Sitecore 10.2’s 8 Benefits for the Business User
With Sitecore’s newest version comes improvements that contain state-of-the-art CMS and marketing functionalities to give users total control over the customer experiences they’re providing across each of their channels.
Sitecore 10.2 boasts “enhanced performance and stability, reduced TCO, improved user experience for headless sites, and a highly scalable headless solution modernized for cloud optimization.”
Within this update, there are eight key improvements for the business user.
Using Sitecore for Personalization
Marketing teams can create and deploy their goals, profiles and personas, campaigns, and taxonomy in one location.
This makes delivering personalized experiences across channels so much easier and shifts the focus back to delivering a quality, connected customer experience instead of searching for all of the different elements needed to properly launch and measure a campaign.
Analyze and Report with Sitecore
Sitecore Experience Analytics provides dashboards and reports for marketing teams to pinpoint patterns and trends in the data collected from their websites (and potentially other external data sources). This includes the Personalized Experience Dialog Box, which allows the user to view the effect of personalization on individual goals conversion.
You’ll also have a variety of methods to test your content – everything from pages and copy to components and personalization. You can see results for individual tests in the Experience Editor and use reports and dashboards in Experience Optimization to analyze optimization data.
List reports in Experience Optimization are now easily sorted by clicking on a column header and these reports can also be exported to CSV with Sitecore 10.2.
How many marketers out there would love to see the quantifiable effect of personalization? It is now possible to see this on the conversions for specific goals.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
Want to create websites with Sitecore at rapid speed?
Using Sitecore Experience Accelerator, you can add content to your pages by adding and editing components. You’ll also be able to select, modify, and create a data source and share content or change the layout of a page or component.
As we’ve said before, digital accessibility is key. 10.2 now offers an impactful change to the Experience Accelerator with the ability to add closed captions for YouTube videos.
Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager
With Sitecore Email Experience Manager (EXM), use everything you know about your audience to personalize each aspect of your email to ensure you’re sending just the right email message at just the right time to keep your cross-channel conversations moving forward.
With Sitecore 10.2 the EXM is even more configurable to make sure your campaigns and lists are showing you exactly what you need to see.
Sitecore Experience Commerce
Blend your content and commerce to create a more targeted, relevant, and personalized end-to-end shopping experience for your customers.
Create personalization rules to better deliver targeted content to your audience because, as we know, 61% of customers want to get personalized exclusive offers from their favorite brands.
Sitecore Horizon
Horizon is a next-generation Sitecore XP editor made up of two editing tools to create, edit, and publish designs and content.
Pages combine editing and design capabilities to allow you to view the page as it will appear on your website when published.
Content is an editing tool that lets you work with content independent of presentation.
With the new Content Explorer, you can now find content items using the Content Explorer instead of the content tree. With Content Explorer, you can organize items in a table view using keyword search and filters, instead of the fixed hierarchy of the content tree.
You’ll also be able to use analytics data to improve both your content and design, giving better visualization and more actionable reporting for stakeholders.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront is a storefront solution for rapidly creating B2C eCommerce solutions by building and altering storefronts using commerce-specific features.
As a business user, you’ll be able to create, upload, and maintain the content, layout, and design of your storefront specific to what is visually appealing to each of your target audiences.
Sitecore 10.2 boosts improvements to performance, cache management, and deployment for the SXA Storefront and Experience Commerce platforms.
Sitecore Headless Services
With an upgrade to Sitecore 10.2 comes a vast improvement to the headless services provided by Sitecore JSS solutions. It is now easier to convert an existing Sitecore application over to a headless solution using JSS framework to incrementally convert the website. By allowing an incremental conversion to headless without a full rebuild, 10.2 offers a bridge to Sitecore’s composable digital experience platform.
This upgrade also makes Sitecore JSS using Next.js compatible with the powerful Horizon editor, so making content changes to headless solutions is even simpler.
Is Sitecore 10.2 worth the upgrade?
From what it seems, Sitecore 10.2 adds a bunch of little improvements that, cumulatively, add a lot of power. By upgrading the Headless Services, it slingshots Sitecore into the future and allows old sites created with an MVC architecture to be quickly converted to a new and improved site that uses newer technologies such as React/Vue/Angular or even Next.js
Similarly, the small changes throughout the system allow marketers and business analysts to do the same things they’ve been doing but better. Making their lives easier and allowing the system to do the work. Simple things like sorting data and exporting to CSV not only make it more user-friendly but also allows quick integration into third-party reporting tools that ingest CSV, etc.
So should you upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore? Yes, you should 🙂
The new features are a big evolution of the product, allowing you to develop faster and offer much greater functionality in terms of digital marketing and e-commerce.
If you’re looking to upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore reach out to our Sitecore consultants to discuss your needs.