Pimcore provides amazing features that help to tell your digital success story. Our gold partner weblizards found 12 reasons, why you should rely on the data and experience management of Pimcore.
Before we talk about the advantages of Pimcore, I would like to say a few important words about digital solutions and the subject of agility. In general, it should be clear that digitalization is changing the way we work together. We all need to become faster, more agile and therefore more communicative.
Anyone like me who has been involved in software solutions and marketing projects for a good 20 years knows that change is actually the only constant in this fast-moving industry.
Agile working without unwanted noises
The beautiful agility concept. So often touted as a panacea and just as often as the worst "buzzword" ever and a cause for "burnouts" and "poor software quality". No matter in which company I worked agile or for which company we implemented Scrum Sprints, working agile did not only mean good in a good way. What had previously been planning for months in waterfall projects suddenly had to be planned, implemented and of course, tested in monthly or even 2-week sprints. That agile projects bring a high degree of flexibility should be clear by now. That ultimately empathy and communication skills of the entire team is an equally important success factor, as well. This is how agility can work and be a very big competitive advantage.
But how is that important in the context of Pimcore? With the products of the Pimcore Experience platform, we as an agency are able to handle all your company data in one place, easily and centrally, and distribute it to all your digital products and channels. Thanks to this philosophy, we are able to act very quickly and agile.
1. You finally become master of all your data and avoid data silos
The correct handling of data is a very decisive factor in digitization projects. Why is that the case?
Company data, customer data, or marketing and analysis data are almost always maintained in different systems and thus cannot be shared. This is an area where companies are missing out on a great deal of potential because the reuse and joint use of data alone can exploit synergies and eliminate sources of error. From a marketing perspective, a consistent brand experience is finally achieved. Only through uniform and flawless communication, it is often possible to positively influence the external view and thus enhance the company image.
Our recommendation is therefore always to analyze the system landscape at the beginning of a digitization project and to consider which existing data you could usefully connect, automate or publish, and where and how. Also, ask yourself where and in what form you could improve data quality before you think about implementing a digital solution.
2. You will be able to offer digital solutions promptly
Pimconauts (that's what we call each other in the Pimcore community) love Pimcore's flexible and holistic approach. Especially the combination of the individual products makes Pimcore a great digital complete solution. The possibility to model complex data models directly in Pimcore is an enormous advantage.
But even if this all sounds logical and the importance of data has now been recognized almost everywhere, the real benefits that such initiatives bring in practice can only be explained with the help of concrete examples.
For example, at the beginning of the year, when major events were banned everywhere, we managed to convert an event platform into a delivery service within two weeks by simply connecting the platform's existing layout components to a new data model of a delivery platform. This would have been unthinkable without the flexible data handling of Pimcore.
3. You are prepared for all important data privacy questions
When people talk about data, sooner or later questions about data privacy will also arise.
With the advent of the EU's general data protection regulation (GDPR), the topic of "data privacy" has also become increasingly important to our customers. As you can imagine, it is of course an enormous advantage in this context to have all company and customer data neatly aggregated in one place.
This enables you, regardless of where and in which system the data was collected, to store all customer information in compliance with data privacy laws, to quickly provide information about stored data, or to delete it manually or automatically if necessary.
4. You can layout your content exactly according to the needs of your customers
By combining business, customer, and marketing data with behavioral data, you will be able to tailor the content of your website to the exact needs of your customers and personalize the digital experience for them.
Suppose you offer articles for different target groups in your online store. Then you can make sure that the respective target group will find the offer on the entry page that corresponds to their interest. Sports enthusiasts can see sporting goods and outdoor enthusiasts can see the latest hiking boots or tents.
Quickly displaying the right product or offer can be a critical success factor, considering that most visitors leave your website after a few seconds if they do not find the desired offer immediately.
Since possibilities for personalization are part of the core functionality of Pimcore, the implementation in practice is not rocket science, but now our daily business.
5. You can even use artificial intelligence to your advantage in the future
Currently, Pimcore is working hard to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the system by using the possibilities of Google TensorFlow via an interface.
Typical examples of usage are the intelligent duplicate recognition of text, images and videos, the search and recognition of object features in images. You will be able to use this technology to automatically enrich product data from your online store with missing product information, for example.
6. You can partially digitalize your services!
Even if the use of artificial intelligence sounds great, as a serious agency we recommend that you first consider the possibilities that have already proven themselves in practice many times and will thus help you achieve success faster. We could to name one common case from practice, jointly tackle the digitalization of some of your most important services.
For the company Marlin AG, for example, we were allowed to implement an online pool planner, which customers can use to inspire themselves or directly compile their desired pool online. For Marlin AG, this offer is not only an inspiring marketing instrument, but also serves as decision support for customers, simplifies preliminary clarifications and partially automates project planning.
Pimcore itself offers hundreds of helpful components or workflows for such cases. For the pool planner of Marlin AG, for example, the extensive Web-To-Print component of Pimcore was used. And if a requirement cannot be solved with the standard components of Pimcore (which is rarely the case), it is no problem to use one of the freely available plugins from the meanwhile large international community or to develop your own solution.
7. Operate successful and efficient e-mail marketing
Another very often used, important example is the integration of MailChimp. Basically, it would be possible to send e-mails and also e-mail newsletters in high quality without the integration of another application, just by using the e-mail component of Pimcore. We have already successfully implemented this approach several times.
Now there are customers who have been using MailChimp for a long time and appreciate its features and possibilities or explicitly want to use MailChimp or any other e-mail marketing software. In such cases, we aggregate the most important data (content, customer data incl. mail address, registration and subscription information, information about newsletter lists, customer segments, etc.) in Pimcore and synchronize them continuously bidirectionally with MailChimp.
Together with the customer, we define which system is responsible for which application. So Pimcore could serve only as a data source or deliver already completely created templates to MailChimp. The possibilities are unlimited and can be implemented exactly as the customer wishes. So, it is no longer the customer who has to adapt to the technology, but vice versa.
8. Automate your most important processes across media
Pimcore also offers similar flexibility in the automation of your processes. For your marketing automation (e.g. mail sequences) you can continue to use your familiar environment (if it exists) or you can automate all processes using the workflows of Pimcore.
Especially in multichannel publishing, there are various practical application examples that illustrate the benefits of automation processes in Pimcore very well. You can automatically prepare digital data for use in print catalogs and send it to the right place in the right format at the right time. Media and content can also be made available in various formats, quality levels, or sizes based on rules and then published on social media.
Wherever processes in your company run the same way, again and again, it makes sense to think about automation.
9. Thanks to the "Bricks" the maintenance of your website becomes a breeze
Bricks are building blocks that can be assembled like Lego bricks within your website and thus make the maintenance of your website flexible and easy. All customers who used to play Lego will remember their childhood by working with the "bricks". In any case, the handling is easy and just as much fun.
We can design "bricks" according to your wishes from texts, graphic elements or even functions. "Bricks" simplify the implementation of complex use cases and adherence to graphical or structural concepts.
10. Bonjour, Hello, 你好 – You will love to maintain your website in multiple languages
Localization, as many opportunities as it offers us from a commercial perspective, was a requirement in the past that caused more teeth grinding than leaps of joy. Often it was only thought of last or very late in the day, and it was not uncommon to have to tell the customer afterward that this would change a lot of the project.
It is of course not the case that localization is no longer a challenge. It is still advisable to make localization or internationalization an issue early in the project.
But Pimcore offers several solutions for the translation of content and data or for localization and internationalization, which make this requirement elegantly solvable. For example, pages can simply be copied and rearranged in another language in terms of appearance and content, or the concept of inheritance can be used to change only the content.
11. Your website can also withstand a mass rush
Activity on websites and digital services is also increasing steadily at the national or even regional level. It is not unusual for digital solutions to be used intensively by tens of thousands of users at the same time.
This presents us all with new challenges. In this context, Pimcore addresses modern development frameworks (MVC) and performance concepts (e.g. caching). If these technical terms do not mean anything to you; in very simple terms, these approaches enable us to use information, data, functions, and media in a resource-saving way.
In addition, as an agency, we can fall back on so-called content delivery networks, through which large amounts of data, mainly image data, can be outsourced. Or we have the possibility to completely outsource the solutions to web services or infrastructures of large Internet providers such as Amazon or Google.
We decide which solution makes sense for which customer on a case-by-case basis. In any case, you no longer need to worry about performance and a larger user base.
12. You set the course for your digital success story
Even though my first participation at the Pimcore Inspire (the annual meeting of all Pimconauts in Salzburg) made me feel like I had joined some kind of sect, I felt like many others; I felt like I was part of something that is being developed in exactly the right direction by a dedicated community and the use of Pimcore gives us as an agency and therefore you as a client a decisive competitive advantage.
Basically, the open-source philosophy of Pimcore, which is still propagated today as an important piece of the puzzle, leads to the fact that many very talented specialists have come together around this great platform in a short time to form an incredibly valuable community.
But the best way to convince yourself is to take a look at the many great Pimcore Case Studies that are already available or arrange a free initial call with us so that we can plan your personal digital solutions together. We would be pleased if your own company history also could contribute as a further chapter to the great success story of Pimcore.
Thanks, Sandro for your contribution, great input! Check out the website of w-vision for more information and inspiring success stories.
