It may feel challenging having to cater to customer demand, but to be truly successful and to achieve commerce growth, you not only have to meet customer demand, you have to go above and beyond – exceeding expectations.
Given that most shopping interactions are now digital, customers have fewer personal interactions with a company, and therefore expect a rich and valuable online shopping experience, which often includes personalization, detailed product content, accessibility and easy navigation.
While these demands may seem difficult to meet, simple tweaks to legacy systems and processes can give you a competitive advantage in your customer experience, helping your business to grow in the process. Here’s how.
Legacy content management systems are holding you back
We have a tendency to stick to the familiar, and the same applies for technology. We’ll often use favored platforms and systems, even when they’re outdated. Traditional content management systems (CMS) have a rigid framework, hosting web images, page templates, plug-ins… you name it. Knowing where your most impactful content is hosted (and who controls it) is far harder to pinpoint using these monoliths that you’re accustomed to.
Instead, an API-first headless CMS architecture separates the backend from customizable frontend layers. Developers can handle standardized components, while merchandisers and marketers can freely customize the webpage content as seen by the customer - all without the technical complexity of code, too. A headless CMS allows your business to be more agile, with teams having the ability to manage content across multiple channels and touchpoints, making content updates easily - and fast.
Your teams should be working smarter, not harder
Content delivery can become slow and complex when teams work independently. Marketers and developers may be working with different internal tools, and the dreaded ‘development bottleneck’ workflow becomes real: time-sensitive content sits on the back burner, webpages load slowly and small content updates require multi-stakeholder approval.
By using Amplience’s Agile CMS, your teams can all work together in one platform, notifying changes in real-time and creating agile workflows for the content creation, review and publication process. With scheduling and previewing features, and engagement from multiple teams across your business, content managment and distribution will be faster, and your teams will be more productive.
Your branded content isn’t consistent across channels
One of the biggest demands from customers is a clear brand identity and personality, so delivering a consistent multi-channel experience is key, and ensures a seamless customer journey between platforms. While a traditional CMS usually serves website content only, Amplience’s Dynamic Content allows you to store huge volumes of content variations, designed for easy distribution across multiple contexts and channels, allowing your teams to ‘create once, publish everywhere.’
Your assets aren’t optimized for conversion
With rich content and inspiration comes the opportunity to convert your customers. From landing pages to product pages and video content, rich media is the key to ensuring that your digital channels work hard – and deliver. With Dynamic Media, your teams are able to create hundreds of content variants from a single master asset, cropping and scaling for mobile screens and using shoppable media to drive your customers to purchase.
If you can’t adapt, you can’t scale
Does a last-minute market or business change have your merchandising team scrambling to update content? Speed and agility is key in allowing your business to be reactive. While customer journeys used to be linear and simple templates sufficed, the customer journey is now everywhere – from web to mobile, apps and social, content needs to be available on-demand and constantly tested and optimized.
By evolving your architecture and adopting a MACH approach, you have the opportunity to choose from the best tools and solutions relevant to your business needs, creating a composable structure that makes it easy to add, replace or remove technologies as you experience growth. Think of it as an ever-scalable skyscraper, just without limits!
Looking to take your commerce growth to the next stage? Talk with us to find out more.