Published on by Karim Marucchi, CEO
Welcome to our ongoing series about Open Source Alternatives to Sitecore. Right now you're reading Part Two: Customer Data Management, when you're done, there are two other articles you might be interested in: Part One: Sitecore Content Management and Part Three: Personalization & A/B Testing.
Welcome Back!
You might also be interested in Part Three of our ongoing series about Open Source Alternatives to Sitecore, which covers Personalization & A/B Testing.
Welcome Back!
You might also be interested in Part One of our ongoing series about Open Source Alternatives to Sitecore, which covers Sitecore Content Management.
In effective digital marketing, it’s crucial to identify emerging customer trends and gain insights into their journey. The key attraction to using “one composable platform,” has always been about having a unified easy-to-use system, but that leads to the need of adapting your unique mix of marketing to their monolithic workflow. The alternative was trying to experiment in duct taping together a hodgepodge of bespoke and Open Source programs that are difficult to learn and maintain long term.
Fortunately, over the last few years, brands have been successfully using customized workflows that feel like a complete turnkey solution for understanding users and uncovering trends. Enterprise marketers can leverage a suite of Open Source tools to perform the same tasks as Sitecore and at a fraction of the cost. Let’s break down their feature set for, “Customer Data Management.”
Open Source Alternatives to Sitecore
In this ongoing article series, we'll explore cost-effective Open Source alternatives to proprietary platforms like Sitecore.
- Part One: Sitecore Content Management
- Part Two: Customer Data Management
- Part Three: Personalization & A/B Testing
THE PROMISE → OUR SOLUTION
Customer Data Managed:
Understand Every User and Uncover Trends
with Customer and Journey Insights
Behavior Tracking Across Channels
Sitecore promotes the capability to “capture every click, search, tap and buying signal from any digital touchpoint and leverage actionable insights.” In an Open Source alternative, for example, we have used a proven analytics tool like Matomo within integrations into a CMS/DXP based on WordPress, In this example, Marketers have extensive web analytics capabilities, allowing them to track and understand user behaviors across different digital touchpoints, at a fraction of the cost. Both of these Open Source alternatives share the same ethos around brands maintaining 100% control over data ownership while respecting brand data ownership and championing user privacy.
Data Sharing Across the Ecosystem
Another feature they offer is to “leverage real-time and historical customer data for in-session personalization on any channel.” Marketers are already doing this with Open Source tools like Apache Kafka. With Crowd Favorite as your partner, your Data Ecosystem will be easy and transparent. We seamlessly integrate this Open Source stream-processing software and provide real-time data sharing capabilities that can handle trillions of events per day. This is not only a robust tool for managing customer data, but another platform that saves you money and allows you to innovate in other areas.
Seamless Integration of Customer Data
Customer data needs to flow in all directions in today’s MarTech stack. While Sitecore has spent years developing the integration of customer data, they promise to “ingest data securely.” What this really provides is the ability for marketers to have a consolidated view of their customer interactions and preferences within Sitecore, but what if you need to pull and push data to other marketing initiatives? Not only did OSS pioneer the use of the API, but it was made to share information in two ways. This allows for data integration that is scalable, customizable, and secure, aligning with the needs of enterprise marketing teams by integrating tools like Apache NiFi. These provide the same enterprise-level data ingestion capabilities that can integrate data from multiple sources in the same format, and then serve them to your full marketing and EPR needs.
Understanding Customers
in Every Moment
Every marketer’s goal is to understand the customer and “recognize and engage existing or new users in-the-moment with live audience segmentation.” This type of live audience segmentation and customer engagement is achievable with Open Source data science platforms. Marketers can set rules around the insights they need and these platforms can analyze and pull the right data into a report—easily turning data into actionable insights. Using these predictive analytics allows for the real-time recognition and engagement of both existing and new users, while also offering insights into customer behavior and preferences.
Leveraging Analytics
and Artificial Intelligence
Leveraging AI analytics is the wave of the future and Sitecore promises to “combine predictive analytics and AI with your data to understand and influence customer journeys.” Knime and TensorFlow are powerful Open Source tools used for analytics and AI. From collating and preprocessing transaction data, browsing behavior, click patterns, time spent on each page, and customer demographics to building a machine learning model, these tools help marketers understand patterns and devise strategic campaigns. Mitigating abandonment to understanding and influencing customer journeys these tools provide endless opportunities.
FEATURED CASE STUDY:
Delivering Open Source Results to the Enterprise for Over a Decade
At Crowd Favorite we know this to be true because we have delivered these results in the Enterprise for over a decade. Crowd Favorite developed a custom WordPress-based solution for DisneyABCPress.com, consolidating seven sites into one editorial workflow with a customized administrative interface. This enables ABC staff to manage content efficiently across all sites from a media contextual point of view rather than individual websites point of view. With over fourteen million assets in the platform, editorial staff can bulk edit with tools, allowing for the upload and modification of hundreds or even thousands of images simultaneously. The system was created with a uniform design language and a consistent look and feel that spans across all sites. This was done by developing custom templates that honored individual branding while maintaining site-wide continuity and providing a solution with a longer lifespan that easily adapts as new content types are developed. All at a fraction of the cost of Sitecore.
The Open Source Advantage
Behavior Tracking Across Channels, Seamless Integration of Customer Data, Data Sharing Across the Ecosystem, Understanding Customers in Every Moment and Leveraging Analytics and AI are all very important features needed today and are all achievable using Open Source solutions. They provide significant cost savings and are easy to use and customize, enabling businesses to free up resources to invest in other critical areas. These Open Source solutions also allow businesses to modify the software to better fit their specific needs, a feature not available with proprietary software.
Ready to find out more?
Interested in finding out where Open Source solutions can take your business? We are ready to partner with you on this journey, providing the expertise and support you need to achieve optimal outcomes. Contact us today, and let’s unlock the power of your digital infrastructure together!
