Episerver Releases Omnichannel Personalization Tools
Episerver, provider of a cloud-based content, commerce, and marketing platform, today introduced three additions to its Omnichannel Personalization Suite—Perform, Advance, and Insight. According to Joey Moore, product director at Episerver's Peerius, the tools link user behavioral data with digital content and products to deliver "joined up" experiences.
"We've seen from our clients, partners, and the wider community that there's a demand for personalization, and we know that that demand comes from end consumers in the commerce sense," Moore says. Episerver has invested in technologies that empower digital marketers to better segment their audiences, he notes, in turn giving them the opportunity to focus on more strategic endeavors.
Episerver's Perform leverages machine learning algorithms to determine which products and offers are most likely to appeal to a customer at a given time, as well as where they would be most likely to respond to them. In addition to detailed purchase histories, the system can analyze behavioral cues from a customer's interactions with variety of company touch points, including a website or mobile app, and surface product recommendations and listings that are relevant to them.
Episerver's Advance is a content personalization solution for email and event triggering, the latter of which can be combined with the predictive analytics capabilities of Episerver's Digital Experience Cloud to stimulate customer engagement.
Advance can tailor email content at the point at which it reaches a customer's eyes, as soon as he clicks the subject line. Because the software can also determine product stock and availability, as well as price changes and discounts, it can display more detailed offers to users. According to Moore, the "click-through rates on a calculated, algorithmically driven product, within an email, can be four to five times that of one that's been handpicked by a merchandiser."
The trigger technology also tackles the problem of abandoned shopping carts, as it digs deeper into the reasons people have for dropping out before committing to a purchase, and creates corresponding workflows based on each customer's decisions. According to more, it "really [understands] the context and root of the users before actioning the triggered message."
Perform and Advance build on the analytical capabilities of Episerver's Insight platform for Big Data management. Insight's APIs enable companies to absorb and process data from different sources, including digital interactions, CRM, and ERP systems.
The enhancements supplement Episerver's Find offering, which lets users create custom landing pages based on each visitor's interests to increase engagement on digital channels.
Episerver has also launched several other products, capabilities, and extensions, for social media, content approval, and live chat support.
Episerver Social is a cloud-based API for user-generated content, which offers storage, management, and delivery of reviews, ratings, activities, streams, and groups on social media.
The Content Approval feature is built into Episerver's CMS and Commerce offerings and gives users the power to approve content while streamlining workflows and facilitating collaboration. According to Moor, this function might be especially useful across distributed teams.
The LivePerson Connector enables the LiveEngage chat capability, so companies can launch communications through pop-up windows. The service includes a back-end agent interface equipped with usage statistics and sentiment analysis.
In the future, Episerver will work to incorporate natural language processing tools for semantic analysis, as well as capabilities that support text and voice-based interactions. "We've already got some exciting versions of that in our labs, so that's the next big threshold," Moore says.