Episerver Celebrates 25 Years of Empowering Businesses Worldwide to Create Quality Content, eCommerce, and Marketing Experiences

TL; DR: Episerver is a software provider delivering digital content management, ecommerce, and multichannel marketing resources to businesses worldwide. Through the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud, the company empowers digital leaders to differentiate their brands while operating with agility through a single platform. As the company continues to build out all-in-one cloud capabilities, it aims to make it easier for brands to reduce time to market and boost ROI.

When it comes to the future of digital marketing, one thing is blatantly clear: A one-size-fits-all approach will no longer cut it.

According to a recent study, 90% of adults in the U.S. have a positive attitude toward content personalization in marketing campaigns. The strategy is equally appealing to marketing professionals, who have cited increased conversion rates and ecommerce revenue as benefits of in-app and website personalization.

But individualized customer experiences don’t appear out of thin air — they require data, analytics, and technical know-how, among other assets. To make matters more complicated, campaigns must be scalable, cost-effective, and executed promptly to prove useful.

Fortunately, companies like Episerver are turning to the power of automation to provide everything marketers need to create standout experiences tailored to each unique visitor quickly and efficiently — all without reliance on IT teams. With the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud, users can even manage content, commerce, and marketing analytics within one screen.

“All of the tools and capabilities we provide are designed to help customers decrease time to market, whether they’re trying to do something on a daily basis or launch a brand new campaign,” said Justin Anovick, VP of Worldwide Product at Episerver. “We’re always excited about helping businesses compete at a different level than they were able to before.”

Founded in 1994, Episerver has grown to serve marketers, web editors, and merchandisers worldwide who depend on the company’s technology to create personalized web and ecommerce sites. As the company celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, its goal is to continue to provide tools that make it easy for customers to create compelling digital experiences.

As the first platform to combine digital content, commerce, and marketing into one screen, the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud provides unique business and financial benefits. The solution’s all-in-one nature allows marketers to spend less time managing assets and more time on their core competencies — including improving user experience, focusing on creating content that sells, and investing time on merchandising strategies.

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Episerver in August 2018, content and product management updates are significantly easier using the platform. The companies surveyed reported that, due to reduced user burden and the ability to manage digital assets across platforms, they were able to reduce development efforts by an average of 50%.

In addition, organizations reported that Episerver’s scalable, fully managed Digital Experience Cloud, hosted on Microsoft Azure, delivers considerable cost savings compared with on-premises solutions. Forrester estimates efficiency gains of more than $352,000 annually, totaling over $1 million in savings over a three-year period.

Finally, the Forrester study determined that organizations that use the Digital Experience Cloud benefit significantly from the platform’s AI-based personalization, which enables them to provide relevant content for unique customers. Ultimately, the Episerver’s AI technology in digital commerce scenarios resulted in $3.7 million in extra revenue for customers as soon as the first year.

“With artificial intelligence and machine learning, you’re able to personalize your content in a more precise way, using mounds of data, as opposed to doing it anecdotally or through manual rules,” Justin said.

To discover how much your organization could save with Episerver, the company provides a helpful calculator based on the number of editors and developers working on your website. The Episerver site also features a similar calculator for determining possible increases in revenue.

Justin told us that many Episerver customers seek the company’s help in competing with industry giants.

“At the end of the day, our customers are worried to death about Amazon taking their business,” he said. “They’re aware of what they’re fighting against, and our job is to help them become quick movers. Gone are the days of relying on developers to get new updates out.”

For the past three years, Episerver has surveyed 4,500 online shoppers around the world to report on evolving consumer expectations and help create better ecommerce experiences. This year’s report, “Reimagining Commerce: Principles of Standout Digital Shopping Experiences,” revealed marketplaces like Amazon are undeniably edging out the competition.

According to Episerver’s research, 61% of consumers seek out marketplaces like Amazon to weigh pricing options, and more than half (58%) do so for product selections. Furthermore, 87% of online shoppers compare what they find on a brand or retailer’s site to Amazon.

Despite Amazon’s predominance and breadth of product offerings, smaller businesses still have the chance to thrive. The trick, according to the Episerver report, is to develop personal connections with consumers through integrated content marketing and customer experience techniques that go beyond the typical emotionless transaction.

Fortunately, research shows that Episerver can make a difference in that area, as several interviewees in the Forrester study reported a boost in customer satisfaction and net promoter scores after adopting Digital Experience Cloud.

Moving forward, Episerver has made the strategic decision to continue building out all-in-one solutions that, in many cases, remove the need for customers to hire third-party providers.

“We include a content delivery network (CDN), security monitoring, multiple environments, the ability to deploy in other regions,” Justin said. “If there is value to the customer, we don’t want to have them pay for those technical pieces — that’s all a part of our offering. We’re the one hand to shake.”

Episever is committed to ensuring the security of its platform as part of that package deal — even though, in many cases, the customer isn’t aware that the service exists. The company has spent countless hours working with the teams at Azure Application Insights to ensure it is providing customers a structurally sound environment with the mechanisms in place to mitigate threats.

“We thwarted 905 million threats last year before they ever reached the customer,” Justin said. “That’s critically important because all the features in the world don’t matter if your site is not working.”

In addition to built-in technical perks, Episerver will continue to deliver value through things like enhanced personalization and improved visualization of the customer journey — which Justin said customers frequently request.

There’s just one caveat when it comes to ongoing development. “Quality matters,” Justin said. “We’re never going to sacrifice quality for that whizz-bang new feature that won’t be relevant for three years because we want our customers to derive value from our products right now.”