A Value First Approach: The Optimizely platform as an enabler
Dom Graveson
In today's challenging economic climate, taking a serious approach to measuring value can be a powerful launchpad for bringing your organisation with you on the journey of digital transformation and evolution.
This is the final article in the five part series titled 'A Value-First Approach', written by Netcel's Director of Strategy & Experience, Dom Graveson. Throughout the series, Dom explores the foundations of taking a value first approach to digital strategy and implementation, and provides practical advice on building your own framework for measurement and building sustained support for your digital journey.
The role of technology and Optimizely in delivering the ambition
If you apply this to the context of delivering your digital goals, you can test out your hypotheses and measure these as leading metrics, while your lagging metrics might take longer to indicate change. Experimentation is a powerful way of testing these hypotheses in rapid cadence, enabling you to demonstrate value fast, often in a matter of weeks, and generate some positive stories to engage and inspire support for your digital programme.
Experimentation is the key to driving continuous improvement, as well as providing a foundation for personalization, which is the key to driving lasting digital customer relationships. You can and should be seriously considering introducing and scaling experimentation as a core part of your ‘small change’ or BAU approach – this approach can turn what is often seen as ‘business as usual’ into something more like ‘better as usual’ – a committed approach to continuous iterative insight-led improvement. Measuring the small things, makes it much easier the measure the larger initiatives as it becomes part of your ‘digital DNA’.
It is important to remember the impact of your technology choices in enabling the continuous improvement of your digital experience. In order to evaluate the tangible benefits of Optimizely as the Digital Experience Platform and Content Management System in making that experience possible. The value of Optimizely is in enabling the speed, effectiveness and scale of your digital experience and the experimentation and personalization to drive it. You can evaluate the impact of Optimizely across the following:
The value of Experimentation:
Measure through iterative improvement - the speed of and quality of turnaround of ideas into experiments into benefits (or at worst case, learning if it fails). The benefits can be calculated through a formula of multiplying the uplift potential of the improvement by the number and quality of experiments. The quality of insights, and the flexibility, scale and speed of deployments of experimentation are crucial here. This is again, where we have found Optimizely to outperform other platforms significantly.
The value of the Optimizely CMP (Content Marketing Platform):
Here we evaluate the process optimisation and faster turnaround for your teams and how Optimizely’s CMP platform is making creating content that engages your audiences and delivers results easier, faster and more insight led. An example you can measure is an increased number of campaigns delivered per Digital Marketeer, and greater success for each campaign as they are based on less guesswork and more on actionable insights from ODP and other sources. This scale and lowered risk enable greater coverage of your market but also higher numbers of variations which can drive personalisation — the more options, the more you can target individuals.
The value of the Optimizely Content Management System (CMS):
There are established performance metrics for digital experiences that a CMS will contribute towards - when you deploy or update your CMS you can measure the impact on things like accessibility, Core Web Vitals scores, Lighthouse assessments, page load speeds, etc… but this is only part of the picture. The delivery of a CMS is often part of a wider change programme, one which looks at integrated systems, data and the people and processes that deliver the experiences. When you calculate the end-to-end cost of delivering marketing operations the value of your CMS becomes clear.
We have a framework for developing a tailored framework measuring value across these areas above that is specific to the unique ambitions of your organization, and what you are seeking to gain from your choice of Optimizely as a technology platform. This aims to simplify the complex question of digital ROI realisation across people, process, experience and technology.
This value first approach might not herald the end of the traditional RFP but it should make for a more cooperative and evidence led approach to building sustainable digital partnerships, and that has the potential to be transformative.
Read the previous articles in this series here: