Choosing a CXM Solution: Where’s Your ROI?

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Deploying any Customer Experience Management (CXM) solution involves significant costs. These include licenses, implementation, hosting, and upgrades just to name a few. I personally believe you should expect to know what you are getting for your investment. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the ROI sources you should expect from a CXM solution.

Source #1: Increased Productivity

Here are a few examples of what productivity gains you get from a fully-integrated CXM solution:
  • Content Authors can manage website content independently. This means they can write, edit, and publish content without delays and always keep the content up to date. As a result, they can focus on their main goal – creating high quality content.
  • Developers get a ready-to-use, consistent platform for developing a website instead of starting from scratch and writing similar code again and again. It’s important that the platform is both flexible and feature-rich, so that developers can focus on meeting business goals instead of developing new modules or integrating numerous third-party add-ons.
  • Marketers can manage all their on-line activities from a single place, rather than utilizing multiple tools which do not provide a holistic view of customer behavior and campaign results.
  • IT departments can focus on managing systems rather than updating website content for the marketing department. Also, consolidating multiple websites under a single CXM platform will lower system maintenance costs.
If you want to benefit from the productivity gains outlined above, you need to choose a CXM solution that will meet these requirements:
  • Easy to use –users should be able to start utilizing the product with minimal training and immediately leverage its capabilities without constantly reaching out to developers and IT. A fully integrated CXM solution plays an important role here, as users do not have to learn and use multiple applications.
  • Supports adoption across your organization – the overall costs shouldn’t become prohibitive when you decide to get more people involved, add more sites or scale to multiple servers with growing traffic.
  • Enables consolidation of your websites – the solution should allow you to manage all your websites in a single installation, share content and maintain consistent branding and customer experience across sites.

Source #2: More Organic Traffic through Better SEO

In the past, many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts critiqued CMS systems because they went against the SEO best practices. However, that has changed in the recent years and a well-designed CMS can actually help you improve your SEO results. It’s no wonder that we see so many clients who experience high traffic growth and a higher position in the search results after deploying a new website with Kentico CMS. In comparison to advertising, SEO represents an inexpensive way to attract qualified buyers at the time they’re looking for a solution to their problems. 

Source #3: Better Marketing Results

Although listed as #3, it’s actually the first place you should look for ROI. What do you want to achieve with your website? Do you want more sales, leads, donations or members? In order to quantify the ROI, you need to:
  • Have a clear marketing strategy – what do you want to achieve with your website?
  • Define hard metrics – how do you measure your success?
  • Evaluate the results – do you see any improvement? Can you quantify it in a monetary value?
There are three major areas where a CXM solution creates value:
  • Website Optimization – increase conversion rates (such as sales, registrations, etc.) through A/B or MVT testing, but also by personalizing content based on user profiles and behavior.
  • Lead Management – handle all leads coming through your website and integrate them into your sales process. CXM allows you to track and manage leads (Contact Management), automatically identify qualified leads (Lead Scoring) and pass them over to your sales team through integration with your CRM. Plus, you can further segment the leads and use E-mail Marketing to nurture the leads that may not be sales ready yet, to ensure you don’t miss any opportunity to convert them into clients.
  • Campaign Management – evaluate campaign success by connecting campaigns not only with number of visitors, but also with number of generated leads, opportunities and sales. Based on such evaluation, you can make better decisions about which campaigns work and thereby increase your campaign ROI. 

Examples of ROI Achieved by Kentico Clients

Kentico has helped thousands of customers create successful websites that bring measurable results. Below you can find a few examples of companies that have deployed Kentico CMS or Kentico EMS:

The Invisible Source of ROI

While it may not be obvious from the examples above, there’s one further source of ROI driven by Kentico products. It’s the combination of fully-integrated CXM solution, ease-of-use, shorter development time, experienced partner network and attractive pricing. Unlike other products that cost several times more in licensing, implementation and ongoing maintenance, Kentico provides customers with cost benefits from day one, which allows them to spend a larger portion of their budget on creating successful websites.

If you consider, for example, a $100k project where the typical mid-market CXM price would be $50k just for the license, the customer has only $50k left to deliver the project, which barely covers the technical implementation of the website. With Kentico EMS at $15k, $85k is available for the success of your project implementation, which means you can spend more money on things like SEO, copy writing, usability testing, landing page optimization and other tasks that unlock the power of the technology to provide you with measurable business results. And that’s a major differentiator between the ROI provided by Kentico EMS versus other CXM platforms – it not only costs less, but it also allows you to focus on getting measurable ROI.

Learn more about Kentico EMS or Try Kentico EMS today! 
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Petr Palas

I'm the founder and CEO of Kentico. I write about Kentico, WCM, CXM, digital marketing and related technologies.

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