Episerver acquires the key to optimising customer experience

Refining and honing the customer experience of a website is on every marketer’s wishlist. But making changes and knowing which are driving improvements can be a tedious process, and sometimes disconnected from content creation.

Our partner Episerver - a leading Digital Experience Platform – has set out to improve this with their game-changing acquisition of the world’s leading Experimentation Platform, Optimizely. But what does this mean and why are we so excited about it?

At 26, we understand the vital role customer experience has in creating a strong connection with users via a brand’s website. Episerver can help us achieve this for our clients with extensive content personalisation features that incorporate machine learning and remove a lot of legwork for marketing teams. Now with the acquisition of Optimizely which has incorporated experimentation into the core of the platform, you can easily test and refine. 

Which layout performs best? Which headline option best appeals to different audience segments? Are the automated 1:1 product recommendations meeting customer needs? These are questions we often ask and the answers can be found in testing which, for too long, has been positioned separately to content creation. Optimizely allows marketers to get real-time answers to their testing experiments, giving them improved agility and control over frontend UI such as banners, links and layouts and backend features such as segmentation strategies and personalisation. These features help create seamless digital experiences right down to the individual customer, ultimately improving brand outcomes. And now Episerver customers have access to this world-leading service, allowing them to create and optimise, all in one platform.

Customer centricity is not an end goal. It is a culture which involves a constant mission to seek out consumer behaviour and respond to it so you can deliver exceptional customer experiences. And it’s always evolving; you just have to analyse and compare website activity pre-covid with during the pandemic to see a huge shift in the way customers search, browse and buy. Together, Optimizely and Episerver can help clients adapt by experimenting more, with greater ease than ever before, so “the behaviours of the customer - not the opinions of the executives – decide the optimal customer experience”, as simply put by Alex Atzberger, CEO at Episerver.

Following the news, we asked John Prior, our Solutions Director, for his thoughts on the acquisition and to find out how it could benefit our clients: 

“We can’t wait to see Optimizely integrated into Episerver Content and Commerce Cloud. Episerver creates great value through its ability to integrate the tools that marketers need to create and optimise their users’ experiences, and that’s going to be hugely amplified by enabling them to manage content, experiments and insight from the same place.”

For more information about how you can create and optimise digital experiences with Episerver and Optimizely, please get in touch.