Getting the most from Kentico EMS

So what has Kentico EMS got that you can’t get anywhere else? Well, nothing actually. All the features that come already built into Kentico EMS are available as specialist components from individual software companies elsewhere. From analytics to multi-variate testing to contact management to email to marketing automation—it’s all been done by others. You can go shop around if you like. You can buy them all one at a time. Individually they might be very good indeed at what they do. 

More than the sum of its parts

But if you’re after an enterprise approach, where all these functions have to work together, and you’re expecting all your little separately branded puzzle pieces to fit and integrate and communicate with your CMS, you may be in for a patch of stormy seas. In fact, you’ll almost assuredly have to jettison some of your desires in order to make the integrations actually function. Otherwise you may find your site floundering, slow to load, and not delivering.

What Kentico EMS does is get all hands on deck and working as one crew. Everything is Kentico. Consequently, the integration isn’t just seamless; it’s inherent. Take for example testing and analytics.

Divide and conquer with better testing

The concept of A/B and multi-variate testing borrows from the scientific method to measure any changes made to your website. You formulate a hypothesis about how people will behave in the presence of your ingenious new design feature. You use a control group to account for flukes in the data. It’s a great way—THE way, really—to gather insight into how your most valuable potential customers truly feel about your website. To that end, the key is changing one thing at a time and measuring it by itself. Fine, no problem. But what if the very fact that you’re testing introduces a secondary change in performance on the new page?

Most of the time, A/B testing makes use of an injectable script to determine which version of the page to load for a site visitor. That potentially makes it run slower, which can affect how people feel about any other changes, and thus can affect how they engage with it. With Kentico EMS, A/B and multi-variate testing is part of the system, not a separate script. As a result, it doesn’t interfere with page loading times—and it doesn’t mess up your data.

Likewise, because email is within the system, analysing client behaviour from email marketing campaigns can feed directly into a lead scoring process, for instance. And email templates can be built using widgets that draw directly from contact databases of course, but also web content, such as related blogs, videos, and anything else you can dream up.

Exponentially easier to operate

It’s customisable to an extent that no specialist tool can come close to competing with. And with a drag-and-drop user interface, creating marketing events, email templates, and other marketing automation processes is easy. Visually it’s like making a flowchart, which makes it easy to conceptualise the user journey.

But really the most brilliant part of Kentico EMS is every piece of the puzzle is right at your fingertips. Everything from your newsletters to your customer databases is right in Kentico. It doesn’t have to be imported or integrated from an external source. Your process doesn’t have to talk to another system or try to fit square data into the round workflow. It already fits because it’s all part of the EMS already.

Factoring everything in

So what’s holding people back? One of the biggest issues is that people who implement Kentico EMS often hang onto those third party tools that they’ve always used. Sometimes they only make use of the CMS aspect of it because using the marketing automation and analytics requires a strategic change in how they work, which can be really hard.

If you’ve got Kentico EMS, and you want to really work it to its full potential, the best thing to do is speak to your digital agency and include them in early discussions about your goals. And if you’re interested in making the switch to EMS from CMS, get in touch. We are a Kentico Gold Partner with Quality Expert Status, one of only 9 in the UK. We’d be happy to help.

For more info on how Kentico EMS could help your business, speak to Ben Franklin, Quba’s Technical Director.