Magnolia Discusses Partnership with Spryker & Siteimprove
By Gabriella Pirrone
September 10, 2018
Digital Experience, Digital Marketing, Digital Transformation, ecommerce, eCommerce Platform, IoT, Magnolia, personalization, Siteimprove, Spryker
Magnolia CMS, a privately-held company that connects e-commerce with a best-of-breed approach for your digital experience, has announced not one, but two exciting new partnerships.
Magnolia’s newest e-commerce partner is Spryker, a cutting-edge e-commerce solution provider that helps companies reach their customers across all digital touchpoints including online shopping, mobile apps, IoT scenarios, blockchain, chatbot and voice integrations.
This particular partnership says it “reflects Magnolia’s ongoing focus on helping enterprises, including major retailers in the UK, Germany and Switzerland, increase revenues through e-commerce initiatives.”
Also, Siteimprove's plugin is alongside this partnership too which “allows users of Magnolia CMS to seamlessly integrate Siteimprove’s tools that help improve SEO, web analytics and content quality.”
The new partnerships also brings the launch of new capabilities within the Magnolia CMS platform itself, allowing digital marketers a way to measure and optimize a customer’s experience and optimize business goals along with the customer journey.
Magnolia’s new capabilities cover:
Personalization: Magnolia expands its personalization capabilities with a module that lets marketers tailor content based on real-time insights from customer journeys. Marketers can now easily combine explicit and implicit personalization to offer relevant content at each step of the customer journey.
Engagement optimization: Magnolia introduces a module that enables marketers to run multivariate testing and leverage automatic optimization of content. Marketers can speed up conversion rates, move customers faster through the funnel and continually enhance digital experiences. These capabilities are built as extensions and are available as add-ons to Magnolia’s core product offering.
To hear more about these two new partnerships, Magnolia’s core product offering and the predictions of where experience-driven e-commerce will be heading into the future, I was fortunate enough to speak with Pascal Mangold, CEO of Magnolia CMS. 
Why was the partnership with Siteimprove and Spryker a good fit for launching the new experience-driven e-commerce capabilities?
“Magnolia’s new extensions help optimize engagement and accelerate conversions once buyers are on the digital storefront. Siteimprove, with its strong SEO capabilities, helps bring more quality traffic to the online shop. So together we offer stronger optimization capabilities throughout the entire purchase funnel, from discovery, to consideration and decision. Spryker’s Commerce OS with Magnolia’s strong integration capabilities make a perfect fit for global brands who look into expanding their channels, and also into gaining much more flexibility and speed to market.”
In your opinion, what is experience-driven e-commerce and where do you see it heading in the future?
“We see experience-driven e-commerce as an evolved approach to selling, that puts the customer at the center and that focuses on delivering optimal customer experiences throughout the entire purchase journey, not just at the moment of a transaction. It does so by leveraging the power of content to help buyers in their research, evaluation and use of products, answering their questions, concerns, providing them with tailored offers, facilitating self-service. It also does so by leveraging data and insights from behaviors in real-time, to drive purchase decisions, and by taking an integral view over channels and touchpoints. It’s not about being digital first or traditional, it’s about being where the customers are, and providing a consistent experience across channels. In the future, we expect to see technology advancing new or emerging channels (voice-activated shopping, for example) and advancing data and insights. But we also think the future is not just about channels, technology or other means, but also about revisiting aims and strategies: the good old segmentation, targeting and creating relevant positions in the consumers’ minds, and aligning entire organizations to these, which is still a challenge.”
In the press release you mention “Digital marketing is becoming more data-driven and Magnolia’s new capabilities give businesses specific ways to test, measure and improve various steps along the customer journey,” What are some other ways that you think Digital marketing is becoming more data focused?
“One of the promises of digital marketing is that of being more measurable than marketing on traditional communications channels. You act and you can almost instantly get metrics. This is one of the reasons why digital marketing spending has been on an increasing trend over the past years. However, the challenge comes when aiming to use this data not just to track and understand performance, but optimize even as you work, in real time. Imagine having to launch a campaign and before you press ‘publish’, you get insights into how likely it is to perform and you are able to make decisions before action. We see some of our digitally mature customers advancing in this direction. This is one way of being data-driven. Another thing is the focus on customer data - bringing together more and more first-party and third-party customer data to enhance profiling, segmentation and personalization.”
In the press release it states “These capabilities are built as extensions and are available as add-ons to Magnolia’s core product offering.” How does the extension work and is the plugin easy to use?
“Magnolia extensions are modules that have typically been developed in close collaboration with customers to meet requirements not covered by the core product. They work as any Magnolia core module: you get it into the bundle or add it any time into your instance on the fly, together with all the necessary documentation needed to install, configure and use.”
Ending Notes
To further comment on Pascal’s response on where we see experience-driven e-commerce heading in the future and putting “the customer at the center and that focuses on delivering optimal customer experiences throughout the entire purchase journey, not just at the moment of a transaction.” can not only build a tremendous amount of value with your customers but can also increase customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, OC&C Strategy Consultants predicts that voice shopping will grow to a whopping $40 billion-plus in 2022, up from $2 billion today across the U.S. and the U.K. So indeed, I agree that not only will we be seeing new advancing technologies or other emerging channels come to life, but voice enabled shopping is becoming more prominent as Pascal mentioned.
Magnolia CMS will be showcasing their new capabilities for experience-driven e-commerce at the Digital Marketing Expo & Conference (DMEXCO) this week on September 12th & 13th, 2018 in Cologne, Germany. If you are attending the event, make sure you stop by their booth at Koelnmesse: at the Spryker Plaza in hall 7.1, stand C-021-E-024.
Gabriella Pirrone
Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.