How to Choose the Best Web Content Management System - Part 1

Choosing a Web CMS is about more than Content Management

To achieve these business outcomes, companies are embracing the discipline of customer experience management and investing in the technology that enables it. A customer experience management platform lets you drive consistency in the experiences that your customers have with your brand. And that’s where a web content management system company comes in. A web CMS helps you achieve that consistency and deliver great web experiences. The rest of the customer experience management solution helps you deliver that content and consistency in other channels such as email and social.

Because your web CMS must interoperate seamlessly with the components of customer experience management, the CMS decision shouldn’t be made in a vacuum. This paper highlights the criteria – both from the marketers’ and the IT/developers’ perspective – that today’s organizations should consider when selecting a new web CMS as part of a broader customer experience management strategy.

The New Requirements for Today’s Web CMS 

One of the hallmarks of customer experience management is delivering a consistent experience across all touch points. That’s difficult to achieve if your content management capabilities are isolated in a siloes system. Instead, your web CMS needs to integrate and interoperate as part of a centralized platform for customer experience management.

A customer experience management platform unifies channels, campaigns, visitor information, and performance measurement into one integrated marketing toolset. The web content management system company serves as the core of the platform, enabling you to create, manage, and deliver the most relevant content for each interaction based on centralized customer intelligence. And because of this prominent role in delivering and managing an excellent multichannel customer experience, your web CMS must be much more robust, scalable, and flexible than ever before.

It’s also important to ensure your web CMS can seamlessly integrate with core systems such as your customer relationship management (CRM) software, ad-serving software, video streaming application, and any other system that would benefit from sharing customer data across the enterprise. Centralizing and sharing customer data enables sophisticated personalization and targeting to deliver a more tailored, relevant experience, which improves customer engagement.

Now that we’ve set the context for the importance of the web CMS for customer experience management, let’s take a closer look at the requirements you’ll want to consider when choosing the best web CMS for your organization.

From the Marketer’s Perspective:  Important Capabilities for Your Web CMS

Today’s marketers require a web CMS which offers far more than simply managing content. Ensuring an excellent customer experience calls for a set of capabilities that range from enabling you to deliver powerful interactive features to engage customers on your website, to collecting and utilizing customer behaviour for personalized interactions, to displaying content optimized for mobile devices.

The following criteria take these and other requirements into consideration and can be used as a starting point for the marketing team’s evaluation of a potential new web CMS:  

• Easy-to-use interface: This remains a must-have for any web content management system companies in India. An intuitive, easy-to-use interface enables both marketers and content editors to add and edit online content quickly without having to know HTML. Casual users should be able to complete routine workflow tasks quickly and easily, while power users can utilize a more robust interface and set of functionality.
• Single view of the customer: Look for a web CMS that collects and utilizes visitor information to personalize the experience. The web CMS should capture information and insights about customers and prospects and combine this information with customer intelligence from other systems such as your customer relationship management (CRM) system for a single, comprehensive view of the customer.  
• Email and automation: The web CMS should integrate email campaign management, testing, and optimization to maximize campaign and site performance, drive higher conversion rates, and improve marketing return on investment. Look for marketing automation capabilities that help you eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline your marketing efforts around everything from email campaigns to landing pages, lead scoring, segmentation and profiling, and testing and optimization.  
• Real-time personalization and targeting: With a single view of the customer, your web CMS should be able to automatically sense and adapt to customer behaviour to offer the most relevant content and interactions.  Look for features such as native content profiling to help capture insight into customer needs and interests. 
• Search engine optimization (SEO): The web CMS should integrate SEO with the publishing process so that keyword-rich content and metadata, search-friendly URLs, and other SEO tactics are consistently and automatically implemented.
• Multilingual support and translation: If your organization has or will have international sites, multilingual and translation support should be on your requirements list. The web CMS should natively support content and websites in multiple languages as well as provide content editing tools that “speak” the major global languages your local, in-country marketing teams use. Also look for a web CMS that easily integrates with professional translation services to streamline the process of translating and publishing multilingual content.  
• Social media support: Any web content management system you choose should include a strong social media component, enabling you to easily create branded communities as well as deliver a seamless experience with third-party social networks. The right CMS should make it easy to establish—and maintain—a dialogue with your customers through blogs, forums, polls, and integration with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. 
• Mobile device support: Your web CMS should serve up a consistent, compelling experience on virtually any device. Look for a solution that automatically detects the visitor’s device type and optimizes the content for the specific device without having to re-render the site for each variation.
• Multichannel support: Insist on a web CMS that delivers multichannel support and integration including web, mobile, email, and social. The right CMS should enable you to view all your channels as a single experience and a seamless conversation with the customer, letting you orchestrate, monitor, and measure customer interactions across channels. 
• Flexibility to connect with other business applications: Insist on the ability to easily integrate any and all of your line-of-business applications such as customer databases and CRM and ERP systems. Look for prebuilt integration with leading enterprise software packages. You should also look for the ability to connect to databases and web services without complex programming. 
• Adaptive to future experience and site design improvements: Pick a web CMS that allows you to change design and experience elements without IT effort. You’ll want to be able to update page layouts, add pages, and alter designs all without coding.