There are many types of content, such as articles, landing pages, and images in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS), and products from a catalog if you have Optimizely Customized Commerce. For example, a marketer working on a campaign can drag and drop products onto CMS landing pages. Then, merchandisers can enrich the product content in Optimizely Customized Commerce.
Large e-commerce sites are often integrated with external systems for managing product information (Optimizely Product Information Management (PIM)), warehouses and inventories (enterprise resource planning (ERP)), and digital assets (Optimizely Content Marketing Platform DAM). This information is regularly imported to Optimizely Customized Commerce. Depending on the integration setup, editing options from the Optimizely Customized Commerce user interface may be limited. You might update product information, work with markets and pricing, or manage discounts.
Example scenario
The following steps describe how to prepare and launch a sales campaign for a group of products, with content in Optimizely Customized Commerce and CMS. In this scenario, you can update product information and create discounts in Optimizely Customized Commerce; also, pricing and warehouse information is imported from an external system.
- Work with a project to manage collaboration, review, and approval of campaign content items.
- Update products to include in the campaign. If needed, update images and display texts.
- Prepare discounts and set the availability time to synchronize with the sales campaign.
- Create website content, such as landing pages with blocks and media.
- Review and publish project items. You can publish immediately or schedule for a future time.
Working with projects
You can use projects and content approval sequences to manage the review and publishing of content items in your campaign. With projects activated in CMS edit view, content items (pages, blocks, media, and products) are automatically included in the active project. Use commenting and email notifications to collaborate with marketing and merchandiser colleagues.
After items are approved, you can publish everything simultaneously, or schedule publishing for a later time. This lets you coordinate with the availability of campaigns and associated discounts in Optimizely Customized Commerce, so everything becomes available on the website at the same time.
Updating product information
When you import the catalog into Optimizely Customized Commerce, products become available in the Catalog user interface. If your solution setup allows, you can add images (assets) and update display texts for products and variants (SKUs) in the catalog. You can also create relations between products and product categories.
Creating discounts
Using the Marketing features in Optimizely Customized Commerce, you can create a campaign with associated discounts. You can set a date range for when the campaign and its discounts are available, matching the publishing of other content in your sales campaign.
You can use any of the built-in discount types to create discounts for the sales campaign. You can base discounts on individual items, an entire order, or shipping costs. For customized discount needs, a developer can create discount (promotion) types. You can also associate coupons (also known as promotion codes) with discounts.
Discounts are not versioned, so are not included in a CMS project. When a discount is saved, it is immediately published. You control the availability of discounts by setting the status and availability date range in Optimizely Customized Commerce.
Creating web site content
When adding content to CMS landing pages, you can use blocks, which can be reused in multiple places. So, while the same content can appear on a start page and in an article, you only need to update the content in one place.
Using drag-and-drop, you can add items from the product catalog to pages and blocks. The same blocks and media structure is available when editing content in CMS and Optimizely Customized Commerce.
Use preview to see what the result looks like in different display channels.
Content rendering for pages, blocks, and different devices (such as mobile phones) must be set up by a developer during implementation.
Optimizely Customized Commerce discounts are also visible in the CMS edit view, so you can see which discounts are part of a campaign. You can drag and drop discounts into, for example, a block to display them on the website, as long as a developer created rendering for discounts.
You can also make active discounts automatically appear on the website's start page. This can be done through code and with the proper rendering support added.
More options
Optimizing the content
When a campaign is running, A/B testing compares which variants of page elements (like blocks or images) perform best. The metrics can help you optimize the message.
Creating automated mailings for a sales campaign
If your implementation includes Optimizely Campaign, you can create automated mailings as part of a sales campaign.
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