Top Digital Trends To Look Out For In 2023 - Vol 2 - Your Daily Dose of Digital - 01/01/23

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Welcome to 2023, welcome to the first of these newsletters for the year and welcome to Volume 2 of my thoughts on some of the?DX, CX & DCX trends to look out for this year.

This is just a snippet of a full article I wrote for the Sagittarius website, discussing the?Top 5 Digital Experience & Marketing Trends To Look Out For in 2023, and I'm hoping to share a few of the insights from the article in this LinkedIn Newsletter - But, please feel free to take that hangover-curing bacon(or fake-on) bap, get comfy in that 'Oodie' your family bought for you for Xmas and?go here?to read in full!

Sh*t Just Got Personal!

Personalisation enables brands to tailor marketing messages and campaigns to individual consumers based on their personal characteristics, preferences, and behaviours and can be achieved through various channels, such as email, social media, PPC, mobile apps, and websites.?

Personalisation improves the customer experience by providing relevant and personalised content, recommendations, and offers to individual consumers. It can also help businesses increase conversions and sales by targeting their marketing efforts to specific groups of consumers who are more likely to be interested in their products or services.

There are several ways that personalisation can be implemented through digital experience marketing, including using customer data to send targeted emails with personalised subject lines, content, and offers; to using customer data & behaviours to tailor website content and recommendations to individual users.?

But, let's go beyond the "Hello <Insert First Name>" depth of personalisation in 2023, ok? We're all better than that!

Zoe Allen, CRO and Personalisation Lead at Decathlon recently spoke at the CX Conference: “The way most brands are segmenting their audiences online is obsolete,” says Zoe. She believes we need to go beyond demographics to improve CX for the average user.

“The problem is there’s no such thing as an average user,” says Zoe. So, when it comes to segmenting, businesses should look at audience behaviour, not their attributes. “Because our demographics don’t define who we are; our actions do.”?

This is, of course, personalisation’s sweet spot. A user browses content on a certain topic or theme, or interacts with certain products, or even comes from a certain campaign and we know what content we need to present to them to nurture their next action, on what channel and with what messaging to resonate with the greatest impact.?

Personalisation doesn’t solely live in the digital world. Many brands are using their digital platforms to go beyond personalised marketing, enabling customers to personalise their physical products at point of order through eCommerce, often using AR and AI. Some great examples include everything from trainers such as those available through Nike’s ID (Nike By You) platform; to personalised clothing subscriptions like Stitchfix and Lookiero; through to skincare brands like Clinique, who offer personalised moisturisers which are specifically tailored to customers’ skin.

No matter the stage in the customer journey, personalisation can positively impact businesses & improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts by delivering more relevant and personalised experiences to their customers. However, to deliver a truly personalised omni-channel experience, it’s vitally important that users are met with the same personalised messaging across all channels. Ensuring a customer can be targeted with personalisation at every touchpoint is going to be a huge part of activity in this area next year with the limitations being placed on cookie/pixel tracking, making first-party data, tracking & personalisation capabilities (like those within Sitecore) even more important.

The Tech Stack will be more Composable and Headless through DXP

A DXP, or Digital Experience Platform, is a software solution that helps organisations create and manage digital experiences for their customers. These experiences can include websites, mobile apps, social media platforms, and other online touchpoints. DXPs provide a range of tools and capabilities, such as content management, customer relationship management, analytics, and personalization, to help organisations deliver engaging and relevant experiences to their customers.

DXP solutions are designed to help brands improve customer engagement, increase conversions, and drive revenue growth through the creation and management of personalised, data-driven digital experiences. Large enterprises and organisations often use them with complex digital landscapes and a need for robust, scalable solutions to manage their digital experiences.

There’s been accelerated development in the DXP space in 2022, with the buzziest of the buzzwords being “Composable” and “Headless”. According to?CMSWire, “A composable DXP is essentially a best-of-breed digital ecosystem with complementary SaaS, cloud-native tools from multiple providers stitched together through APIs and data flows. Composable architecture offers a more flexible and agile approach to delivering customer experience, avoids vendor lock-in and allows teams to evolve a system with the tools they love.”

“In 2023 it’s likely that vendors will continue to offer cloud-native services with APIs that can fit into a composable DXP, and that more customers will start to evolve their composable systems. But we’ll also start to see more products emerging similar to?Sitecore Connect?that contribute an orchestration layer and make it easier to achieve a composable DXP in practice.”?

This support for a more composable stack opens the door for further advancement in headless. Headless website development is an approach where the front-end of a website is “decoupled” (separated) from the back-end, or content management system (CMS). In a headless website, the front-end is implemented as a separate client-side application that communicates with the back-end via APIs to retrieve and display content. This allows the front-end and back-end to be developed and managed independently, which can be beneficial in situations where the front-end needs to be updated frequently or where multiple front-ends are needed to support different devices or platforms.

One advantage of headless website development is that it allows brands to create highly customised, personalised and interactive user experiences without being constrained by the capabilities of their CMS. It also allows them to easily update and maintain the front-end of their website without affecting the back-end, which can be particularly useful for large organisations with complex digital landscapes. Support for headless publishing through Sitecore is now making it far more achievable to harness the power of publishing the same base content across multiple experiences across multiple channels through a more accessible system for storing, accessing & distributing your content. The benefits of headless are clear to see. Exciting times.?

2023 has more in store...

There's another three (or more) trends to look out for in 2023 - if you want to read ahead, go and?check out the full article here.

For those of you interested in?delivering experiences that convert in 2023, don't hesitate to reach out to me or find out more about what we do at Remarkable over at:?https://sagittarius.agency/