Last week’s Kentico Connections was full of exciting product enhancements, new releases, and networking. As a devoted EMS user I bounced between the marketing and hands-on tracks, and even had the opportunity to have impactful conversations with key members of the Kentico team.
While our Kentico development expert, Laura Frese, has covered all things dev-related from Kentico Connection. Below, discover some of the key highlights from the Marketing sessions, along with interesting facts I learned in the hands-on workshops.
Kentico 9
To start off the conference Kentico’s CEO, Petr Palas, shared that their newest version will be released to the public November 24th. Beyond the numerous functionality updates for developers, Kentico 9 has some major online marketing enhancements. Palas, described this change as part of the “Digital (r)evolution”. We now live in a time where customers aren’t just using digital, but living in a digital world- therefore our marketing tactics must adapt to these changes.
Integrated Campaign Management
The biggest change within Kentico 9’s EMS, is the campaign feature. In an effort to improve the user experience, the campaign management module has been redesigned to take marketers through a typical flow when creating an online campaign. Within one work area, marketers are able to:
- Create a campaign
- Set-up conversion and tracking codes
- Create and update campaign page content
- Build and launch the campaign’s email
- View the new detailed reporting
Another feature that has received a major facelift is the campaign reporting. In Kentico 9, the campaign reporting is more detailed than anything we’ve ever seen within Kentico before.
Kentico Draft
During the keynote, another big announcement was made to help Kentico clients with their content strategy. Introducing Kentico Draft. This is a cloud-based service for digital agencies and content teams that provide a single place for web content production. All team members are able to collaborate on content together. Once it is finalized, the content can be seamlessly imported into your website.
Other EMS Updates
In addition to the integrated campaign management, there are a variety of other Kentico 9 EMS updates that I’m looking forward to implementing in the future. These include:
- Improving the Marketing Automation work area with new conditions to better automate eCommerce functions and the cart abandonment process.
- Adding more detailed reporting to the Email Marketing. This now displays statistics such as delivery rate, engagement and the most clicked links.
- The Contact Management has been updated to bulk import contact groups more efficiently using segmentation; along with giving contacts the ability to unsubscribe from all marketing emails in one click.
- Kentico has enhanced their Persona field even further. This will make setting up your site’s personalization even simpler.
