Future-proof your customer journey with Enonic

Strong customer journeys can attract new customers and delight existing customers. Making sure that your digital platform—your content management system—lets you create the best possible customer journeys is a given, but you should also make sure that this platform is future-proof.

Rather than being a buzzword, “future-proof” denotes the following for any digital platform: That it is ready for the fragmentary state of today’s and tomorrow’s digital channels (i.e. that it offers headless capabilities), that it has a flexible core able to create lightweight and custom solutions fast, and that it is easy to integrate with best-of-breed solutions.

With this in mind, let us take a look at how you can future-proof your customer journey with Enonic.

The customer journey

Firstly, how can you build your digital customer journey with Enonic? The Enonic platform allows your developers to build websites, applications, and APIs to fulfill any requirement. But, a central part of Enonic’s philosophy is to offer a lightweight core, while being ready to integrate with the best-of-breed products and services in the industry—whether it is tools for website health, marketing automation, SEO, or analytics.

Now, let us walk methodically through each significant step of an imaginary and essentialized customer journey, to illustrate what possibilities Enonic is offering:

• Search
  Enonic’s CMS interface, Content Studio, is tailored to offer basic SEO out of the box, which can then be further augmented by apps from Enonic Market or custom solutions.
• Online ads
  Paid advertisements are usually handled through a specialized, third-party service (like Google Ads), but it is possible to build your own ads solution (but why try to reinvent the wheel?).
• Social media
  Social macros enable embedding of social media on your Enonic site, while sharing can be handled by third-party integrations.
• Blog
  Can be made as a custom content type in Content Studio, with an infinite set of possibilities to functionality and presentation.
• Call to action
  While it is possible to build your own CTAs in Enonic through content types, macros, and analytics tracking, we recommend using a third-party marketing automation platform combined with whatever custom solutions you need to keep your digital experiences from being slowed down.
• Landing page
  Content Studio offers a powerful, visual landing page editor where you can create tailored sites and pages, and utilize structured content for all it’s worth.
• Form
  As with CTAs, it is possible to make forms entirely in Enonic, only use a third-party solution, or do a combination.
• eCommerce
  While it is entirely possible to build your own eCommerce solution in Enonic, and while Enonic Market offers a simple payment app, an integration with the best-of-breed eCommerce platforms in the industry is advisable also here—at least to get started.
• Chat
  The Enonic Market features a few chat apps to be included on your site, and it is also possible to integrate with your favorite solutions via APIs.
• App
  Enonic is a platform to build, not only websites, but applications too. However, not only native applications, Enonic is also a forerunner in the progressive web apps industry—modern websites that act and function like native apps.
• Website
  The Enonic platform offers powerful tools to build websites, with the user-friendly CMS interface Content Studio, flexible content types, templating, access and identity management, collaboration tools, and much more.
• Online community
  Again you can both build your own intranets, forums, or other custom solutions—or integrate with your favourite community platforms, like Slack or Disqus.
• Email & newsletter
  Naturally, while it is possible to build your own marketing automation platform with Enonic, we don’t recommend it in order to save you time and energy—and instead integrate the Enonic platform with automation actors like HubSpot, MailChimp, and so on.
• Survey
  As always, use the flexible Enonic platform together with the solution of your choice to create surveys where you can identify customer pain points and thus get actionable insights.
• Self-service
  Creating custom services for your websites and apps forms a large part of the Enonic universe. Work together with your developers to build the best possible self-services for your customers, thus ensuring both conversions and satisfaction.

See also: How Enonic can be the hub of your digital experiences »

The future-proofing

Now that we have had a speedy run through how Enonic can help you build or elevate every step or touchpoint in your digital customer journey, it’s time to see what measures Enonic has taken to stay ahead also in the future.

• Headless API and content first
  Enonic can be used as a headless CMS, which means that content is strictly separated from presentation, to deliver content to any part of your customer journey—today and tomorrow—on desktop, mobile phones, wearables, IoTs, in-store terminals, outdoor digital billboards, and so on. This is the surest way to future-proof, not only your customer journey, but your entire digital platform.
• Progressive web apps
  We have mentioned this already, but it cannot be understated: PWAs are an amazing technology for both the present and the future. PWAs make websites faster and more app-like in service and appearance, while at the same time avoiding some native app woes, like app store presence, update nagging, and demanding performance. Enonic, of course, is a platform to develop progressive web apps.
• Integrations: SEO, analytics, CDP
  We might have mentioned this principle a couple of times in this article, but it is tremendously important: Enonic strives to deliver a lightweight, but flexible and powerful core, onto which you can couple your favourite tools and services by integrations. To stay ahead of the competition, you will need to focus on SEO and analytics for the foreseeable future, but also pay attention to the introduction of the customer data platform in the privacy realm as an easy and responsible way to handle personal data from your visitors.
• Flexibility: Personalization, machine learning
  The core of Enonic is not only suitable for integrations with third-party solutions, it is also a platform in its own right, with the potential to build any service you would like. In time, it’s possible to envision the Enonic platform used to build or improve upon services within personalization and machine learning. And, being open source, there’s no limit to what one can achieve with Enonic and other projects of similar licensing.

With an emphasis on headless CMS, integrations, and a powerful core to build digital experiences, Enonic is especially suited to build your digital customer journey—both today and tomorrow.