The Email Experience Manager has been in Sitecore (EXM) for more than 5 years but has now become an out of box feature of Sitecore 9 XP and above. EXM allows brands to create contextual, targeted and personalized email campaigns, and deliver them straight to the customers.

However, why is Sitecore EXM the best solution for your organization and its marketing goals?

1. Connected Experience with Sitecore: THE BEST PART!

This point may seem the most obvious reason, but this is the magic pin! Not only is it easy to get all your marketing content and functionality on one platform, but it offers a seamless experience for your email marketing efforts with integrated web experience.

For example, you can use same content as in webpage without copy and paste, auto populate forms, track and personalize web experience for email campaign users, offer personalized web experience for a person whether he has read the email or not and more. Also, when a lead fills out a form on your website, you can seamlessly set up a marketing campaign with automated EXM campaign. In addition, as mentioned above, customers (YOU!) have the option to use the cloud service to deliver email from Sitecore- providing you with the need to manage your domain reputation.

2. Personalised email campaign

As in any other channel we can’t ignore individual preference and requirement in emails as well. Sitecore not only allows basic use case like greeting with name and adding individual attributes like his location, designation, membership level etc using Tokens [$firstname$] but complete component level personalization same as we do in web channel with Personalisation Rule Engine. There are lot many new rules that are added in latest Sitecore version based on user journey profile and action on both web and email.

3. Easy to use, compose and send EDM

One of the most powerful features of EXM is the ‘compose and send function’ where we can compose email from content item, which already exists, and send function which queues all the contacts you need to send and initiates a multi-threaded process that sends emails through the delivery provider. The Sitecore Email Delivery Cloud Service is Sitecore’s highly pitched email delivery service which leverages a batching mechanism that tends to reduce round-trip latency and sends swift dispatch to the Sitecore EDS.

There is a separate subscription fee for this service!

EXM provides users to set up a custom SMTP provider. This provider uses SMTP settings that are configured to send messages to an external SMTP server for distribution. The biggest downside of using a customized SMTP is that it puts the burden on the client or third-party SMTP provider for managing the reputation of the domain. However, this option allows users to use non-Sitecore service providers if they choose, such as SendGrid (which provides a Microsoft Azure subscription where you can send up to 25,000 emails per month for free).

4. Customized Subscription Management

Sitecore's subscription management policy is flexible and implemented according to customer needs. Sitecore offers several different tools to help customers modify subscription management exactly the way they need it. They include:

EXM Client API : A custom API for use on content delivery servers that allows to subscribe as well as unsubscribe option and subscription confirmation methods
Subscription Control : Fields that provide links to items to content that the client API uses for redirection
Marketing Automation : A tool that adds contacts to lists and unsubscribe contacts from lists
Email Preferences Center : A place for the customer to make changes to the contact's metadata for marketing preferences

5. Integrated Analytics

Email managers available in the market when contrasted with Sitecore EXM offers analytical reporting, which is disjointed, in both how you access it and the data that is provided leading to a disjointed customer journey. EXM offers more detailed information available in a central location. Sitecore’s standard reports offer a performance overview, recipient activity displaying which user took what action including any lead scoring value which is accumulated. With EXM you are guaranteed higher landing page performance.

Espire + Sitecore- A winning Combination!

Espire, with a team of experienced EXM Sitecore developers, is a Global Partner of Sitecore. Sitecore is a global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore Experience Platform with Sitecore EXM manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time. If you are considering moving to EXM for your email marketing needs, please feel free to contact us for a conversation on how we can help you.

Drop us an email at enquiries@espire.com!