The Episerver Platform – An Overview

The Episerver Platform has grown considerably since its inception 25 years ago. Now in version 11, it has grown from a sophisticated, but simple tool for website development into a platform encompassing a vast number of options, features and APIs. In fact, its size may seem daunting.

However, Niteco’s 120 certified Episerver developers – the largest number of any Episerver Partner – know the system like the backs of their hands and know what features you need to reach your business objectives.

To make understanding Episerver’s platform easier for you, we have created this overview of what it offers you beyond “just” a CMS/Commerce environment. If you’re using an older version of the Episerver platform and are unsure about whether an upgrade would be worth the effort, consider this tool that lets you see which new features were added with which version of Epi (https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/feature-list/episerver-cms/) or contact Niteco’s experts for advice. 

Episerver Profile Store

In Episerver’s customer data platform, dubbed the Profile Store, all the data pertaining to the behavior of your visitors is stored in order to be accessed by other features. Any subcategory they visited, any term they searched for, and purchase they made and any information they chose to share with you – all of it is combined in the Profile Store to create a profile of that specific visitor. This allows you to learn more about your visitors and potential customers and personalize your offerings to them.

Episerver Insight

Episerver Insight is, in essence, the user interface for the Profile Store. It allows you to access the information about your users and potential clients that is stored in the Profile Store. It also helps you to understand and structure this wealth of information with useful stats and visualizations. To boost your personalization plans for your website, Insight also enables you to create segments into which you can categorize users and for which you can then create personalized content.

Episerver Advance

Advance is one of the features that utilizes the information that is stored in the Profile Store. Based on a visitor’s prior behavior, Advance personalizes home pages, listings and landing pages in order to present relevant content to them without them having to navigate to specific sub-pages. The effect is that if a user was browsing a specific set of categories during their last visit, content relevant to those categories will be presented to them on the home page on their next visit, putting fewer clicks between them and conversion.

Episerver Perform

Perform does for products what Advance does for content. Presenting relevant products to your prospective customers wherever they interact with you is a great way to reach your sales objectives. With Perform, you can target any touchpoint and utilize the valuable information in the Profile Store to show a person exactly the products they want.

Episerver Reach

As the name implies, Episerver Reach helps you to reach out to your users even when they’re not on your site. Reach, utilizing the information available in the Profile Store, lets you send out personalized email recommendations based on a user’s prior behavior, purchases and stated interests. It also enables you to set triggers in order to automatically communicate with your users on the basis of their specific situation or actions. These triggers can be set by you based on your own business needs and can range from the user leaving unpurchased products in their shopping cart to new products becoming available in categories that the user had previously viewed.

Episerver Campaign

Episerver Campaign is Epi’s Marketing Automation  tool and allows marketers to target users and potential customers through all available channels – be it through ads or emails, content marketing, print advertising, social media or more. Myriads of options allow you to create elaborate trigger campaigns that cover all the bases, increase traffic and improve conversion rates. Campaign maximizes the use you get out of the information in the Profile Store and makes it possible for you to personalize every single page of your website in order to create the best possible user experience.

Episerver Find

Episerver Find is the platform’s search engine, which is highly customizable in order to account for varying website architectures and differences in data sets. Find not only offers great search functionality, it also automatically generates SEO-friendly landing pages for search results. In addition, you can gain great insights into your visitors’ behavior with the feature’s extensive analytics. You can even use autocomplete, suggestions and related queries to guide your users and increase conversion rates.

Episerver Personalized Find

Taking Episerver Find a step further, is Episerver Personalized Find, which lets you personalize search results for individual users based on their previous behavior and interests. Using guided search options and consistently improving search results powered by machine learning, it takes your user where they want to go more smoothly, reducing the necessary clicks and actions between the start of a user’s visit and conversion.

Episerver Social

Episerver Social is a micro-service you can use to boost community interaction across your site. It enables you to make use of user-generated content like ratings, reviews and comments and create your own social community, including even individualized content streams for all your users. Considering that users are much more likely to buy from commerce sites that feature community interaction and reviews, Social can take a site to the next level.

What do you want Episerver to do for your business? Tell us.