Episerver and Optimizely
Uncover what the Episerver Optimizely hybrid means for brands and the future of Digital Experience Platforms
Is Episerver now Optimizely?
Yes, Episerver is Optimizely. The longstanding leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), completed its acquisition of Optimizely, the leader in experimentation and optimisation in 2021. This combination creates the most advanced DXP to optimise every customer touchpoint across the entire user journey. A highly powerful tool that can transform customer experience and businesses.
With the powerful combination of creation and optimisation, companies that adopt Optimizely benefit from experimentation on every customer touchpoint; from product development and content to digital experience and customer support.
Defining the Future of the DXP Market
Rooted in a proud heritage as a customer-centric digital experience platform (DXP) and Experimentation leader, the combined Episerver Optimizely brand reflects the endless innovation potential of digital experiences. It takes a data-driven, digital-first approach to drive forward the company’s mission: to empower people to unlock digital potential – unleashing them to create and optimize excellent experiences that result in outsized outcomes.
“For nearly three decades, Episerver has helped businesses create content-driven digital experiences for our customers. Digital experience is a journey without a finish line” said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely. “Ultimately, our customers want to innovate and use data to confidently create and optimise every customer experience based on actual outcomes. The Optimizely brand very much galvanises this vision and uniquely positions us to define the future of the DXP market.”
The acquisition and rebrand is regarded as the most significant transformation in Episerver’s history and is a milestone that sets a new industry standard for digital experience platforms. The powerful combination of Episerver and Optimizely transforms digital experience creation and optimisation for its customers, enabling digital teams to replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes.
How the Episerver Optimizely merger benefits businesses
Consumers expect the brands that they engage with to know them. 61% of people think brands should tailor experiences based on their preferences. Organisations cannot afford to overlook this demand and stand to reap the benefits of offering highly personalised and differentiated experiences for their audiences across multiple channels and devices. What digital teams need is the ability to understand how their actions are impacting their customers so they can act more intentionally.
Bringing together Episerver’s ability to create digital experiences through content and commerce with Optimizely’s ability to experiment and optimise across touchpoints empowers marketers to build experiences that get smarter over time. The combination creates a unique system of differentiation to:
- Inspire innovation: Running better experiments across both front-end layouts and back-end logic, with easy-to-use tailored recommendations, drives increased revenue, productivity and cost savings.
- Increase agility: Gaining real-time answers accelerates collaboration and creates more responsive customer experiences for improved lead generation and faster time to market.
- Improve outcomes: Measuring outcomes of different options allows digital teams to orchestrate unique digital experiences for each customer, at scale – driving transformation, customer engagement and brand differentiation.
Optimizely and Episerver coming together gives organisations access to one of the industry’s leading tools to optimise every customer touchpoint through the use of Optimizely A/B testing and experimentation features. Some of the key capabilities of the rebranded platform include:
Optimisation-as-a-Service
Supporting this vision through best-in-class technology, Optimizely offers Optimisation-as-a-Service. This feature combines targeting, testing and recommendations, bringing together the leading solutions from Optimizely Web and Episerver Content Recommendations.
Content-as-a-Service
Following the acquisition, Optimizely launched Content-as-as-Service, the first fully headless DXP with revolutionary authoring and editing capabilities. Bringing together robust capabilities for data, content, commerce and optimisation.
Organisations are empowered to unlock behaviour-based decision-making, ensuring confident creation and outsized outcomes. Through Optimizely’s even stronger combination of user and site level data, tied with multichannel experimentation insights, marketers, merchandisers and developers have access to the advanced analytics they need to understand what is happening in each experience as well as how to continually optimise it.
Why Optimizely was an attractive acquisition for Episerver
Optimizely is the leader of the fast-growing experimentation category, with 9,000 brands, over 900 partners and more than 10 years of innovation. Its proven at-scale platform has run over 2 million experiments to eliminate guesswork across the user journey and optimize the customer experience for some of the world’s most prominent brands like Peloton, Nike and Uber.
The combination of both technologies, really has created a powerhouse for ambitious organisations that have a customer-centric mindset and are keen to innovate through digital acceleration.
Ultimedia was the first UK Episerver Partner and now an Optimizely specialist. We have been helping enterprise-level organisations elevate their digital strategy through smart solutions for over 20 years. To learn more about Optimizely and how it can benefit your organisation, contact us today – we’d love to help.
