FRICTION FREE EPISERVER CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY! Proven methods for delivering a great customer experience

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1 INNOVATIVE E-COMMERCE & DIGITAL MARKETING TIME SAVERS Get the most out of your day page 3 SELF SUFFICIENT Aspect sets itself free from IT page 5 SEEING THE FUTURE How the internet will look in 2025 page 12 EPISERVER CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY! THE TECH MASTER Scott Brinker on the marketing technologist page 14 FRICTION FREE Proven methods for delivering a great customer experience

2 ON MY MIND MARTIN HENRICSON CEO, EPISERVER On the road to find out In this issue: The friction-free customer experience. Page 7. Internet connectivity in Page 12. Scott Brinker on the marketing technologist. Page 14. T his year EPiServer celebrates its 20th anniversary. So much has changed since 1994, but now more than ever the internet is empowering organizations to transform how they operate and get closer to their customers. In this issue we look at how companies can use agility and speed to create outstanding customer experiences that help them stand out from the crowd. We also speak with Scott Brinker about how marketing is becoming increasingly technology driven and changing as a discipline. With EPiServer Find, we introduce a completely new way to present products and content. Using state-of-thenavigation technology, EPiServer Find guides visitors from Google all the way to the actual conversion and gives you great insight into how your visitors behave and convert. Happy reading! Website: Project manager EPiServer: Joakim Holmquist joakim.holmquist@episerver.com Address: European HQ EPiServer AB, Regeringsgatan 67, Box 7007, Stockholm, Sweden; US HQ EPiServer Inc. 2 Mid America Plaza, Suite 600. Oakbrook Terrace, IL USA. Editoral production: Spoon, Stockholm Editor: Chad Henderson Design and prepress:: Spoon Website: Printed by: Elanders 2 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

3 FAST TRACK GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR DAY BY JANE CHRISTIE-SMITH Everyone wants more time. But as we re not going to get the wished for 26-hour day, here s who is working to save us time, be productive and make us a lot happier Prioritizing your life Do zeroing your inbox or frequently reorganizing your to-do list sound familiar? This is just one of the ways we are sabotaging ourselves by either not completing critical tasks or succeeding but in a frenzy of stress. As an expert on behavioral economics and irrational behavior, Dan Ariely has spent years researching what makes us do the unproductive things we do. He s shared his insights in the bestselling Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, and now has teamed up with other experts to form Timeful to put their research to practical use. Timeful is working on an app that harnesses their AI and behavioral science expertise and big data analysis to help you prioritize your life. Check out their site to request a beta invite. timeful.com Smart sleep mask Intelclinic s NeuroOn sleep mask and app help you get the most from power naps. While you re sleeping, the mask will measure your eye movements, brainwaves, the oxygen levels in your blood and the tension in your muscles, and when you ve completed a REM phase, the mask will gently vibrate to wake you. Unlike smartphone sleep apps that can be affected by bed partners and pets, NeuroOn is solely focused on you. Once your nap is done, the mask will transmit all your sleep data to the app, which will then be able to offer advice on how to improve your sleep quality. intelclinic.com Working smarter As most of us know, there is a huge difference between being busy and getting important work done. Now you can take the lean and agile methods used by software companies and startups and apply them to your own work. Project management apps such as Trello, Kanbanflow and AgileZen can help you visualize your work and break big projects down into very concrete to-dos. In this way you work on the things that will have the greatest impact, so that you can reduce waste and keep moving forward.. trello.com; kanbanflow.com; agilezen.com My news today News aggregators are not new, but they are getting increasingly sophisticated in creating personalized web experiences for users. Flipboard remains one of the most popular content curators that offers users magazine-style news based on your interests. If you re looking for exclusive content that s relevant to your industry (and your competitors), you might want to apply for Quibb membership. Quibb is described as a professional network to share industry news and analysis but what makes it so desirable is the caliber of members and the quality of its daily newsletter. But, be warned, Quibb currently only accepts about 38 percent of applications. flipboard.com, quibb.com EPiSERVER ENGAGE 3

4 SOLUTIONS HOW OTHERS CLIMBED THE MOUNTAIN BY ISABELLE KLIGER & CHAD HENDERSON We do business with more than 30 countries CHALLENGE: Due to rapid global expansion, leading marketing supply chain company, InnerWorkings, Inc., needed an e-commerce solution that could support multiple languages, currencies and brands. EPiServer provided the e-commerce and CMS tools that enabled InnerWorkings to transition from a US-centric online presence to a solution through which it manages more than 200 sites in 30+ countries. ERIC HARKE INNERWORKINGS, INC. Job title: Vice President ecommerce & Product Management Website: inwk.com EPiServer products: EPiServer CMS, EPiServer Commerce SOLUTION: Five years ago, we were a US-only company and our technology infrastructure was built accordingly. We now do business with 30+ countries, on more than 200 sites. EPiServer s e-commerce and CMS capabilities met all our criteria for an easy-to-deploy, global platform. Its products were clearly designed to be global, while competing solutions appeared to be English-centric with additional languages added as an afterthought. So far, eight of our sites have gone global. They are already in thirteen languages including Chinese, Arabic and Japanese and any currency we do business in can be integrated into the platform. We also used EPiServer s social add-ons to increase engagement with our customers. With comments, reviews and a dialog between and with our users - something typically missing in B2B e-commerce - we have gained a competitive advantage. PHOTO: PAUL AUDIA 4 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

5 BETH ZINDEL ASPECT Job title: Marketing Operations Manager Website: aspect.com EPiServer products: EPiServer CMS, EPiServer Commerce It was just light years beyond the tool that we were using PHOTO: NELS AKERLUND CHALLENGE: As a global leader in contact center solutions, Aspect provides customer engagement solutions for every type of telephony, web interaction, and intelligence based routing web chats. Due to growing customer demands, Aspect needed a tool and platform where the marketing team could manage day-to-day website updates without involving other departments. SOLUTION: The thing that really helped us choose EPiServer was the ease-of-use. It was just light years beyond the tool that we were using. We also needed a tool that supported more advanced capabilities, like a site that had a fully-responsive design where we can do persona-based content and have built-in tools for things like A/B testing. The initial site went live in November 2013, and immediately after that we had decided to launch a new cloud contact center offering called Zipwire. It s targeted more at small to medium sized businesses that need immediate deployment. So it s built with that in mind very responsive, mobile friendly and focused on offering people a free trial. From an efficiency and performance-improving perspective, the platform has done everything we were hoping for. Our executive leadership wants everything we're doing to be best in class. Using a new web platform has been part of our transformation as a company that doesn t just talk the talk, but walks the walk. EPiSERVER ENGAGE 5

6 SOLUTIONS CLAIRE SHARP SUNDT VARNER GROUP Job title: Project Manager Digital Media Website: EPiServer products: EPiServer CMS, EPiServer Commerce Partners: Geta and Creuna We start small then expand on things that actually work PHOTO: PATRIK LUNDIN CHALLENGE: Varner-Gruppen is one of Scandinavia s largest clothes retailers, with more than 1,300 stores including Bik Bok, Carlings, Volt, Cubus, Dressman, Solo, Urban, Vivikes, Wearhouse, Levi's Store and WOW. When the company decided to launch online shops in 2012, it needed a flexible solution that could keep up with its rapid campaign cycles. SOLUTION: We started using EPiServer CMS quite early, in 2008, to build several websites where the focus was on pre-shopping, driving customers to the stores. We have about three million hits a month now on these different sites. Then in January last year we kicked off a double e- commerce project for Cubus and Dressman XL. Having a super flexible content management system was very important because all of our brands are campaign-based companies. This means that every three weeks they change their campaigns and after that all the material is rarely used again. With the online shops, we started by building very basic campaigns, like a 25 percent discount, then built more and more modules using a combination of InRiver, which is a PIM platform, and EPiServer Commerce. For the Dressman XL online shop, 90 percent of our customers take a campaign product with them, so we are very happy about that. When we build stuff we start small and expand when we understand how things actually work. We are now on our second version of the checkout after a few months. We like to get things launched then start improving straight away. 6 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

7 BY CHAD HENDERSON AND JOAKIM HOLMQUIST THE FRICTION-FREE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE n a global, online marketplace, customer experience is increasingly becoming the key differentiator for companies. But what is a great customer experience? Here is a secret for you: nobody knows. Your customers are your customers, and no white paper or research report is going to be able to tell you exactly what they want. Sometimes even your customers won t be able to tell you what they want they might not know until they see it. The good news is that there is a way of finding out scientifically what your customers want and how to deliver the best possible experience for them. It requires that you work methodically to learn what your customers really care about and what they care less about, and then working to continuously improve that experience. Many companies say that they put the customer at the center of their business, but in fact few truly use the new power of digital technology to listen to their customers and hone in on what customers really care about. Today the future belongs to companies that can speed up the process of getting products and services in front of real customers, learning from their behavior and building new iterations with the insights about their customers behavior taken into account. If you do not focus on watching how your customers behave and have the agility to test and tweak the experience then it is time to start worrying. There are plenty of industries that

8 IN TODAY S MARKETPLACE EVERY MOMENT OF FRICTION IN YOUR BUSINESS have already been disrupted by new players who are simply providing a more customer-friendly, friction-free experience. Airbnb and Uber, for example, are not the first or only companies to offer services for vacation rentals and taxis, but they are succeeding because they are providing a superior customer experience. We ll get back to this in a moment. INCREASES THE CHANCES THAT USERS WILL GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. Get customer-obsessed When Forrester Research conducts its Customer Experience Index, it measures three ways customers judge companies: How enjoyable are you to do business with? How easy are you to do business with? How effective are you at meeting your customers needs? These questions matter because in today s marketplace every moment of friction in your business increases the chances that users will go somewhere else. Consumers today are overwhelmed by choices, and it is your job to make the choices for them as easy and enjoyable as possible. For example, Amazon focused on customer experience early on with features like one-click purchasing with no need to re-enter credit card information and confirmations. Amazon studied what its customers did and didn t do, then worked on streamlining the process as much as possible to reduce friction. They still do today. As obvious as focusing on the customer experience sounds, a recent survey of global CMOs found that 63 percent of them listed acquiring new customers as their top priority, while only 22 percent said retaining current customers was their top goal. This lack of focus on customer experience shows in the bottom line. The average e-commerce company earns just 7 percent of its business from repeat customers, while Amazon, on the other hand, earns 66 percent of its business from repeat buyers. These statistics matter, because today s customers are empowered like never before. They are tech enabled, they re highly connected, and frankly they demand a whole new level of customer obsession for you to win their business and keep their business, says Forrester Vice President and Group Director Sharyn Leaver. More than ever, customers control how and what they find out about your company and products. Have real customers validate your ideas The world is in constant change, as are customers preferences, so smart companies are always on the hunt for novel ways of getting closer to their customers. One way of doing this is to let go of rigid, waterfall projects where you wait until the end to get the customer involved. Instead products, services or websites are 8 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

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10 developed in smaller cycles. At the end of each cycle which lasts a month or less customers can start using what has been built and the company can start learning how real customers interact with it and what is important to them. Then this feedback is used in to validate or falsify assumptions and is incorporated in the next cycle of development. In this way the development plan can also be adjusted based on changing conditions and the actual behavior of real customers. The companies that will be the most successful in creating great customer experiences will be those that in addition to having a great vision and strategy go through the loop of building something, getting feedback and getting to validated learning quicker than their competitors. Startups without much of the legacy systems and heritage of established companies can have an easier time speeding up this process, which is why they have managed to disrupt industries by creating superior customer experiences. However, there are several examples of established companies who have benefitted from continuous experimenting. Even giants can move quickly Intuit, an American software company that develops financial and tax preparation software, has established a process where it continuously experiments with new ideas in order to learn what works and what customers want. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries describes how Intuit with 8,000 employees changed its development process and gained significant results. Previously over the course of a year, the marketing and product teams would conceive one major initiative that would be rolled out just in time for tax season, which often led to too many of its products failing. Now they test over five hundred different changes in a two-and-a-half-month tax season, writes Ries. They re running up to seventy different tests per week. The team can make a change live on its website on Thursday, run it 10 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

11 WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE SUCCESS CRITERIA FOR YOUR WEBSITE? OR FOR A GIVEN PAGE OR SPECIFIC PART OF YOUR WEBSITE? HAVE YOU IDENTIFIED THE MAIN BOTTLENECK THAT CAUSES YOUR VISITORS THE MOST AMOUNT OF FRICTION? WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU CHANGED JUST ONE SMALL PART OF THE CUSTOMER S JOURNEY? over the weekend, read the results on Monday, and come to conclusions starting Tuesday; then they rebuild new tests on Thursday and launch the next set on Thursday night. Just like Intuit, if you approach a big idea by breaking it down into small steps, perhaps launching a smaller part of it to test whether your customers really care about it, you can gauge the impact early on and make necessary tweaks or drop it altogether before it becomes an enormous waste. Ries and many with him now believe that a company s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build innovation factories like at Intuit to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis. Rather than trying to get it right the first time, companies need to focus on shorter cycles and smaller changes that they can immediately learn from and adapt to. Getting the customer experience right in all of the touchpoints where you interact with customers is a difficult and continuous process, and it can be hard to know where to begin. An excellent way to start is with your website or even a specific part of your website. Remember to think like a scientist: develop a hypothesis based on something you can measure, then test it. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you get started: Are you crystal clear on what the ultimate success criteria is for your website? Or for a given page or specific part of your website? Have you identified the main bottleneck that causes your visitors the most amount of friction to achieving your success criteria? What would happen if you changed just one small part of the customer s journey? It is OK to have brilliant (or non-brilliant) assumptions about what your customers want. That is part of the innovation process. It is not OK, however, to leave these assumptions untested particularly for long periods of time. So get out your magnifying glass or put on your lab coat whatever research paraphernalia you need and start discovering your customers today. EPiSERVER ENGAGE 11

12 THE KNOW GETTING REALLY CONNECTED It s only 25 years old, but already the internet has changed your life. Buckle up, it s just begun. Things are going to get a whole lot more integrated. Engage looks at what s next for the internet. BY JANE CHRISTIE -SMITH THE INTERNET AS DOCTOR Imagine a GPS system for your health: it knows your habits, your genomics and your goals, and it can help you reach a target, whether that be to run a marathon, lose weight, manage hypertension or lower your risk of cancer. Dr Daniel Kraft, Singularity University The Massachusetts-based start-up MC10 is working on a flexible computing prototype that will be applied to the skin with a temporary tattoo. Sensors inside will monitor heart rate, brain activity, body temperature and exposure to UV radiation. This is the start of our health going from reactive (waiting for a doctor's appointment), to proactive, continuous and entirely in your hands. And you re not the only one who will benefit, according to Jupiter Research, the global annual savings from monitoring our own health will be 23bn by EPiSERVER ENGAGE

13 THE INTERNET IS EVERYWHERE: Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own social networks, which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation. More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do. - David Clark, senior research scientist at MIT. This all-pervasive, all-around-us internet is coming soon. In fact, futurist Gerd Leonhard thinks that we will see the end of offline within five years. Our technology, our actions and our interactions will all depend on connectivity between our devices. We will be always contactable, always visible and always on. Some futurists suggest that absolute privacy and the ability to be offline will be the preserve of the elite. THE INTERNET AS AN EXTENSION OF OURSELVES: Somebody s approaching and I need to think of something clever, and if my neocortex doesn t cut it, I'll be able to access more neocortex in the cloud. - Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering, Google Kurzweil has famously said that by 2045 we will reach singularity where humans and computers will merge, resulting in our intelligence being enhanced a billion-fold thanks to high-tech brain extensions. And by uploading our minds to the cloud, we will achieve digital immortality. But before that, in the 2030s, he believes our neocortexes will be connecting to the cloud via brain nanobots, so by having access to so much information, we will become much smarter wirelessly. He believes we re part way there already, with our portable technology that we carry around with us. THE INTERNET AS AUGMENTED REALITY: We will grow accustomed to seeing the world through multiple data layers [by 2025]. This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing as well as policing and espionage. - Daren C. Brabham, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California Wearable tech, and Google Glass in particular, has given customers a taste of what a data layered world will look like. And it will affect every aspect of our lives, from fast facts about a landmark as you drive past it or conversation suggestions when you re on a date. Tom Standage, digital editor for The Economist, says: We will see augmented reality as the new interface for information. Overlaying it on the real world will come to be seen as an enormous shift; historically, there will be a period before and after the advent of the aug, as some sci-fi writers call it. THE INTERNET AS THE GREAT EDUCATOR: The biggest impact on the world [by 2025] will be universal access to all human knowledge. The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plough in India or China. Enabling that person and the millions like him or her will have a profound impact on the development of the human race. - Hal Varian, chief economist for Google Already organizations like Khan Academy and EdX are providing educational resources and online courses free of charge to millions of people. By 2025, immersive learning environments could enable students to explore 3D worlds and become part of the eras they are studying. EPiSERVER ENGAGE 13

14 BY LINDSAY HOLMWOOD PHOTO STEVE MARSEL THE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIST Scott Brinker believes that marketing today is in the midst of a disruptive evolution unlike any other seen in the past 50 years. To adapt to this new landscape a new species of marketer must emerge: the marketing technologist. Having worked at the intersection of marketing and technology for the last 20 years, Scott Brinker is now sharing his passion through his Chief Marketing Technologist blog and the company he co-founded, ion interactive. His fascination with how the marketing and IT worlds are coming together and changing each other has resulted in speaking engagements around the world, and a new ebook, A New Brand of Marketing. And he has a mission to help marketing teams everywhere integrate technology into their everyday work. What does a marketing technologist do and what kinds of companies need one? It s a person with a technology background or skill set that works in the marketing department. Their mission is to help marketing use technology more effectively, and understand how to leverage these technologies to reach the audience they want online. More or less every company needs that capability; even if you re a small company, you become so reliant on digital marketing as a way to stand out that even having a little marketing technology skill can make a big difference. What skills do marketers need today that they haven't before? The back-office of marketing its internal operations used to be no more complex than Excel spreadsheets and a mailing database. Today, it includes CRM, content management, marketing automation, predictive analytics, and testing and optimization tools. The skills that have always been important, such as good communication, design, and market research are still valuable. But now we have to include strong data analytics, managing technology to execute great marketing, and a responsibility for user experience design in web experiences. So it s not that everyone in marketing needs all of these skills, but teams as a whole need these capabilities. Even having a little marketing technology skill can make a big difference. SCOTT BRINKER Age: 42 Residence: Boston, Massachusetts. Occupation: CTO at ion interactive and author of the chiefmartec.com blog. Background: Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Columbia University; Master s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University; and an MBA from MIT. Family: Wife Jill Geiser and daughter Jordan, EPiSERVER ENGAGE

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16 What are the four biggest trends in marketing now? Moving from traditional marketing channels to increasingly digital channels. 1 For years, the money story of digital has been the steady migration of ad spending from traditional channels to digital ones. The real migration has been with how customers find and evaluate what they will buy and from whom. For many markets, the first touchpoints of discovery are now digital via search, social media, mobile apps, and an ever growing array of new digitally-powered devices. Video: The next wave of content marketing Scott Brinker discusses how to prepare for it: episerver.com/scottbrinker You are a big believer in applying agile methods to marketing. Why do you think they are useful? Marketing today is in such a rapidly changing environment. By taking new approaches to how we manage marketing, we can productively harness these explosions of changes, like a combustion engine. Agile marketing lets you tap those powerful disruptions for your advantage. Rather than big marketing campaigns, you start with a little strategy. You engage in iterative cycles of plan-design-launch-measure that are executed tightly together. After a series of iterations, you step back to reflect on insights learned, patterns discovered. And that seamlessly leads into the next little strategy, rising up the learning curve. In your new book, your write that marketing strategy is changing from being about communications to experiences. What do you mean by that? It used to be that marketing was in the business of communications. We would create ads or brochures, things that people might read, listen to or watch on TV, but when it came to actually having an experience with a company, such as purchasing or using a product, marketing didn t get involved. People can now go from reading an ad about a company online to clicking on it and visiting a website. Now I m not just passively reading things but interactively having an experience with a company before I even become a customer. And the quality of that interaction will influence whether I become a customer or not. Marketers are always looking for new ways to engage customers and reduce barriers to conversions. Why do you think marketing apps might help with this? A marketing app is really just a lightweight web-based interaction that a customer can have with you like an ROI calculator or a product configurator. These apps are intended to help educate prospects about a particular topic or solution. The advantage of marketing apps becoming interactive is that they let people learn by doing things like quizzes, playing a game or being asked questions. I think one of the exciting things about marketing apps is that they get away from all or nothing conversion offers. You can start to get people engaged with your content without any gate, and then after you ve demonstrated value to them, you can then move to a more tailored conversion offer. 2 Moving from just being about art and copy to being about code and data. Whereas industrial age smokestacks spewed soot, today s information age software belches data. But these billowing clouds of data are laced with gold. The output of one piece of software can serve as the input to others as well as itself where it can then be mined for insights and applied toward better, more tailored user experiences. 3 Moving from communications to customer experiences Since marketing is what you do to win a customer, and these extended product experiences are increasingly how customers are won, then by default, marketing is now in the business of delivering experiences not merely communications. The clock on a customer s experience now starts at their very first touchpoint. 4 Moving from thinking about marketing in terms of yearly marketing plans to a more fluid set of agile marketing iterations. The short version for a more thorough introduction, read my blog post, Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change is to not treat such projects as big, indivisible engagements that must follow a rigid plan determined up front. Instead, projects are executed through a series of mini development cycles, each lasting no more than a month. Each mini cycle seeks to produce something tangible that can stimulate feedback, either from internal review or deployment in the market. presents A NEW BRAND OF MARKETING The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline by Scott Brinker Marketing Technology Management Chief Marketing Technologist Blog Excerpted from A New Brand of Marketing by Scott Brinker 16 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

17 IMPROVE MARIE-LOUISE NOHLGREN, TRAINER, EPISERVER Choose your content type 1 Easily reuse content Would you like to be able to use the same content on several sites or pages? This can easily be done by creating your content once as a block and then reusing it across all your sites and channels! Not only can you reuse content, you can also personalize it for a specific segment, which makes your content context-aware. Here is how easy it is to create reusable blocks for your webpages. Learn more about EPiServer by attending a course: episerver.com/signup Define the settings 2 4 Add your block to the selected pages 3 CHOOSE YOUR CONTENT TYPE When creating a block, the first thing you have to do is choose a block type that corresponds with your desired type of content. Perhaps you want to create a teaser, a poll, a video or contact information to be published on a number of pages on your website. Your blocks are stored in a folder structure, where you can easily get an overview of them and move them around. With global blocks, editors can reuse not only content they have created themselves, but also blocks created by other editors on the website. 1 2 DEFINE THE SETTINGS Next you need to define the settings for the block. For a teaser block you would add your heading, the text, an image and finally a link to a page where the user is taken when clicking on your teaser. Blocks may look differently depending on the layout of the pages they are used on. Previewing will give you an idea of how the block will look in each variation. ADD YOUR BLOCK TO THE PAGES 3 Now it s time to add your new content to one or several pages. You simply drag and drop the block into a content area on the chosen places. A content area can contain several blocks, pages and images. SET A LAYOUT FOR THE BLOCK 4 When the block is in place, you can easily alter the layout using the drop-down menu to give your page content the right look. The same block can have different layout settings on different pages. When updating any settings or content in the block, you do it once and it is updated on all the pages where it has been added. EPiSERVER ENGAGE 17

18 UPDATE NEWS FROM EPiSERVER BY ISABELLE KLIGER FROM SEARCH TO CONVERSION A whopping 92 percent of internet users says they use search engines, more than any other online activity, including . This creates high expectations. Search is now used as navigation. With EPiServer Find, there is an entirely new way to attract visitors to your website, engage them with content and convert them into customers. EPiServer Find is a smart search solution that can be used to create automatic landing pages for visitors, for instance based on their Google searches. It saves you time, optimizes marketing strategies, and delivers a great customer experience. This is not just another site search box to park on the page header, we ve applied search technology in a strategic and innovative way, said Bob Egner, VP of Product Management at EPiServer. This latest release is part of our long-term strategy to address key challenges of today s e-commerce and digital marketing landscapes. EPiServer Find gives you a completely new way to present products and content. With EPiServer Find, content and product information are set free from the rigid site structure and are instead focused on the needs of the customer through personalization and faceted navigation. To boost conversions, EPiServer Find also includes auto-suggestions that learn from past behavior, related queries that encourage more specific searches and behavioral boosts that keep the most popular items for any search query at the top of the results page. Learn more at Continuous releases provide more value faster The market moves at internet speed and EPiServer knows how important it is for customers to be able to get results quickly from their online business. EPiServer has therefore shifted to a continuous release process, where updates to its products are delivered on a weekly basis. The updates will include both fixes and new features in order to radically shorten time to market. Partners benefit by getting access to new improved versions immediately, and customers benefit by being able to add new functionality to their solutions as they hit the market, says Per Ivansson, VP Development & Operations/ CTO at EPiServer. By continuously delivering small incremental improvements, EPiServer can deliver new features and fixes as soon as they are ready and respond quicker to feedback from its user and developer community. 18 EPiSERVER ENGAGE

19 EPISERVER TURNS 20 EPiServer in numbers 1994 The year EPiServer was founded, and the same year the internet was first available to the Swedish public. 7 The company s number of employees when the first version of EPiServer was launched in ,900 Sites were running on EPiServer in 2007, compared to 25,000 today. 5,400 EPiServer now has 5,400 customers worldwide, with 357 new customers in To celebrate EPiServer s 20th anniversary this year, the company brought together its employees from around the world for a beautiful day in the Stockholm archipelago. There was fishing, canoeing, champagne toasting, and a chance to meet colleagues both new and old. To all of our customers, thank you for partnering with us on our journey! We hope that the next 20 years will be just as amazing as the first. 3 million Lines of code for EPiServer products have been written since the company was founded million Search queries per day on EPiServer Find today. EPiSERVER ENGAGE 19

20 Connecting e-commerce and Digital Marketing Fuel your e-commerce growth! Digital leaders use EPiServer to create winning online experiences Craft online experiences that engage and entertain across all touchpoints. Do it smarter and faster than ever before. EPiServer Commerce is a multi-channel, multi-market e-commerce e-commerce platform built around the user. Our e-commerce e-commerce solution incorporates the full scope of EPiServer s best-in-class web Web content Content management Management to to power your your end-to-end e-commerce e-shop and site help and you help reach you reach revenues revenues and and growth growth faster. faster. No No matter matter what what channel channel or what or what market. market. An innovator in multichannel digital marketing and Find out e-commerce more at episerver.com/worksmarter software to drive your online Visit presence and create business results.