According to Forrester, U.S. business and government tech spending has increased every year since 2013 with this year forecasted to reach $296 billion on software alone while Gartner says total global IT spending will reach $37 trillion this year.

To justify the steady increase in money going out, decision-makers are being held increasingly accountable for monitoring money coming in as the direct result of those technology purchases.

On one hand, marketers know improvements to customer experience, content management processes and hosting infrastructure positively impacts revenue. On the other hand, the burden of proof rests on them to demonstrate a positive return on investment. It becomes difficult to prove a case for ROI, however, when factors like benchmarking, tracking mechanisms, methodology or visibility into other departments are limited in any way. So, business professionals today do their due diligence prior to investment to get as much evidence as they can, post investment, that their resources will be recouped.

By valuing transparency here at Episerver, we prioritize evidence too. It’s one of the many reasons we work with the analyst community who serve as third-party validation of Episerver’s offerings such as digital commerce, content management and personalization.

For the first time, Episerver commissioned Forrester Consulting to carry out its Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on our behalf. They interviewed six customers over many months and analyzed the data as to what it means to be using Episerver Digital Experience Cloud. From these customer interviews, the composite organization is a North American brand with annual revenues of +$300 million.

Like our customers, we know we deliver value, but we bear the burden of proof – and now we have it.

What Forrester found, which confirmed something we’ve known for a long time, was that cloud-hosted CMS/digital commerce substantiates a sizeable savings over on-premise based solutions in the modern era. As the report’s author puts it, “In moving to the Episerver cloud platform, organizations are able to avoid costs of infrastructure hardware as well as associated maintenance costs. Total three-year gains from moving to the Episerver/Microsoft Azure cloud results in gains of $875,609.”

Importantly, Episerver’s investment in artificial intelligence (AI) based personalization and campaign management was also proven to pay off for us as a company and our customers as business users. When AI-based personalization is used to handle content, messaging and products contextually—to make it very relevant to specific customers—businesses on Episerver can expect higher conversion rates (+3%), increased basket sizes (+5.5%) and a multi-million dollar return over the course of three years (+$4.6 million).

Of course, there is a cost to running our service, but customers are paid back in less than six months post migration with total net benefits equaling more than +$5.3 million in three years—resulting in an unmatched 443% ROI for Episerver Digital Experience Cloud customers.

For one reason, as companies invest in Episerver, we pay them back with their time. Episerver offers the ability to build once, use multiple times to share digital assets across channels with minimal code needed to deploy content into production – resulting in companies saving nearly -$1.1 million over a  span of three years.

As our VP of Product, Justin Anovick, put it, “...this provides conclusive evidence of Episerver’s winning combination of being able to help our customer achieve rapid time to value while correspondingly helping their organizations to move faster – it’s our secret sauce!”

Don’t take his word for it, download “The Total Economic Impact™ of Episerver Digital Experience Cloud.”