How to create a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) with Drupal

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Posted on

24/07/2020

Are your customers asking for a DXP instead of a CMS? Are your developers struggling to build personalized digital experiences with Drupal?

Efficiently managing digital content has become commodity by using giants such as Drupal. Making that content and customer experience personal and consistent across all digital touchpoints can still be challenging. However, with ever rising customer expectations, it's becoming more important. No wonder that Gartner has replaced the CMS quadrant by a DXP quadrant.

Not sure what a DXP really is about? This blog can help you.

In this post, I will explain how you can build your own DXP for Drupal using Open Source components.

What is it not?

Not just a bucket of products
Not just a website or an app
Not a tool
Not a one-way communication vehicle
Not standalone
Not IT nor Marketing system
NOt a monolithic system

So now we have that out of the way. A DXP is not a single product. You can maybe compare it to the word website. It can mean anything as long as it is digital. A website meant that you had a place where you represented yourselves or shared information. A DXP is a place where your customers come to solve questions they have, in a digital form. There is a lot of research on this topic, but I'll leave it to you, the reader, to dig in a bit deeper. I imagine you would get overloaded if you would google "what is a website" as well :-)

Drupal is also moving forward with its content management capabilities and the video below shows how a content editor would work with Drupal to create rich landing pages. That said, Drupal is still missing many other capabilities that needs to be augmented with tools in the same ecosystem to become a DXP building solution.

Creating great editorial experiences

This video demonstrates how you can create great editorial experiences using Dropsolid Rocketship & Layout Builder.

Management capabilities of a DXP

In terms of Management capabilities it is fairly easy to create registration, login & password management, roles & permissions but also to create group communities together so they can exchange information. It is a lot harder to keep a customer profile or to move towards voice and immersive elements using Drupal out of the box.

Platform capabilities of a DXP

In terms of Platform capabilities Drupal makes it very easy to do custom development because of its years of community building on drupal.org. This also makes custom integrations very easy but it is a lot harder or near impossible to build neural networks in Drupal or with customer data that interacts with a Drupal application. Not only because of Drupal but also because how the web works and the many caching layers such as a CDN or Varnish are in between an interaction of the end user and Drupal.

Another important benefit of Drupal is its API-First approach to allow frameworks such as Vue, React, Angular or others to create multi-channel experiences in a headless/decoupled or hybrid way.

Experience Capabilities of a DXP

In terms of Experience capabilities, it is also lacking when it comes to detecting intention or introducing personalisation and A/B testing. On the plus side, Drupal has a very powerful Search API extension which can be used to index the site and query structured data. However, to personalise this search or to boost information based on AI feedback loops it becomes a lot harder.

What are we missing?

If we trim it down to practical capabilities we are missing a tool in our toolset for the above 3 cases. In the video below I'm demoing how this can be solved by utilizing the power of Apache Unomi. Next to that we can augment our toolset towards marketing automation with Mautic.

Drupal Personalization

This video demonstrates Dropsolid website Personalization for Drupal based on Apache Unomi.

Optimize!

The ultimate goal is to increase conversions. The optimizations you do within the DXP are ultimately to drive conversions so that you can connect with your end user through marketing campaigns, powered by manual or automated actions. In the image here we see that in Google Analytics we segment the data in the different intention groups that were detected by the AI. We can then detect if certain intention groups have a higher conversion rate than others and start to change the content to influence these numbers over time. We can also add A/B testing and measure the result within the goals that were set in Google Analytics.

How can you do this yourselves?

Which (open) tools are needed to build a DXP on top of Drupal

Marketing Automation

Mautic is a fully-featured cross-channel orchestration solution that enables organizations of all sizes to orchestrate and deliver individually personalized experiences at scale. Mautic helps teams gather important contact information, optimize and template campaigns, and report on results. No other solution compares to Mautic's modern and flexible design which provides team members the freedom to move quickly and adapt easily to changing business needs.

Mautic

Mautic Form embedding

This module allows you to select forms from a chosen Mautic instance and display on your Drupal 8 website. It allows you to choose between multiple authentication methods to get the list of forms.

Mautic module

Customer Data Platform

Apache Unomi™: The Open Source Customer Data Platform Apache Unomi™ (pronounced "You know me") is a Java Open Source customer data platform, a Java server designed to manage customers, leads and visitors data and help personalize customers experiences while also offering features to respect visitor privacy rules (such as GDPR)

Apache Unomi

Dropsolid Rocketship Drupal Distribution

The intent of Dropsolid Rocketship is to make digital business easy by providing a framework and best practice examples based on real life situations from a company that has built and managed over 500 Drupal sites. Dropsolid Rocketship is a distribution that enables small to mid-market business to profit from an optimal start when getting your feet wet in Drupal. It provides best practices from deployment, configuration and ways to extend it, proven by many cases that have implemented and resulted in this learning. All Drupal 8 sites at Dropsolid have Rocketship at its core. Junior developers learn the basics with Rocketship, while senior developers have had their say in how an optimal development codebase looks like. As it is our goal to make digital business easy, there is no better way than being transparent in how we achieve that.

Rocketship

Content Management

Drupal is an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences. It's made by a dedicated community. Anyone can use it, and it will always be free.

Drupal

Dropsolid Rocketship GDPR Cookie Compliance

Privacy regulations are becoming more and more strict and with that also the way of handling cookie consent on websites. It’s not enough anymore to have a cookie notification bar, visitors should be able to give consent on specific types of cookies that are being stored when visiting a website. There are many third-party solutions with subscription models to plug into a website, but the standard that we use is a Drupal module, so that it’s a part of the Drupal solution we provide and if required we can tailor it further to the needs of the client if required. Dropsolid has decided to contribute to the EU Cookie Compliance (GDPR Compliance) module on drupal.org and co-maintain this module in the future.

EU Cookie compliance

Unomi Drupal Module

This module connects your site to the API of Unomi. It allows a pluggable authentication strategy to support local Unomi's or hosted Unomi services like Dropsolid Platform.

Dropsolid Platform for AI segmentation

All of your interaction data are stored in a universal visitor profile. The data are available to create segments. These, in turn, can be used to personalize interactions, across all channels. Segments are available out-of-the-box in Drupal’s page builder and Mautic’s email and marketing content builders. The related Customer Data Platform, Unomi, is secure, scalable and is able to handle vasts quantities of data. Our AI engine is able to detect behavioural patterns from these data and is able to label visitors in real time according to its AI-defined segments. This allows for further personalization. Data capture is easy: it only takes one tracking script on your website, comparable to a Google Analytics integration. You could be gathering relevant data within minutes of reading this page. Sounds interesting? See for yourself!

Need help? Happy to assist you.