System Integration
Our Featured Insights:
HP TeamSite + Hybris
No one system can do everything your marketing plan requires. By unifying content and commerce systems, marketers can correct shortcomings in these systems and drastically improve customer experience. Discover how Nikon combined HP TeamSite with Hybris to get the most out of both platforms, improving organic search traffic, order size, and cart conversion rate in the process.
Integration Architecture
Integrating content, commerce and marketing systems improves customer experience, which moves key metrics like conversion rate, organic traffic, and cross-sells/up-sells in the right direction. The integration architecture—everything from simple sites with disparate user experience to integrated, seamless experiences leveraging microservices—must be considered. CMS, DAM, content marketing and eCommerce vendors may have pre-built frameworks that should be evaluated. The customer experience vision, prior investments in legacy systems, resources and skills, checkout/commerce nuances, performance concerns, budget, and time-to-market all shape the preferred integration architecture.
APIs, Data Stores & Microservices
There are several ways to pass data safely and effectively, from one system to another. Unfortunately, many systems are notoriously weak in this area. Most enterprise platforms include application programming interfaces (APIs) that offer a structured mechanism to pass data. Central data stores, including a new breed of document-oriented databases, can be used to pull data and content from separate systems. Web services like REST and SOAP offer structured communication protocols for integrating systems based on WWW standards. Microservices are alternative architectures with narrowly focused, loosely coupled and independently deployable services, allowing applications to be highly scalable, available and dynamic.
Content & Commerce Unification
Content is essential to creating modern shopping experiences, keeping customers connected to what they love about your brand. But as web experiences get larger and more complex, customers can lose site of the purchase journey. To keep customers completely immersed in your content, while never straying too far from the purchase journey, content must be systematically integrated with your ecommerce and marketing automation systems. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, integration of these systems drives sales increases and organizational changes to deal with cross-functional and cross-department realities of customer experience management.
CRM, ERP & SSO Integration
No personalized, modern-day marketing and commerce operation would be complete without integrating CRM and ERP systems. CRM systems provide customer data used for personalization. ERP systems provide product SKUs, inventory, and other core product data. Secure and authenticated delivery of this is best done through single sign on technology (SSO). SSO helps manage the identities of users, sometimes using social platforms for authentication, passing data to enable seamless, personalized, contextually relevant experiences.
Getting Started:
Proof of Concept
Selecting marketing technology can feel like a leap of faith, but it doesn’t have to be. After documenting requirements, scoring vendors, and selecting a product, consider implementing a Proof-of-Concept (POC). A POC provides hands-on experience to validate assumptions in the selection process and learn valuable lessons for planning your implementation. Kanban will work with you to build out a timeline and help you define the core concepts for your POC. Your organization receives validation of the product selection process, a new focus on priorities, and a realistic implementation timeline, reducing risk and shortening time-to-market as you go.
Further Insights:
Optimization of Product Filter for eCommerce
The 7 Principles of Unified Content and Commerce
