Exploring Kentico Marketing Features

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Rob Warburton
December 16, 2019 4 min read
Exploring Kentico Marketing Features

If you’re looking to implement a new content management system, it’s likely that you will have stumbled across Kentico Xperience as a possible solution. As Kentico Gold Partners, the team here at GRM Digital are clearly advocates of the platform, however, it’s not just it’s powerful content management capabilities that we recommend to our clients. Kentico Xperience 13 houses one of the most powerful, cross-channel marketing platforms, all seamlessly tied into the CMS backend. (or should we call it a DXP now?!)

Throughout this blog, we’ll dive deeper into each of the marketing features found in Kentico Xperience 13 and how these can assist your marketing efforts.

Update: Kentico released their most up-to-date digital experience platform in November 2020. Find out more about what's new in Kentico Xperience 13.


Kentico Email Marketing

Email marketing is nothing new, however its role as a digital channel remains pivotal, with more than 59% of marketers claiming that email is their biggest source of ROI. Email marketing isn’t going away any time soon, and as such, Kentico have invested heavily in building an email marketing platform to rival anything else out there. With direct integration with your CMS, email marketing in Kentico allows for more personalised, targeted campaigns designed to engage your prospects. If your business creates large amounts of content relevant to varying audiences, you’ll benefit from the dynamic content feature which allows you to show relevant content based on personas which you can predefine. (We’ll discuss that in more depth later). Clients of GRM have reported significant reductions in resource time when using dynamic content for their email newsletter strategies.
 

Kentico Marketing Automation

In recent years there has been a significant shift towards personalisation and intelligently ‘nurturing’ customers through the sales cycle. All of this is facilitated by marketing automation platforms which allow marketers to deliver the right content, at the right time and in a personalised way. Kentico Xperience 13's marketing automation platform does this job very well, utilising intelligent data that’s stored right in the heart of your CMS. If upgrading to Kentico 13 proves to be your first time delving into the world of marketing automation, you’ll be pleased to hear that Kentico has designed the platform to be as simple as possible. They claim that even non tech-savvy marketers will be able to deliver successful automation campaigns. The platform uses a simple drag-and-drop interface which pulls in intelligent data triggers which can be used to kickstart your campaign. They've even included automation templates, which allows you to work from a pre-defined workflow, saving you heaps of time setting up all of the various stages.

Below are a few examples of some simple automation campaigns that you could run in Kentico:

Cart Abandonment Emails – Set an automation to send a follow up email to a user if they leave their cart without checking out.

Content Download Follow Ups – Send a string of follow up emails to prospects who have engaged with your brand by downloading a piece of gated content such as a webinar or eBook.

Encouraging Contact – Trigger Kentico to send a user an email if they have visited a ‘high-value’ landing page but didn’t complete the form.  

Kentico's marketing automation platform has had a facelift in version 13.


A/B Testing Tool

Kentico 13 includes an out-of-the-box A/B testing module which allows you to test an unlimited number of page variants in order to increase your website’s conversion rate. What’s particularly useful about this A/B testing module is that you can define specific audiences for which to run your test (something which isn’t available on even some of the more advanced third-party tools). This means that you’re able to provide super personalised messages to a particular audience and get the right test results quicker than you would by using a blanket approach. The system requires no additional spend on external applications, so you can continue to test, manage and analyse each and every single page of your website to make sure it’s performing at the highest level. Some of the more data-driven marketers out there will enjoy being able to access real-time reports that show how A/B testing campaigns are progressing.


Content Personalisation

Website personalisation is becoming a fundamental tool for marketers as we continue to acquire more advanced data about our prospects. Kentico plans to make full use of this data, with a content personalisation tool aimed at displaying the right content, to the right person, at the right time. The platform does this by analysing an individual’s browsing history and segments them by factors such as:

Demographics – address, age, job title, gender, etc.

Behaviour – visited pages, downloaded content, purchased products, campaign clicks, searched keywords, etc.

Customer context – purchase stage, location, time of the day, used browser or device, etc.

 
Predefining personas based on the above data will allow you to display the right content to the right audience, for example:

  • You can display laptop options on the homepage of your E-commerce store only to people who have previously looked at laptops
  • You can display a relevant case study for ‘Medical Clients’ to anyone who converted on a page that is about web design services for medical clients.
  • The main headline on the homepage of your website can change depending on a user’s ‘industry' e.g. Web Design Services for Healthcare, Web Design Services for Engineering, Web Design Services for Education.


Qualifying Leads

Kentico includes a scoring module which allows leads to be attributed ‘points’ based on their interactions with your website.

Marketers are able to easily set score thresholds to record how hot a lead is before triggering an email to the sales team. In a nutshell this means that you can pre-qualify leads and make sure that your sales team are only contacting the leads most likely to convert. Points can also be deducted based on a period of disengagement or you can deduct points based on any negativity towards your brand, such as when a lead unsubscribes from your newsletter.

Leads in Kentico Xperience 13 can be scored based on two types of rules:

  • Demographics - identify the fit of the leads for your company based on their profile values, such as location, title, or completeness of data
  • Behavioural – identify the level of the leads’ engagement with your company based on their activities, such as visited pages, downloaded documents, or submitted forms

 
Some examples of scoring criteria:

  • Downloaded eBook ‘Kentico 13 Features’: +50
  • Completed Webinar Form ‘Guide to Kentico Pricing’ :+ 50
  • Visited Webpage ‘Purchase Kentico Licence’: + 75

 

Using Data at the Heart of Your CMS

Despite not being a feature as such, perhaps one of the most beneficial parts of using Kentico for digital marketing is that you’re basing your communications on solid, real-time data; the data which is right at the heart of your content management system. With Kentico 13, gone are the days of having to manipulate multiple platforms to ‘talk to each other’, and you may just save resources by rolling all of your marketing software requirements into one system. If it’s a fully integrated communications and web content management platform that you’re looking for, you may benefit from Kentico Xperience 13 as the 360-degree online marketing platform.

To find out more about Kentico features and whether it’s the right fit for your next CMS upgrade, please call our web development experts on +44 (0)203 397 4155 or email [email protected]

Find out how we became Kentico Xperience Quality Experts.