Opticon21 – What’s Coming Next for Optimizely?

Last month, Adage was fortunate enough to attend Opticon 2021. Opticon is a yearly event that gives us the opportunity to see where our partner Optimizely is headed and what advancements will be coming. To kick-off, we delved into The New Era of DXP. This new era is about creating a synonymous relationship between the customer experience and the digital experience.

As Optimizely pointed out throughout the event, the digital experience for customers is ever-changing. One of the biggest changes for some brands over the past few years is becoming more digital and turning to a digital experience when in-person was not possible. Winning brands need to adapt to their customers’ changing needs. Brands cannot make assumptions about their consumers but have to test and learn especially as customers are adapting on a regular basis.

By partnering with Optimizely, formerly Episerver, Adage is able to help our clients become a part of the adaptive digital experience. Our clients are able to connect with their consumers on a meaningful level, solve problems, and come up with strategy and design to revolutionize their digital business.

This brings together meaning, purpose, urgency, and agility in order to make decisions based on data, not assumptions. There were 3 key takeaways to consider when looking at what the adaptive digital experience provides:

1. Shared Outcome: solve key problems for any digital team
2. Shared Data: one set of data in order to avoid running on assumptions
3. Shared Platform: all information available to everyone internally

Product Vision Roadmap

Optimizely used Opticon21 to talk to their clients and customers to determine what problems are out there for digital experiences. Some of these problems included HIPPO’s, moving from brick-and-mortar to online, pre-launching without testing, and the inability to work off real-time data. Optimizely was able to provide a product vision roadmap that was built after listening to their customers’ and partners’ problems to best determine the future of Optimizely.

Optimizely was able to provide their product strategy for B2B, B2C, CMS, Experimentation, and overall DXP. For B2B, B2C, CMS, and Experimentation, the updates to Optimizely will drive the business forward. Having a new and improved DXP will bring all core capabilities into one overarching set.

The results are tools that are easy to use and make everyday common tasks simpler and fast. The new product roadmap will allow for the integration among various Optimizely products. Adage’s partnership with Optimizely allows our clients to focus on outcomes and remove assumptions; In turn, this converts more consumers, increases order value, and generates more leads.

Vision Demo

After identifying key problems that businesses were facing, Opticon21 provided attendees with a vision demo for four of the issues identified:

• Companies are not seizing value-based opportunities because of HIPPO (highest-paid-person’s opinion)
  • Use A/B testing to discover which options get best results via the actual consumer
• Marketing teams are limited in what they can do
  • Ability to use information across platform in order to guide, even the most experienced creator, with the most exceptional content
• Businesses need to go digital in a hurry
  • Promote with varying audiences in order to see what’s happening, and analyze products, order value, and relationship between cross- and up-sell
• Brands are losing money by launching capabilities without testing
  • Be able to experiment in order to ensure future roll-outs are more successful

What’s New?

Revolution Authoring is the ability to reimagine how customers create content. Within revolution authoring, there are two key breakdowns:

• Content Ideation: with advancements in content intelligence, Optimizely will be able to tell you what to create, what campaigns, and what experimentations to run next
• Vendor Managed Inventory: for sites with product, give clients the ability to manage how inventory is being shown to customers

Modernization is looking at the architecture and underlying components of a client’s digital presence. Optimizely is looking to ensure that clients can work on all modern devices and formats. They want clients to be able to cut through the noise with content filtering and intuitive UI that’s easier for developers.

Harnessing Data involves three key areas. These three areas are:

• CDP: cross-channel unified customer views and how they are interacting across multiple channels to make it easier for marketers to understand all data collected
• Real–time segmentation: the ability to see what customers are doing across platforms in real-time and act on them in real-time
• Product Information Management (PIM): allows smaller teams that don’t have a need for complex PIM’s to unify information

Integration combines all of the above needs into one big idea that Optimizely hopes to have across all clients. Integration is specific to two areas:

• Integration Platform: allows customers, solution providers, and other partners to make integrations among other product suites, so everything can be managed in one platform.
• Unified Identity: Optimizely is one brand, with one set of credentials, which allows for one dashboard with all product capabilities

Final Takeaways

Being able to attend Opticon21 led the Adage team to a better understanding and insight into the new Optimizely, ensuring we can help our clients get the most out of the platform.

Marketing and product teams will now be able to work on one platform to ensure information is being shared on how to overcome customer problems. Optimizely takes away assumptions of what consumers want and can push businesses to become more adaptive in their digital presence. The latest addition of Data Core Services adds to the solution set and begins a business’ journey towards adaptation.

Adage continues to partner with Optimizely to ensure our clients exceed expected outcomes by taking away the guessing when it comes to what customers are seeking online.