Digital experience platform: DXP vs. CMS

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a content management system (CMS) combined with marketing and personalisation tools. The elaboration of these tools can be chosen and linked completely according to the client's needs. You want to be able to choose and combine your own tools.

The components used in a DXP depend on your own situation. If your goals and your target group indicate that you need to apply certain things, then a flexible DXP is able to adapt. That is the added value of a DXP with Drupal, in line with the open marketing strategy we employ.

Once the foundation of your website or digital platform is strong, you can think about optimisations with a DXP.

A digital experience platform exceeds the functionalities of a CMS. A Drupal CMS is a system to manage your content. DXP is not so much focused on managing content, but on digital experience, on user experience. Where a CMS is all about content blocks and modules, a DXP provides interaction between your website and all external marketing tools that improves your users' experience.

A digital experience platform (DXP) with Drupal leads to a composable or combinable solution. Recognisable elements include:

Automated marketing
Analytics
Personalisation
A/B testing
Social media en content calendars
SEA

The way you apply the DXP depends mainly on the maturity of your own team.

The biggest advantage of a DXP with Drupal is that you can grow gradually. You start from a strong CMS and you gradually add the necessary components as your company grows or as your own marketing knowledge increases.

Of course there are basic parameters that need to be right. Fundamentals such as content and information architecture need to be in place first, then you can grow further. The extra functionalities you can add to your DXP are then tailored to your marketing plan.

Another advantage of a digital experience platform with Drupal is that we can co-create together with the client. We build a customised platform and think along with the client about the optimal solutions. We guide our clients through the digital transformation towards the best customer experience and the available marketing tools.

A DXP is provided to integrate with marketing tools to create a better customer journey. Using data, we segment your target groups to better understand and reach them.

Your company launches a Facebook campaign targeting 25-year-olds. If we then associate the right UTM codes with that campaign, we can capture this information in our digital experience platform. We can segment these visitors under the Young Adults target group and then personalise their experience on the website. This is how we optimise the customer journey of this target group.

Calibrate has several years of experience building digital experience platforms. For example, we created a tool for Q8 to A/B test, personalise and send automated marketing.

We also link dashboards with analytical website data to your Drupal DXP. Through an embedded performance dashboard, you can view the performance of your website directly in the backend. What are the most popular pages, channels, etc.? Or you can keep an eye on any major exit rates.

The DXP also includes integration with marketing automation platforms like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot or Mautic. In this way, our customers can see how many people click through to the website via an email campaign, you can look up contacts and see their activity with the website, ...

These are a few specific examples that give an idea of the possibilities of a Drupal DXP, but as already mentioned, we always look at the needs and possibilities together with our clients. This way, we deliver a DXP tailored to your situation.

Why do you need a DXP? Even if you have an information website that mainly offers content, it is best to start working with marketing and personalisation tools.

Thanks to a digital experience platform you get to know your visitors better and you are able to communicate with them better. A Drupal DXP transcends a CMS so you don't just put content on a website and wait for something to happen. The business starts thinking better about how and where they reach their customers, what they want to do with the available information about their customers, how they can use this information intelligently, etc.