DXP vs CMS: What’s Better for Your Business

How important is personalization for your business?

DXPs are the kings of digital experience personalization. DXPs can help you deliver different content to different audiences by leveraging user attributes such as location, role, seniority, and department. With a strong Information Architecture approach, you can orchestrate multiple digital experiences that support your user’s journey. For example, banks have multiple external audiences (such as individuals, organizations, investors, etc) and a personalized digital experience allows them to showcase specific products and updates that match these audiences depending on their user attributes.

Is your goal to communicate a brand message or drive action?

Often marketing sites focus on one call to action and one specific campaign at a time to drive new customers. A CMS can support a direct, yet impactful message driven by a powerful campaign. On the other hand, a business platform with a DXP helps large audiences like citizens, workforces, and clients to do their daily tasks, support their customer or employee experience, and communicate multiple external and internal campaigns at the same time.

We have discussed this topic before in this blog—the “knowing vs. doing” concept is really helpful in exposing the innate differences between a CMS and a DXP. Modern digital experiences include all sorts of interactivity, from interactive videos to forms, surveys, account management, and payments. Creating a deep, powerful relationship with a user is one of the core benefits of a DXP: providing a well-rounded digital experience. CMS can provide similar capabilities after integrating plugins or third-party add-ons such as payments and eCommerce. Still, their main objective is more tied to one-way communication, like driving a marketing campaign or providing information about a specific upcoming service.

Is systems integration essential for your channel?

Integrating data and information from sources such as ERPs and CRMs are critical to creating rich digital experiences that drive action. For example, developing a customer site that displays a form for complaints and collecting and keeping track of user contact data, number of tickets, and feedback integrating with a CRM.

If your digital channel needs to provide data from heterogeneous sources, DXP’s integration capabilities can be a strong foundation for your efforts. While integrations with CMSs are possible, the DXP architecture is OOTB-ready to work with microservices and APIs and connect with your digital environment no matter the complexity.

Do you need your digital channel to be always available and have extra support?

Some organizations need to be available 24/7—for example, insurance companies. Accidents and claims happen all the time, at any given moment. They can have seasonal peaks, such as spring break or the holiday season, which makes their beneficiary claim portals particularly vulnerable to high traffic and lots of interaction. For this type of business needs, DXP offers high-availability features, autoscaling for traffic peaks, and robust management tools to help you manage your platform. A CMS may offer similar features under a Cloud-managed model but with less performance analytics or control for user admins.

Is your digital channel for an effort or an organization?

Scoping your channel’s focus also helps visualize which way to go. If your digital channel focuses on an event or a campaign, a website with a CMS is enough. On the other hand, if you plan to deploy channels to support multiple processes from an organization and touchpoints with multiple departments and owners, the DXP architecture and approach can make your life easier. Currently, DXPs are the recommended software for employee portals and enterprise channels. 

This may also be an important consideration for future plans. If you expect your efforts to grow quickly to need support for multiple processes or channels, you can save time and expenses in the long run by choosing an option that has the capability to scale with you.

CMS vs. DXP: Which one should you pick?

When it comes to managing content and experiences, the existing offering is vast. Unsurprisingly, many companies are considering growing their digital channels with a DXP that can provide them with richer functionality and automation.

According to Grand View Research, the Digital Experience Platform market is expected to reach 30.31 billion USD in less than 10 years. Retail and Banking and Financial are the segments with the top revenue share; the expectation is that they will continue to grow with the market. The reason is clear: digital customer experience, customer satisfaction, and overall loyalty are critical for these segments, and DXPs offer tools and functionality to support their efforts.

Like any new initiative, every effort needs its business case. A standard Content Management System is a better fit for marketing campaigns in certain industries and organizations with evolving digital processes or that only drive external campaigns.

But that’s only from the feature standpoint. CMS may offer performance limitations when it comes to growing and scaling large repositories of content—hundreds of thousands of pieces—  and having a strong Information Architecture to help you manage it. On the other hand, while CMS is relatively intuitive and easy to control, DXPs often face unique challenges, such as its learning curve and the challenges of driving adoption across an organization.

Often, growing and large organizations go the DXP route, especially if they are considering exploring new sources of revenue with their online business. While it may take more effort and planning to tailor and implement in the first stages, a Digital Experience Platform is a stable and reliable solution to strengthen your company’s position through digital channels.