Over the past few years, there has been a rapid convergence between content-driven experiences and traditional eCommerce platforms. That's also because omnichannel experiences are reigning supreme and it’s rapidly becoming clear that there’s no way forward without creating moments of buying by integrating content and commerce.
The Need for Personalized Experiences
By delivering personalized content, based on customer data, individual shopping behavior, and industry trends, eCommerce is evolving away from simple ‘product pages’ to a new generation of immersive, insight-driven customer journeys. That’s where a merger of content and commerce becomes significant; it can achieve the right personalization and contextualization needed to fuel customer friendly purchase experiences.
What is Content-Commerce?
Content and commerce pertains to a business’s ability to offer engaging narratives around their product or services to the consumer (in the form of rich product content like detailed information, brochures, product guides, video tutorials, social media stories, online or offline events or even user generated content like reviews or experience sharing) and an equally intuitive and intelligent commerce platform to seamlessly send them down to the path of purchase. This is what a good content-commerce combination looks like. It provides consistent, connected experiences to customers.
Need of Content Commerce?
Content has started playing an exceedingly important role in enticing consumers, by going beyond display ads and turning towards storytelling and narrative building to stand out in an overcrowded market. Consistent, contextual, and convincing content can be the bedrock for engaging, effective campaigns that drive merchandizing. It can transform the overall commerce experience by connecting with not just customers needs and desires but capturing today’s hyperconnected customers’ imagination. That is where a robust content-commerce combination plays a significant role.
Headless Commerce: How It Transforms the Traditional Commerce Landscape?
Three Key Aspects of Content and Commerce Unification
1. Channel-agnostic digital experiences
Brand experiences are no longer limited or constrained by specific channels. The ability to shop, view ads and create engaging experiences on mobile or web, or even at offline kiosks, is integral to eCommerce 4.0. This also means that businesses need to shift from a channel-centric to a customer-centric perspective when it comes to building a seamless brand experience that drives online sales.
2. API led commerce for consistent experiences
The emergence of RESTful APIs has made it easier to simultaneously distribute tailored content, regardless of channel-specific limitations. By setting up a robust set of APIs, you enable bi-directional communication through your entire content system, from presentation and site management to checkouts and promotions - this frees your eCommerce platform from infrastructural dependencies and helps you create a consistent brand experience at every stage of the buyer journey.
3. Flexible integration with marketing tools
Integrating systems with your marketing strategy helps avoid data silos. For instance, you have a CRM system for segmenting customers and recording details; social media tools to tag, message and engage customers in campaigns and flash sales; analytics to understand, test and track customer behavior. Your eCommerce Engine should be robust enough to meet your enterprise-scale requirements and scalable enough to evolve with changing technology.
How businesses can level-up by merging content and commerce? And how Pimcore helps them at every step?
A Richer Customer Experience (CX)
Developing a powerful customer experience is largely about adding relevance and convenience to the existing user journey. By injecting personalized content for each customer or by creating a connect between brand story, product information and buyer context, enterprises can craft a series of memorable moments that resonate with the customer long after the purchase is complete. Combining eCommerce and content can help:
- Establish a strong customer-centric brand differentiator via richer buyer journeys.
- Deliver a more contextually relevant user experience, tailored for your eCommerce niche.
- Acquire deeper insights into omni-channel customer shopping behavior.
Pimcore Delivers a Seamless Discovery-to-Purchase Journey
Take advantage of Pimcore’s advanced content management system to deliver multi-channel consumer purchase journeys.
- Unified Digital Experience: By combining data and experience into a single, open-source platform, Pimcore allows you to publish content across every customer touchpoint as part of a consistent brand narrative.
- Real-time Personalization: Use Pimcore’s behavioural targeting functions to build high-fidelity personas in real-time and follow up with personalized offers to boost engagement.
- API-driven Content Delivery (CaaS): By decoupling authorship and presentation, you can focus on building engaging stories that are quickly published on multiple touchpoints via powerful APIs.
Integrated Marketing and Commerce
It is critical to develop your marketing function as part of a single continuum, by integrating expertise, toolsets, and operational parameters. This allows you to develop a centralized view of your customers and throws the weight of your resources towards achieving a common set of goals, via a unified strategy. This integration also helps you:
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Eliminate siloed operations and reduces intra-organizational conflict.
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Unify data streams to build a more intelligent picture of your customers.
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Create consistency in messaging across all your customer relationships.
Pimcore Enables Marketing and Commerce Integration
From discovery to purchase decision, Pimcore helps your marketing teams to deliver consistent messaging. Deploy automation to enable smarter cross-platform communication and uncover new marketing opportunities and messaging touchpoints for your eCommerce ecosystem.
- Effortless Interoperability: Empowers your marketing teams by giving them access to data from every tool, system and application so that your eCommerce engine can be fed with real-time data to fuel a personalized CX.
- Agile Data Management Models: The flexible and agile data model and multi-domain data management protocols allows for a unified, integrated approach to customer experience management.
- Best-in-Class Automation: Use Pimcore’s advanced marketing automation frameworks to free your talent from tedious, process-based tasks, including customer segmentation, data integration and campaign management.
Contextualized Communication
Modern customers use powerful cognitive filters for blocking irrelevant information. Regardless of how informative or educational your content is, it must also engage with your customer’s real-time needs in order to be truly engaging. Contextualized communication accelerates purchase decisions, creates more robust customer relationships, and allows your brand to navigate increasingly dynamic markets. Context-based communication can:
- Enrich the customer experience on an individual level.
- Shift your marketing strategy from multi-channel to cross-channel distribution.
- Help build a modular, instead of a monolithic, communications system.
Pimcore Brings Context to Every Customer Experience
Boost customer engagement with your brand, by leveraging analytics and market intelligence from disparate sources to drive unique, highly customized experiences. Pimcore’s content management system and digital commerce platform helps you evolve communication at every stage of the buyer journey to a new standard with:
- Enhanced Web Analytics: Identify, profile, engage and track audiences with web analytics that help you get the right messages to the right people at the right time.
- Headless Content Capabilities: Headless content systems leave your developers free to build powerful, uniform, multi-platform customer experiences.
- Open source Led Experience Management: Pimcore merges best-in-class web content management features with a flexible, open source eCommerce framework to create a digital experience platform and scale personalized experience delivery.
