Company outlines key updates to its Product Suite; guides customers on the path to composable

Sitecore, a global leader in end-to-end digital experience software, announced the release of new component capabilities in its cloud native, modern CMS, XM Cloud, which will empower brands to deliver seamless and personalized customer experiences across all digital touchpoints.

XM Cloud Components is a Front End as a Service (FEaaS) composer for marketers to create their brand’s digital style guide and build visual components. Components can be created from scratch or can be styled by importing existing HTML. Data sources can be mapped to components to enable dynamic and responsive components that may be reused across digital properties, saving time and creating brand consistency.

With XM Cloud Components, content authors, UX designers, and marketers can work in parallel to speed up the process of creating on-brand digital experiences for their customers. It’s fully integrated with XM Cloud Pages, creating an end-to-end next generation authoring experience.

Marketing Technology News: Appy Pie Introduces AI-Powered Website Builder to Simplify Website Development

“We’re thrilled to introduce this new component capability to our XM Cloud platform, designed to enable marketers, designers and developers to work in harmony,” said Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer of Sitecore. “With the ability to compose on-brand, dynamic page components, brands can remain agile and responsive to customer needs in real-time, which is essential in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Our modern SaaS-based DXP provides limitless opportunities for brands to plug and play new technologies such as ChatGPT, introducing a new level of flexibility to adapt and respond to technology innovations and the ever-changing customer needs.”

According to an exclusive survey conducted by leading market research firm Advanis on behalf of Sitecore in March 2023, most US marketers (85%) expect that they will move at least some of their marketing tech stack to composable software solutions. The top three reasons for choosing composable offerings include flexibility to integrate with existing martech stack (47%), faster time to value (46%) and freedom to integrate technologies that optimize the customer experience (46%). Having realized the benefits of using composable software, these findings prove that US marketers are now ready to take the next step in seamlessly deploying engaging and personalized digital experiences.

Commenting on their exciting journey with Sitecore, Amy Kolzow, VP Global Digital Marketing at Wolters Kluwer said: “We are proud to provide a unified and modern online experience that brings dynamic thought leadership to our customers and showcases our vast product portfolio. When we embarked on our digital transformation journey, we found it challenging to create web experiences that cater for every marketer, regardless of how mature they were in their use of technology. It’s that balance we found with Sitecore that we couldn’t find elsewhere. Since beginning our partnership, we built 30,000 pages, and now we publish about 100 pages a day, all thanks to the drag-and-drop components capability.”

At DX Europe, the company also announced it has signed over twenty new customers to its XM Cloud platform since Sitecore Symposium, which took place in Chicago in October 2022.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Laurie Morylak, SVP of Marketing at ReliaQuest

In addition to XM Cloud Components, Sitecore also unveiled a number of other updates:

Content Hub One

• Since the launch of its pureplay Headless CMS in October, Sitecore has continued to roll out enhancements to Content Hub One around user interface, preview capabilities, better content modelling and developer experience.
• In addition, Sitecore announced that it has signed a major multinational cosmetics brand as the latest customer to use Content Hub One. The brand will use Content Hub One as a key part of its digital content delivery strategy, allowing the cosmetics giant to easily build digital experiences off the same platform and leverage only the best content.

Sitecore Connect

• Following the successful launch in October, Sitecore Connect has been building great traction in the market. Sitecore has released pre-built connectors for a number of products including Content Hub ONE, Content Hub DAM and Ops, CDP, Send and OrderCloud.
• This has enabled practitioners to create a host of new capabilities to enable content integration, including examples leveraging the latest AI tech such as Generative AI (ChatGPT) and stable diffusion tech (Dall-e) to augment content in the Composable DXP.

Sitecore Search

According to the Advanis survey, two-thirds of US marketers (61%) have noticed changes in customer search patterns, particularly increases in direct-to-retail, social and voice search. To address this, a great majority of US marketers have either already invested (70%) or are planning to invest (23%) in AI-powered search to be able to better respond to changing customer needs.

• In response, Sitecore Search has been updated with powerful AI and analytics capabilities that make it far better at recognizing questions in different formats, helping brands to deflect call center traffic and save costs.
• In addition, Sitecore released global support for double-byte characters like Chinese.

“We integrated Sitecore Search on Sitecore.com to revamp the search experience on our own website,” said Hannah Grap, VP, Corporate Marketing, Sitecore. “Within a month from implementation, we saw a 25% increase in click-through rate and doubled the amount of relevant content to our visitors for some of our top keywords.”

Sitecore Send

• A host of enhancements have enhanced Sitecore’s email marketing solution – Sitecore Send – to lead the way in effortless automation and personalization. Some of the highlights include:
  • A new mobile-friendly design, optimized to improve the user experience on mobile devices.
  • AI-powered audience discovery tool to find, organize, and target different groups of customers based on their specific interests, buying intent, and where they are in the sales funnel. These insights help marketers improve the relevancy of your campaigns.
  • Redesign of the email designer making it even easier for markets to craft compelling email campaigns.

Marketing Technology News: Performance Marketing Opportunities in the Streaming Wars