October 5, 2009, ebizQ
eBiz
Author: Elaine Chen

The web is a primary channel for driving sales and customer loyalty. Accordingly, organizations have realized that to be effective in marketing, service, internal and external communications and more, they need to deliver highly relevant content and a rich and interactive customer experience online.

However, delivering a positive and engaging web experience has become more and more challenging, as consumers increasingly demand current, personalized content as well as the ability to participate in rich online communities. Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions therefore emerged to address these new needs.

Let's discover the tools and capabilities a full-featured WEM solution can bring to enterprises seeking a new level of control and flexibility in managing their web presence.

What's in WEM

WEM capabilities build on web content management (WCM) tools used to easily manage, edit and publish web content, allowing organizations to efficiently keep sites current and compelling. WEM goes beyond these capabilities by providing the ability to manage the entire experience visitors have online, by enabling the delivery of targeted content and campaigns and providing advanced social computing tools so visitors can also participate in online communities and interact with other visitors, customers, the organization itself, and more.

Specifically, by implementing a WEM solution, enterprises can gain the tools they need to:

Conceptualize: Close teamwork is essential to creating compelling site content; however, collaborating across a large enterprise with disparate systems and content repositories can prove challenging. With the right WEM implementation, organizations can bring together content and team members from across the company and from across the globe, with easy-to-use tools such as wikis and blogs, and content integration capabilities for managing digital assets and making them accessible.

Author: Robust WCM tools are critical for enabling organizations to effectively and efficiently manage their content and campaigns online. These tools should include tailored user interfaces that put marketers and business users in charge of website content, while giving IT staff the flexible capabilities they need to do their jobs effectively. Friendly user interfaces let non-technical staff easily edit site content, in-context of the actual website layout.

Design: Business users should be able to design pages with simple, visual, drag-and-drop capabilities. Meanwhile, power users should also be able to quickly build website templates and replicate sites for other products or regions. Providing non-technical users with the ability to easily plan sophisticated marketing campaigns is also important, including the ability to create time-based campaigns by allowing marketers to design and compare future versions of the website.

Publish: Organizations must also be able to manage content publication via a reliable and transparent system. For example, self-monitoring capabilities and user-friendly dashboards can give site administrators full visibility into the publishing process and its status, providing maximum protection against errors. Robust workflow is also essential to ensure that content goes through the appropriate steps and gets designated approvals prior to publication.

Target: Customizing content for specific audience segments is essential to engaging, converting and retaining today's online visitors. Business users should be able to create user segments that are identified either explicitly (via login or self-identification) or implicitly (via the user's online behavior and navigation). Simple user interfaces should then allow them to quickly set up rules to define what recommendations or promotions will be delivered to each customer segment online.

Deliver: Providing an engaging web experience requires rapid and seamless delivery of content to site visitors when they want it. WEM solutions must therefore be able to speed dynamic delivery of personalized and multilingual content across even the largest and most disperse web presence. As the web is increasingly becoming integrated with other delivery channels, solutions should also make web content easily accessible on mobile devices and for leveraging in other formats such as print.

Analyze: Feedback is essential to optimizing any online campaign or communication. However, for sites with dynamic or targeted content, reporting on site usage at the page level is not enough. Instead, users require tracking and reporting on individual assets, promotions, and visitor segments in order to determine whether target audiences are responding to specific in_the_news or promotions, so content and campaigns can be optimized for success.

Participate: Site visitors today expect to be able to actively participate in a dialogue online with the organization itself, like minded customers, and more. Visitors must be able to share their perspectives and interact through social computing tools such as wikis, blogs, commenting, polls, social tagging, and more.

While delivering these mechanisms for transparency and open dialog, enterprises must also maintain security and ensure business policy compliance. Thus organizations require the ability to moderate user-generated content, integrate community features with enterprise user management systems, apply business workflows to content, and integrate user-generated content tools with web content management systems for seamless use of collaborative or user-generated content online.

The WEM advantage

With such comprehensive capabilities for managing site visitors' entire experience online, WEM can help organizations drive revenue and customer satisfaction as well as operational cost efficiencies. For example, by providing visitors with content and products tailored to their needs, companies can increase the amount of time and money visitors spend on their sites. Meanwhile, enabling content contributors to quickly create and edit content items can create significant savings, and allow IT resources to be redeployed to more strategic tasks.

Because of these strengths, WEM solutions are becoming the essential toolkit for all enterprises today. As an industry-leading WEM provider, FatWire has found that implementing WEM has helped customers from all industries to use the web to its fullest potential as a channel for customer and prospect communications, driving sales, customer loyalty, and business success.

About the Author

Elaine Chen is the Director of Marketing at FatWire Software, the largest independent provider of Web Experience Management solutions. She has over 10 years of experience as a technology marketer and writer.

About FatWire

FatWire Software (www.fatwire.com) provides Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions that enable organisations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence. FatWire is headquartered in Mineola, N.Y. and serves over 500 customers from offices in 10 countries.