Uniform blog/What is a digital experience platform?
What is a digital experience platform?
What is a digital experience platform?
What is a digital experience platform?
A digital experience platform (DXP) is go-to-market software that allows brands to create, optimize, and manage digital experiences globally across channels and devices.
A modern, composable DXP is multisource and tech-agnostic. Its many visual features include native personalization, content management, and AI agents to support omnichannel alignment and enterprise scalability.
DXPs are designed to empower digital teams to actively own the competitive edge through a single, integrated product that serves as the nexus of the go-to-market tech stack. This is accomplished by unifying and streamlining a user’s experience wherever and whenever they interact with the brand, presenting a consistent customer journey across digital touchpoints.
Whereas early CMSs were limited to static, single-channel websites, modern DXPs integrate everything from behavioral data to advanced analytics to craft relevant, personalized experiences that increase the likelihood of conversion.
A right-fit DXP is the digital command center for nurturing customer relationships, engaging and generating leads, and driving sales and demand through every channel.
How does a DXP impact the customer journey?
Here is an example demonstrating the strength of a holistic digital experience strategy spearheaded by a modern, composable DXP.
- Malik scrolls through his social media feed and clicks an organic post for running shoes from Nimblestep, a specialty footwear retailer he follows. His click takes him to a landing page in the mobile app dedicated to this particular shoe.
- Later, Malik returns to the Nimblestep website on his desktop computer. The same running shoes are now presented to him in a banner atop the page. He ultimately opens an account and adds the shoes to his shopping cart but does not buy them.
- The next time Malik returns to the website to consider the purchase, he is reminded of the abandoned shoes in his cart and offered a single-click return to check out, which he declines.
- Subsequent page views present a pop-up graphic highlighting a nearby brick-and-mortar location for him to try the shoes on prior to purchasing them.
By aligning content and data and coordinating personalization, localization, and the ability to A/B test promotional landing pages, a composable DXP lets brands offer customers relevance, presence, and brevity as it appeals to their intent. Layering on email marketing, advertising, and incentives would increase the likelihood of conversion.
What are the core elements of a DXP?
Every DXP possesses core components that contribute to the development, optimization, and publishing of digital experiences. The basic elements of a modern, composable DXP are comprised of:
- Visual Workspace: The heart of a DXP, enabling users to create, edit, and publish content on a single tab with on-platform access to all tools, content, and data.
- CMS: The go-to repository for storing and organizing company-wide content.
- Integration layer: Simplified integrations unifying all systems in the stack.
- Edge optimization: Delivering dynamic experiences without sacrificing speed or conversions.
- Modern front-end: A preferred front-end product that utilizes composability to power a performant design system.
Today’s businesses depend on technologies working harmoniously to deliver data-driven content that resonates with an audience. Without an interconnected framework, the goal of executing a consistent, coherent experience can fall short.
How does a DXP work?
A composable DXP enables code-less integration with the rest of the tech stack, including third-party products with APIs—unlike CMS-first and composable-adjacent DXPs, which require heavy code and maintenance for external connection.
A right-fit DXP ensures all systems are united and flowing through digital experiences. Personalization and localization features blend content and data pulled directly from the DAM, PIM, CMS, and more into the visual workspace to create dynamic, bespoke experiences that represent the brand. A/B testing and analytics give teams the insight needed to optimize engagements. AI agents, translations, and integrated tools let marketers go the extra mile to improve the journey, meet visitors where they are, and make marketing scalability possible for every size team.
While most DXPs contain the same components, composable DXPs bring more holistic, future-forward functionality to the table:
- A modular approach to building and scaling content based on atomic components that allows each team to reuse basic components in experiences across all channels while maintaining branding and governance.
- API-first integrations ensure seamless, simplified connectivity and communication between chosen back-end systems.
- Native AI agents and workspace access to generative tools that help users create content on the fly, perform SEO and CRO tasks, and keep translation duties internal.
- Personalization is holistic. Developers designed a personalization structure to utilize relevant data, from purchase history to intent to location, to refine the dynamic content a customer sees.
CMS-based and composable-adjacent DXPs rely on custom code and have limited integration options due to their out-of-the-box approach. Modern DXPs are built for composability, removing complexity and rigidity from production and management processes, simplifying integrations to enrich the user workspace, and accelerating performance at scale.
What are the benefits of a DXP?
From adaptability to flexibility, a composable DXP offers several advantages in meeting business and customer demands:
- Freedom: At its core, composability is tech-agnosticism, unlocking access to integrating third-party tools that meet needs beyond native capabilities.
- Scalability: Reusable components, patterns, and templates give businesses more control over brand, governance, global collaboration, and costs associated with marketing-related development and contractual content type volumes.
- Simplicity: A platform intuitive enough to empower front-end developers to enable its business users, removing development resources from marketing workflows to increase all-around productivity through autonomy.
- Support: The presence of 24/7 AI agents and integrated generative services transforms a marketer’s workspace from functional to comprehensive, as users can create unique, localized content in minutes and optimize meta data and components with suggestions produced in seconds.
- Future-proofing: With the presentation and orchestration layers safe, development teams are able to modify the tech stack incrementally–on their timeline and within budget–making wholesale migrations unnecessary.
How does a composable DXP drive business?
A composable digital experience platform empowers teams to reach their potential, building and publishing exceptional experiences in a fraction of the time it takes with CMS-based and composable-adjacent DXPs. To accomplish more in fewer clicks and deliver competitive, engaging experiences quickly by eliminating friction from idea to production. Advanced tooling, including agentic AI, A/B testing, and personalization, supports omnichannel experiences that convert site visitors to customers.
A composable DXP paired with the right strategy will align teams and technology to surpass desired outcomes.
Download our DXP guide to learn more about digital experience management and how composable DXPs simplify the composability journey.
If you're ready to see how Uniform Composable DXP can help your business, schedule a demo today!