What is Optimizely?

Optimizely is a digital experience platform (DXP) that enables enterprises to deliver engaging experiences across every digital touchpoint. Teams can fuel data-driven decisions through continuous experimentation and constant innovation to achieve success in their marketing and commerce endeavors.

Until its acquisition by Episerver in 2020, Optimizely was a platform that helped companies create and conduct A/B tests to optimize user experiences on their websites. However, today, Optimizely is more than just an experimentation platform. Since then, Optimizely has acquired other platforms, including customer data platform Zaius and marketing orchestration platform Welcome.

Now consistently recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Optimizely boasts content management, personalization, customer data management, and analytics in one platform enterprises can leverage to orchestrate the entire content lifecycle.

Features and Product Offerings

Optimizely offers several products across its DXP suites, including Orchestrate, Experiment, Monetize, Enhancements, and Optimizely One.

Orchestrate

The Orchestrate product suite enables teams to plan campaigns, create content, and collaborate across teams. Businesses can manage the entire content lifecycle in one place as they plan, create, publish, and deliver digital experiences quickly and efficiently.

Benefits

• Command Center: The Orchestrate suite of tools unifies the content lifecycle and improves time to market. Instead of worrying about friction and delays in content processes, marketers and content editors can focus on creating exceptional content.

• Campaign Planning & Execution: A high-level view of all campaigns, allowing teams to plan and manage priorities.

• Editor-friendly Publishing: Editors can easily create, personalize, and scale content to deliver dynamic digital experiences.

• Asset Management & Reuse: Organize assets into a single repository that enables businesses to find the correct assets quickly, track when and where assets are used, and keep everything up to date.

• Personalization at Scale: Leverage targeted content based on location, visited pages, referrer, keywords, profile properties, and other factors to deliver relevant content to customers.

⠀Below are the products that make up the Orchestrate suite.

Content Marketing Platform

Optimizely’s content marketing platform (CMP) is purpose-built for marketers and supports the entire content lifecycle, from planning and creation to distribution and analysis. Content teams never have to leave the platform to create high-quality experiences.

Features

• Centralized Campaign Planning: Teams can use CMP to plan campaigns down to the finest detail and have complete visibility into current, upcoming, and one-off marketing activities.

• Collaborative Building: Marketing teams can collaborate on content in the same place they ideate. This includes assigning workflow steps, supplementing content production with AI, commenting, versioning, and live web-proofing.

• Streamlined Asset Storage: CMP’s streamlined storage allows marketing teams to track marketing assets and reuse brand-approved assets.

• Publishing & Promotion: Preview how content looks on different channels and publish easily to multiple locations. Also easily integrate CMP with CMSs, social platforms, sales tools, and other solutions to publish content faster.

• Performance Measurement: Track, measure, and analyze content performance to understand which content performs better and drive ROI using robust analytics and efficiency metrics.

Content Management System

Optimizely’s content management system (CMS) provides marketers and developers with a modern, fully composable suite of user-friendly tools. Businesses can use the CMS to deliver experiences to any channel and personalize those experiences with the help of AI.

Features

• User-Friendly Editing: Optimizely CMS offers unlimited content layouts and a drag-and-drop page builder. This allows marketers to easily select the elements they want to edit and see the updates in real time.

• Omnichannel Content Delivery: Enterprises can use Graph, Optimizely’s GraphQL-powered service, to deliver content to any channel. Teams can pull exactly the content they need and deliver it to any device or app, while content gets served from a CDN to ensure speed and performance.

• Personalization: Built-in features like Visitor Groups and Content Recommendations enable businesses to tailor content experiences based on different criteria, including geographic location, visited pages, profile properties, and more.

• Translation: Manage content in multiple languages using integrations with translation apps such as Smartling, LanguageWire, and others.

Content Recommendations

Content Recommendations provides real-time guidance about which content will likely convert and drive revenue using AI-generated insights.

Features

• Web & Email Content Recommendations: Act on real-time visitor interests to deliver a personalized experience. Also, it automates content recommendations via email based on those unique interests.

• Email & Web Product Recommendations: Provide customers with the best product recommendations by combining AL, machine learning, and merchandising strategies on-site or via email.

• Personalized Search & Navigation: Provide personalized search results for relevant content products based on behavioral signals.

• Reporting: Get a comprehensive understanding of content at a granular level and why it works to help create an optimized content strategy that delivers ROI.

Digital Asset Management

Optimizely’s digital asset management (DAM) solution enables businesses to manage, organize, and reuse content to maximize their marketing assets.

Features

• Centralized Repository: Optimizely’s DAM keeps all marketing assets in one place. It provides a searchable repository that removes the issues of finding content or knowing the most recent version.

• Governance and Brand Control: DAM supports content governance, ensuring consistent messaging across all assets.

• AI Automation: Leverage AI to provide tagging, automated image and video renditions with smart cropping, and AI text and image generation.

Experiment

The Experiment product suite is purpose-built for running experiments, generating insights, and optimizing experiences across channels.

Benefits

• Test and Learn: Run experiments to optimize the customer experience and drive the best business results.

• Experimentation at Scale: Allow teams to experiment, run campaigns, and roll out new experiences without going through development workflows each time.

• Advanced Targeting: Leverage a host of tools to centralize audiences in one place and target them with tailored experiences based on segments, profiles, and more.

• Low/No-code Experiments: An easy-to-use WYSIWYG visual editor that allows teams to design and run experiments and adjust campaigns without requiring developers.

Feature Experimentation

With Optimizely’s Feature Experimentation, enterprises can gain more control over digital experiences and generate higher-quality releases, safer tests, and faster feature validations while innovating across the entire product lifecycle.

Features

• Collaboration: Cross-team collaboration allows teams to improve the speed of experimentation, build workflows, and increase approval cadence.

• Best-of-Breed Experimentation: Various data tools to run experiments with high statistical rigor and derive clear and actionable insights.

• Granular Personalization: Select the customer data to align with experiments and target precisely. Define granular audiences and implement advanced audience targeting.

• Feature Management: Relieve the pressure on engineers and decouple deployment from release. Additionally, deliver specific features to targeted audiences, controlling who sees which variation and roll back if necessary.

Web Experimentation

Optimizely Web Experimentation offers a precise A/B testing platform that enables businesses to create and convert more customers with high-performing experiences.

Features

• Collaboration: Create shared workspaces to crowdsource ideas, build hypotheses, and track activity across departments.

• Design: Design experiments using low-code tools and extension templates without relying on developers, using a visual editor, on-page review, and AI suggestions.

• Fast Execution: Run experiments from the network edge for a swift user experience to execute with speed using the Stats Accelerator.

• Precise Analysis: View insights in a configurable dashboard, allowing teams to make sound decisions, integrate analytics tools, and ensure data consistency.

Advanced Personalization

Deliver targeted messaging by leveraging experimentation and personalization tools to recommend relevant content to users.

Features

• Adaptive Audiences: Blend machine learning and human expertise to provide a relevant customer experience based on their interests and adjust in real-time to deliver a consistent experience even as behaviors change.

• 1:1 Recommendations: Create individualized content, messaging, and products and tailor experiences using prebuilt algorithms.

Experiment Collaboration

Experiment Collaboration helps to simplify processes by standardizing workflows. It allows teams to share plans and results to increase testing efficiency and velocity, maintain control, and build a test-and-learn culture within their organizations.

Features

• Structured Intake: Capture ideas from multiple people while managing backlog using customizable idea request forms and templates.

• Single Workspace: Create a home for briefs, variation designs, and communication, and assign workflow steps and approvals so that everyone can work together in one place.

• Design Proofing: Collaborate on design variations with version history and approval tracking to ensure consistency.

Monetize

The Monetize suite of commerce products enables companies to deliver modern, relevant commerce experiences with the flexibility to launch and scale as required.

Benefits

• Self-Service: Provide customers with what they want when they want it using self-service functionality.

• Multichannel Commerce: Deliver commerce experiences where the buyer is and launch on new channels as necessary.

• Localization: Deliver a personalized global commerce experience with relevant recommendations, custom pricing, and more to enhance the buying experience.

• Composable Platform: Leverage a modular and API-driven approach to connect multiple commerce products and scale the system as required using prebuilt integrations with payment gateways, PIMs, ERPs, and more.

Customized Commerce

With Optimizely’s Customized Commerce solution, teams can craft compelling buying experiences that delight customers, enhance brand appeal, and turn engagement into sales.

Features

• Content Creation: Use on-page editing, reusable blocks, and page elements to create personalized content experiences supported by a market-leading CMS and multi-site support.

• Personalization: Segment customers or create Visitor Groups and target segments with unique offers.

• Conversions: Drive sales growth using custom checkout workflows and integrated shipping and payment options.

• Retention: Boost customer loyalty with intelligent analytics to help influence promotions and program signups.

Configured Commerce

Optimizely Configured Commerce offers a composable commerce platform with Catalog, Search, Checkout, Promotions, and other out-of-the-box features.

Features

• Content Management: With a low-code/no-code and drag-and-drop interface, manage catalogs, custom attributes, UOM, catalog restrictions, and more across multiple sites.

• Controlled Pricing: Introduce customer-specific pricing and streamlined checkout on one or multiple pages.

Product Information Management

Optimizely Product Information Management (PIM) makes setting up and managing the product catalog easy.

Features

• Management: Acquire, validate, and manage product information using bulk updates.

• Imports: Import product information from other locations.

• Product Governance: Create properties and configure category trees with data types and templates.

Enhancements

Data Platform

Optimizely Data Platform is a customer data platform (CDP) that helps teams unify, segment, and activate customer data in real time. Integrating seamlessly with other Optimizely products allows businesses to collect, store, and enrich customer data from multiple sources, create and reuse segments based on multiple attributes, and activate those segments in real time across channels.

Features

• Unified Data: Maintain a unified and regularly updated view of customers with data collected from multiple sources. Ingest from and export to Data Platform and other sources, including CRMs, commerce, and third-party platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and others.

• Segment Management: Create and manage segments to enable targeted and real-time experimentation for content commerce experiences. Run sophisticated tests using historical and third-party data to test different variations.

Email Campaign

Optimizely Email Campaign is a marketing automation platform that enables companies to automate marketing campaigns with user-friendly features that require no HTML. Customize emails and build multichannel tactics with email, direct mail, and text messages.

Features

• Drag and Drop: Customize color schemes, edit photos, build content blocks, and create engaging email campaigns without using code.

• Integrations: Plug-and-play integrations for Salesforce, storing custom data, and more.

Integrations

The Optimizely App Directory provides a one-stop shop for finding apps and integrations that work well with Optimizely products, including Microsoft 365, Google Analytics, Siteimprove, Bynder, and others.

Optimizely One

Optimizely One is an all-in-one marketing operating system for creating high-quality digital experiences. It provides an easy-to-use and fully integrated suite with the flexibility for businesses to compose a system that works for them.

With Optimizely One, businesses can connect and manage the entire content lifecycle, from the planning and content creation stages to the layout, publishing, testing, personalization, and content analysis. All of Optimizely’s content applications are brought together in one place, in a shared system that uses a single login. This provides greater visibility and improves collaboration and speed to market.

Building an Optimizely Ecosystem with Oshyn

Optimizely is a leading digital experience platform that enables marketing and product teams to create and optimize digital experiences across multiple channels. The collection of products within the Optimizely ecosystem supports content management, experimentation, and commerce initiatives. However, with so many products, it’s vital to have the proper guidance when selecting and implementing solutions to meet business goals.

Oshyn is a certified Optimizely partner with service offerings that can support enterprises across their entire project lifecycle, from the design and planning stages to implementation, development, continued support, and maintenance. Oshyn is also an expert in building composable solutions, enabling us to assist businesses that want to integrate Optimizely products with other best-of-breed products.

One company that leveraged Oshyn’s help in implementing Optimizely to achieve outstanding success is TCDRS. In just 7 days after deployment with Oshyn, the company saw a remarkable 42.7% decrease in bounce rate.

Want to know how Oshyn made this possible? Find out more by reading our case study.