Why web CMS and AB testing platforms are no longer enough
While many acquisition channels are saturated, attracting lots of traffic to your site or product doesn't necessarily mean more revenue these days.
The main goal of marketing, growth, and even product professionals should be providing users with more assertive communication and a genuinely engaging browsing experience that leads to conversions.
After all, if each person is unique and comes from a different browsing context, why should you show everyone the same content?
71% of consumers declare they expect companies to deliver personalized experiences, and 76% report they become frustrated when that doesn't happen, as stated in this McKinsey study.
Along with this goal come many challenges, though. Many CRO professionals with little or no programming knowledge face continual technological backlog time delays – even when they have developers dedicated to their teams. Having a site or product that is continuously optimized requires constant changes and many tests. That makes developers overloaded and unable to focus on long-term projects.
If you have ever used a traditional web CMS or AB testing tool, you know that most of these platforms allow the use of static content only, which means your entire audience sees the same message and offer.
For that reason, some companies try to develop in-house personalization systems, which have proven to be much more expensive and complex than they seem.
When this is not an option, some improvise by creating one landing page for each campaign or a different URL for each content variant they wish to test, for example. But this is unsustainable in the medium term, and not scalable at all. This post discusses which type of CMS empowers marketing and product teams with enhanced flexibility.
Make everyone happy with the tools the growth team loves: dynamic content, personalization, AB testing, and analytics.
How a modern CMS should look like these days
While the needs of your marketing and product teams evolve, the tech stack should adapt to it. That’s why you need a future-proof content management approach, and the right CMS for you is the one that allows you to have that. And how does that look like, in practice?
Unlike traditional CMS platforms, some API-first headless CMS allow you to create and manage modular, reusable content components. This granular approach means you no longer need to duplicate content across your channels. Instead, you can update a single component and see changes reflected site-wide, improving consistency and reducing manual work.
With centralized control, your team can manage content from a single source of truth, ensuring accuracy and enabling faster updates. Whether you are managing a complex knowledge base or structured data across multiple frontends, it allows your team to scale more efficiently.
You could say that implementing a modular content approach requires an initial investment in time and strategy. However, the long-term benefits — like reduced maintenance costs, improved traceability, and greater flexibility — are substantial. With less effort, you’ll be able to create more personalized and high-quality content.
This gives marketers autonomy, while developers and designers can rest assured that they won’t break the source code and will follow the pre-defined visual guidelines.
No integration headaches to have the right data
You might think that structured data about users’ browsing history is necessary to drive results. We know that this usually requires you to integrate your CMS with CDPs, CRMs, and other platforms like Salesforce.
But some modern digital experience platforms already offer the possibility of enriching user profiles progressively while they navigate. That makes it possible to create real-time updated segments based on:
- data related to marketing campaigns
- browsing data correlated to the current session
- data related to browser and device
- user geolocation data, including the country, state, and city
- data related to product views, shopping carts, and order checkouts
- profile data such as name, email, telephone, interests, etc.
In other words, when a user accesses your site, it changes based on which marketing campaigns the user has already clicked, which content they have viewed, how many sessions they have already started, their location, etc — and all of that, using first-party data from the same session collected by the CMS.
Why having 3 platforms for content management, AB testing, and personalization when you can have a single one?
Why Croct is a better solution for this
Besides integrating traditional web CMSs to personalization platforms, you would have to integrate AB testing platforms andweb analytic platforms for monitoring results.
If you have ever tried anything like that, you know that maintaining that many different integrated platforms is quite tricky. Any slight change can corrupt the code and negatively impact the data flow from one point to another. Besides interfering with this data reliability, it requires even more development hours.
As we know, it is never possible to be sure about which personalized content will achieve the best performance without experimentation and validating hypotheses. hat’s why we have created Croct to make it possible without integrations. After creating a personalized experience, you can rely on a robustl built-in AB test and analytics tool where it is possible to validate hypotheses by monitoring the performance of those changes.
We use the Bayesian analysis for AB tests to analyze results from experiments. That statistical approach is the most commonly used solution in companies with AB testing as their core and, therefore, the standard adopted by the experimentation industry.
Wrapping up
Creating a personalized browsing experience from end to end can give you a significant competitive advantage by making consumers feel connected to your brand. However, this comes with even bigger challenges when you need to integrate more than one tool. Through Croct, you have everything you need to iterate rapidly in just one platform.
Take a look at our playbooks to learn more about how the implementation works and the practical steps to begin optimizing your site and generating more conversions. You can also create your free account to explore our platform yourself.