What is a composable DXP?

Customer experience impacts how your customers feel about you more than ever before.

It has become more than just the touch points when buying a product or service, with a 2020 study revealing that 74% of consumers are likely to buy based on experience alone. It now includes their entire research process well before they even make a purchase.

The challenge? Marketing and IT teams work with outdated, inflexible tech stacks. Tools you use to deliver customer experiences are often bulky, slow, and disconnected.

One report revealed it takes an average of 11 months to implement a digital experience system. Chances are your competitors are moving faster than that, and your (potential) customers have raised their expectations accordingly. You need a way to run your customer experience efforts from a single place and keep it scalable and flexible.

In this guide, we dive into a composable digital experience platform, its benefits, and your roadmap to implementing it in your business for maximum results.

A digital experience platform, or DXP for short, is a platform that allows companies to optimize the digital customer journey and experience. It creates the foundation to manage all content and campaigns in a central hub.

Nowadays, almost every aspect of a company is digitized to some extent. Unlike content management systems, whose sole purpose is to create and manage content, a DXP is the platform that enables you to tap into all digital aspects of your business and use them to create a compelling journey from discovery to post-sales.

Monolithic DXPs, also called suites, can be a good start, but come with the limitation of lock-in by a single vendor or technology. They can be quite complex and require you to hire team members with specific skill sets to build the experiences you want and often come with a higher total cost of ownership.

A composable digital experience platform removes this challenge and takes this centralized approach to the next level.

A composable DXP works as the backbone to your digital content. You can tailor it around your existing processes and infrastructures. APIs and DXP integrations become your building blocks so you can deliver digital experience as quickly as your audience needs them.

Composability in DXP means you can bring your entire marketing stack together, including content management, marketing automation, ecommerce, personalization, and analytics. Rather than having to think of all of these tools as separate entities, they can be viewed as a group of DXP partners. This single access point makes it easy to connect with your customers in a smarter way.

Let’s dive deeper into why you’ll benefit from a composable DXP.

The market evolves all the time—and with it the expectations of consumers.

Suite solutions for managing your digital presence usually come with vendor lock-in. When you need a feature your vendor doesn’t provide, you don’t have a way to change that quickly. Let’s say, you want to add Apple Pay to your ecommerce checkout flow, but because you can’t switch to a vendor that offers it, you simply don’t introduce Apple Pay.

If your customers need it, the risk of losing them grows, whether first-time, potential or returning customers.

A composable DXP removes this issue completely. The platform becomes your control center for all customer touch points and lets you integrate technologies to provide the ultimate customer experience, whether that technology is a new payment method or the latest iteration of software driven by artificial intelligence.

The above example is exactly what happened to Dippin’ Dots. Their ecommerce tool struggled to keep up with payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the checkout process was inefficient. Magnolia’s composable DXP allowed them to integrate a more powerful ecommerce solution into a marketer-friendly content and digital asset system.

Composable DXPs allow you to put your customer first.

Instead of forcing them into a predefined customer journey, you can rely on composable DXP as a central platform for all customer behavior and adapt your assets and strategies based on what you learn.

Here are two key ways you can do this:

Vendor lock-in has another downside: you’re forced to tailor your entire marketing strategy to it. You have to outline your limits based on the CMS or DXP solution you use and navigate inside of it.

This hinders your creativity and your growth. A composable DXP allows you to plan and launch any campaign you can dream of, run experiments, and adjust as you see what works and what doesn’t. Thus, you can build your technology stack as you see fit.

Take Essentra, a manufacturing company that wanted to keep using their ecommerce and inventory system, but needed a more flexible CMS to give more power to marketers and reduce load on the IT team.

They were able to do so with Magnolia, while also adding other systems like a plug-and-play digital asset management solution. Without the limitations of a legacy system, they’ve launched local websites in five countries and plan to expand to 20+ more markets.

Marketers rely on IT teams to turn their ideas and plans into tangible campaigns and results. The problem with that is that it doesn’t allow the marketing team to move fast enough.

On top of that, slow implementation means slow results and feedback, so you can’t optimize your campaigns frequently. By the time you do, your competitors might be too far ahead.

A composable DXP allows marketers to build web experiences, reuse content, personalize it at scale, test multiple variants, and get detailed insights without learning new processes or being slowed down.

Taking a composable approach when it comes to choosing your DXP allows you to select the business capabilities that matter most to your brand. If you need customer data platforms, artificial intelligence tools, marketing automation, ecommerce functionality or something else. All of these features can be leveraged to help you meet customer expectations and enhance the user experience with personalized content.

This provides you with an improved ROI much faster than other tools as you aren’t left with an unused suite of tools in your technology stack.

Choosing a composable DXP is a decision that will support your marketing for many years to come. It’s essential to choose the best solution for your business now, rather than having to choose again down the road.

Use these prompts to solidify your composable DXP requirements.

Instead of only working with a revenue or sales goal, break your business goals into more specific areas you want to excel at.

These business goal categories can focus on:

What do your customers need in order to help you hit those business goals? Where do they spend their time and what do they expect from their online experiences? Take the time to research your target market and survey your existing audience to learn how they make decisions.

Of course, don’t forget your existing processes and data. How many websites do you manage? How many newsletter subscribers? How much traffic and online spend do you handle? How many transactions?

Your composable DXP needs to work around those existing processes and help you unlock new growth opportunities based on what you’ve learned from your audience.

Finally, answer these questions:

Use this list when narrowing down your composable DXP options and make sure you only keep those that will allow you to extend your composable DXP through integrations with these tools.

Next up is your composable DXP roadmap: choosing a solution and implementing it in your business.

Start by making a list of options that match your composable DXP requirements. Start with:

Be sure to involve your marketing and IT teams, especially the team members that will use the DXP on a daily basis. These teams likely have decades of combined unique experience, so make sure you put it to use.

Book calls with the sales team of each of the composable DXP options on your list. Get your marketing team to recommend questions relevant to their role and use these questions as you progress through the demo.

This will help you get not only the overview of the product, but also the specific way you can apply it to your setup and processes.

Don’t stop at asking hypothetical questions on your product demo. Go the extra step and look for—and ask for—case studies and past customers with similar requirements to yours.

This can include number of employees, target market, team size, product type, marketing campaign types, and much more.

This will show you how they solved a pain point similar to yours and how a specific composable DXP provider might work for you.

By this point, you likely have a frontrunner. Use the information you collected about it to map out a timeline of its implementation.

Think about:

Be aware of which functionalities are the highest priority and which ones can wait. Map out the required input from different team members in this process so that they can plan accordingly, too.

Talk to your vendor about pricing and licencing options, a trial period, and discounts (especially if you’re buying a significant number of licences).

As you close this deal, get your composable DXP provider to provide details around onboarding and implementation so you can start following your implementation timeline from the previous step.

Now you know. To create exceptional customer experiences online, you don’t need a one-size-fits-all solution. You need a flexible, customizable, easy-to-use and integrate composable DXP solution.

Magnolia lets you manage your content in one central hub, deliver personalized experiences efficiently, and optimize your shopping experiences.

Use APIs and connector packs to extend Magnolia into your other core digital systems. Instead of getting stuck with legacy systems, you’ll have access to the most powerful tech stack at your fingertips.

If you want to see a composable DXP in action, book a live demo with Magnolia. You’ll be glad you did.