9 Reasons to Love Sitecore 9

What’s to Love About Sitecore 9?

Marketers and Business Leaders want to maximize every client interaction, with the goal of leading to more revenue and loyal customers. The IT team wants an easy to use CMS, with world class Commerce capabilities, that deploys on the Cloud for scalability, captures data efficiently – and has cutting edge machine learning capabilities… All in one digital solution. Easy, right? Sitecore 9 can check all these boxes – and more – giving you a long-term relationship with your customers.

9 Reasons to Fall in Love with Sitecore 9

Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter what shiny gizmos or gadgets we create for our customer if their information is not stored securely in our databases. With the looming 2018 GDPR regulations, Sitecore 9 addresses “the right to be forgotten” and other such important issues surrounding Personably Identifiable Information (PII). Additional GDPR security measures include support for encryption of data-at-rest and data-in-motion.

Sitecore Experience Cloud

When you’re dating someone, you really want to make a great impression. Whether you wax and buff your hot rod or go in search for the perfect dress to show off your features, the new Sitecore Experience Cloud is similar because it has all the bells and whistles to be attractive to marketers and developers alike. Sitecore Experience Cloud provides a wide range of content management, digital marketing, and commerce tools at your fingertips, giving you the ability to continually optimize experiences. With Sitecore Experience Cloud, Sitecore announced new methods for collecting customer data, using the power of machine learning to capture real-time insights.
Sitecore Cortex – The Mind in the Machine Inside Sitecore Experience Cloud

If only we could use Sitecore Cortex to help us learn about those we fall in love with so instead of guessing their thoughts, we would be given a blueprint on how to make them happy! Thankfully Sitecore Cortex can now take the guesswork out of marketing to customers. We want to know every customer touchpoint, what they are thinking, and how we can possibly get our customer to purchase our product – or ten! Sitecore Cortex, built inside the new Sitecore Experience Cloud, analyzes tons of data in real time, giving you access to customer touchpoints faster than ever before. Not only do you get real-time analytics, but Sitecore Cortex can profile your customers based on content consumption, build smart attribution models, to drive self-learning engagement scoring, and can provide intelligent recommendations with the ultimate goal of creating loyal, repeat customers. Sitecore Cortex can help you learn your customer’s journey in more detail than you ever thought possible.
Sitecore xConnect – Expanding data capture possibilities

When dating, have you ever gone to the same restaurant over and over because you just love it so much? Then you and your date try a new place that is simply so amazing that you wonder why you didn’t find it sooner? Sitecore’s xConnect is expanding your customer data touchpoints across a wide variety of both traditional and non-traditional sources. This opens personalization opportunities by collecting third party data-capture including from wearables and IoT devices, and anywhere along your customer’s omnichannel journey. Lastly, Sitecore xConnect embraces non .NET platforms such as Salesforce, and builds on their connectivity with Microsoft Dynamics CRM – allowing data from both Sitecore and the CRM to combine to form a personalized experience. What’s not to love?
Sitecore Forms - Goodbye Web Forms for Marketers

Many Marketers are positively giddy about this announcement! Sitecore listened to the grumbling about Web Forms for Marketers and created a custom, easy to use, drag and drop builder that supports multiple page forms across multiple device portals. Thank you Sitecore. You get me.
Headless Implementation – Freedom and Flexibility

Headless CMS is the big buzzword in software implementation right now. Ever had the need to access Sitecore data from an application other than your website, such as your mobile app? With Sitecore Headless, accessing the data becomes easy. Better yet? Sitecore offers both Headless and the traditional model giving you the freedom and flexibility to choose how to implement your content – an option that will have both your Marketing and IT team falling head over heels in love with Sitecore.
Email and Marketing Automation – The Way to a Marketer’s Heart

While the way to someone’s heart may be food, for most Marketers I know, Automation tops the list. Everyone is being asked to do more work with less staffing and burn the candle at every conceivable angle. So when a leading Customer Experience software like Sitecore can also offer up Email and Marketing Automation at scale, it’s time to pay attention. Sitecore’s new Marketing Automation tool goes beyond the traditional email campaigns to extend into the omnichannel, customer experience journey. With its new drag and drop interface, Marketers are sure to fall head over heels.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator – Getting You to Market Faster

Today everyone’s “love language” appears to be speed. How quickly can I get to market? How easily can I purchase a product on a website? The Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) comes with a default theme, Wireframe, which is specifically designed to help you set up your site quickly. The really nice benefit is your theme can be set up for you, while you can collaborate with your web design team through Creative Exchange. When completed, the new design can be imported back through Creative Exchange and the site can be re-skinned using the new theme. You can create a new theme by copying the base theme and adding your own specs including classes, styles, and assets. Sitecore gives you speed to market while enabling you to build out the bells and whistles you ultimately want. Who is in love now?
Federated Authentication Support

Sitecore has heard what our customers love – simple but secure logins to their favorite websites! Who has the time, patience or energy to memorize 101 logins and passwords? Thanks to Sitecore, this will hopefully soon be a thing of the past as Sitecore 9 supports a wide range of authentication, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Open ID Connect, or any SAML single sign on authentication provider. This will be open to both website visitors and Sitecore users alike, allowing all to use popular social sign-ons such as Google, Facebook, and more.
Security – the True Customer Love Language

As you can see, there is a lot to love about Sitecore 9. Which feature(s) resonate most with you? Drop us a line and let us know at info@xcentium.com.

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