types of features that you may need depending on your goals include campaign management, marketing performance management, and even commerce capabilities (like payment gateways).

The role of customer data in digital experience

Ultimately, the most important thing to understand about all of this is that you’re not necessarily looking at an “either/or” scenario when it comes to creating the best digital experience possible for consumers. In all likelihood success will come down to a combination of techniques, all working together to create something far more powerful as a collective than they could be on their own.

A CDP can and should be used to inform your business’ larger DP delivery strategy. Using the customer data that you already have, you can unlock invaluable insight to make better and more informed decisions all the time. With this comes a better understanding of who your customers are – why they behave the way they do, what they like, and what they dislike. It allows you to personalize web experiences by way of recommended content and similar features that drive traffic, help collect leads, and keep people engaged across the board.

Of course, there are a number of important considerations that will need to be made – chief among them being data quality. First-party data is that which comes from your own sources, and you need to make sure you’re working with actionable intelligence. The same is true of second and third-party data sources, too. The fastest way for this entire effort to fall apart is to start making experience decisions based in inaccurate or incomplete information.Having said that, by keeping points in mind like those outlined above, you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of this process with as few of the potential downsides as possible — even as you face change in the future.