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Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Episerver Acquires Optimizely – Taking the Guesswork Out of Creating Personalized, Relevant Customer Experiences

Co-authored by Kathleen Lukasik and Ed Flynn

Doing business online is becoming the norm for most consumers. To meet customer expectations, companies need to create online experiences that are highly personalized across multiple touchpoints. To create these experiences, digital teams need to understand and learn from customer responses to their actions so they can deliver data driven personalized experiences. The ability to experiment and learn is a key component to creating unique customer experiences at scale.

Thought: Episerver Acquires Optimizely – Taking the Guesswork Out of Creating Personalized, Relevant Customer Experiences
Episerver Acquires Optimizely – Taking the Guesswork Out of Creating Personalized, Relevant Customer ExperiencesGroup Director – Analytics and Insights — Kathleen Lukasik
Thought: Episerver Acquires Optimizely – Taking the Guesswork Out of Creating Personalized, Relevant Customer Experiences

We are very excited by the move Episerver has made to pull Optimizely into its organization and product offering. Rightpoint is an Episerver Premier Platinum partner and knows the platform extremely well. Our research and insights driven approach to designing and developing innovative digital solutions for our clients speaks to the heart of the experimentation culture that Optimizely has been cultivating for years. Ultimately, this merger is going to allow for more efficient data collection that will power robust personalization and experience optimization opportunities for our clients. 

Optimizely brings a great feature set to the Episerver platform for deploying rapid experimenting and testing to narrow in on the trigger points that are rapidly evolving in today’s consumers. Our design group, whether it’s research, analytics, interaction design or content believes in defensible design through data, and this merger will allow us to apply that data in a more streamlined fashion directly into the Episerver powered digital experience platforms we build for our clients. Rightpoint constructs and implements experimentation strategies for clients to create frictionless experience for their customers. The use of Optimizely as part of Episerver’s organization will allow us to more accurately and effectively implement testing strategies within our experience optimization support for clients. 

When we look at the market shifts and changes in user behaviors that COVID-19 has caused, we can see dramatic shifts in how people are thinking about and adjusting their online purchase behaviors. Our approach to understanding human behavior lives at the center of qualitative and quantitative insights from research and analytics. Identifying how user behaviors are changing at a macro level, coupled with applying insights into testing at a micro-level, provides a strong understanding of how to identify customer needs and wants. This merger will allow us to lock into those shifts rapidly through integrated experimentation, advanced personalization and ultimately better recommendations all along the purchase cycle. 

We often help our clients build design systems through Episerver’s component-based architecture, and the addition of Optimizely will hopefully allow us to bring experimentation directly to the component layer and allow for more advanced personalization as the data sets grow and the system learns to adapt to user’s needs. We are also excited as to what this could mean for more real-time analysis of customer journeys. Optimizely brings a great new set of analytics capabilities into the Episerver platform which could allow for more focused metrics to be applied to living journey maps rather than static ones that often get forgotten about after a specific project is completed. In a world where competing for attention can change in an instant, continually learning from your customer’s experience allows you to stay ahead of the curve. We are excited to couple our evidence-based approach to design and technical expertise with Episerver and Optimizely.