With A/B testing and content personalization features available out of the box, Optimizely (Episerver) provides digital marketers a ready-made content laboratory for ensuring the right message is being delivered to the right user, on the right device, and at the right time.
As a presenting sponsor Optimizely's (formerly Episerver) Ascend later this month in Las Vegas, The C2 Group will discuss getting the most of these and other digital marketing features during one of its two tracks, It’s Alive! Maximizing Your Content Laboratory with Episerver.
But what about maximizing the Optimizely experience for content managers and site administrators? C2's specialized team of CMS experience architects reviewed five simple, yet powerful tools for maintaining and sustaining your Optimizely site:
Preview
More than a simple page preview prior to hitting "Publish", Optimizely's preview feature allows content managers to preview draft content as it would appear to a site visitor down to the device, language, visitor group, or campaign.
Permissions and Workflows
Not an overtly obvious feature, there’s a great deal of power behind Optimizely’s permission and workflow capabilities:
- Flexible, granular role-based security allows admins to create specific users, groups, and roles for viewing and editing rights across the site or for specific pages.
- Workflow capabilities support internal processes for content approval and publication by automatically creating user-specific tasks in the “My Tasks” queue and generating email notifications.
- Permissions and workflows are easily configured from the admin interface. C2 recommends careful planning around identifying user roles and permission sets, as well as defining and documenting content publication workflows to keep order within the CMS interface.
Version Compare
As content is changed, Optimizely automatically saves progress and maintains a detailed history of all activity. This makes it simple and easy to compare versions side by side and revert back to a previous state. If you have seasonal content, or simply prefer a previous iteration of a page or content block, this is a great feature to use.
Expiring Content
Optimizely has built-in “Start Publish” and “Stop Publish” properties for scheduling and archiving content. While expired content will no longer appear to end users, it is still available to editors and content managers within the interface. This is another great feature for seasonal or campaign content, and it’s available for all content types within the CMS.
Page and Navigation Creation
Creating a page in Optimizely means content teams build out the navigation and menu structure as they go. This is a simple, yet highly efficient feature that does away with the need to manually drag breadcrumb widgets onto a page or organize pages and menus separately.