Everything brands need to deliver and evolve experiences in a fully integrated solution. Adapt quickly based on contextual insights through Horizon and deploy data-informed updates or new experience elements faster than ever before.
If you want a quick overview of the whole release, check out Sitecore 10 Highlights article. In the following article, we’re going to drill down into the changes and benefits for the technical teams of content strategists, authors, and marketers.
While a lot of the big changes in the release address technology delivery, there are several new enhancements that allow marketing teams to quickly evolve experiences and have a better flow with their existing tools.
See the promo!
The Sitecore corporate YouTube channel dropped a 2-minute promo video all about delivering the ultimate customer experience with Sitecore 10:
You can also see the official sitecore.com What’s New? page https://www.sitecore.com/whats-new
Personalize on CMS-only installations
A big bonus to the digital marketing team in this release is the ability to roll out basic session and device personalization even with CMS-only installations. No need to install the full Experience Platform to take advantage of this type of personalization. This allows you to start your personalization journey with a lighter-weight infrastructure!
Read more on the full list of personalization conditions available in the official documentation.
Do more with expanded Horizon features
The Horizon editing interface has expanded to cover more user scenarios. With the addition of the ability to swap between sites and languages, larger solutions with multisite and multilingual can make more use of the Horizon interface. This includes being able to switch to your SXA sites!
A new dedicated field editor experience allows you to edit page metadata that is not directly editable on the page. This allows you to edit other types of fields without the WYSIWYG interface. This is also useful for editing ‘headless’ content that is not intended for a page. Using the new Content view allows you to see all the content items, not just the pages, and edit your data in the Horizon field editor.
Speaking of SXA sites, the integration to SXA has been improved to support editing directly on the page for all supported field types and also do site-specific images and datasources. A tighter integration between SXA and Horizon editing will be coming over the course of the Sitecore 10 series.
Also, if you happen to be developing your assets in Sitecore Content Hub DAM, you can now leverage that rich media in the Horizon editor instead of only using the native Sitecore Experience Platform media library. This allows your marketing team to have a better flow from Content Hub to your web channel.
Make it easier to connect with customers
There are a few changes that have been made to help marketing teams connect with customers and get better insights across a variety of Sitecore tools.
Easier email creation
HTML creation for email marketing is a complex and niche skill. Some additional out-of-the-box templates have been added to the current library to help marketers get started, faster!
- Left Image Block
- Right Image Block
- Image Focus
If you do have some markup skills, the templates can now be fully customized to your needs using Scriban, just like editing rendering variants in SXA.
Connect to customers with automated birthday campaigns
There are now new ways to leverage marketing automation to engage with contacts around their birth date. You can now do things like:
- Send offers some number of days in advance of their birthday
- Send greetings on their birthday
- Send reminders and follow-up with your customer some number of days after their birthday
Deeper analytics insights into your audiences
Another important change in this area is the ability to filter any analytics report by a marketing segment. Marketers can work more easily with segments and:
- Target segments of contacts via predefined rules and then report based on that segment.
- Push an email to a segmented list and then see the impact across the site.
- Report on the performance of key audience groups.
Easier workflow with Microsoft Word
This might seem small, but a lot of authors have been waiting for easier workflow going from their Microsoft Word documents and into Sitecore rich text fields. Previously, authors would often break the branding on a site because their copy-paste efforts would introduce extra markup from their documents. With the new changes, clean source HTML is created that preserves the content AND the branding.
Model more of your content in Content Hub
For some teams, Sitecore Content Hub is now the central hub for all media content in their DAM, but also content models defined in CMP. Their web channel is only one channel consuming this content. This release expands how much content can be managed in CMP and then integrated to the Sitecore Experience Platform. With support for additional field types, this allows marketing teams to centralize more of their content creation into Content Hub and still leverage this with their web teams. With the addition of a taxonomy import, marketing teams can also make sure that the taxonomy associations they make in Content Hub will persist into the content items in the Sitecore Experience Platform.
Support your data privacy compliance journey
Sitecore’s previous releases have incrementally been improving the privacy tools available to teams looking to meet with regulatory needs and customer privacy demands. In Sitecore 10, new support has been added to help you on your journey!
Right to be forgotten
A major need for marketing teams on a journey to meet data privacy regulations, like GDPR, is to support the need for visitors to have their personal data anonymized. With this release, Sitecore Forms makes it easier for you to support erasing this personal identifiable data that is saved via the out-of-the-box Save data submit action. This includes redacting submission values, removing any associations to xDB Contacts, and deleting any files uploaded by the visitor.
This approach allows for marketing teams to still see reporting data, even when anonymized.
Right to object
A second change in this release regards making it easier to enforce and manage consent choices. Visitors need to be able to consent to being tracked and marketing teams need to store these choices and make decisions on them. The new consent management tools available in the platform allow for implementation teams to configure sites to require explicit consent before the Sitecore tracking will begin. The tracker is now able to be disabled based on the consent settings stored for the user, and xDB supports the ability to store these consent settings and persist it across visits for the contact.
This allows marketing teams to have some sites operate as they currently do, but add additional consent requirements for specific sites that need to meet stricter privacy guidelines.
Drive real-time Salesforce marketing automation
While Sitecore does offer marketing automation capabilities, we also understand that teams may already have their own tools in place that are handling this aspect of their marketing tool stack. Sitecore Connect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows teams to work in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and leverage the rich visitor analytics data stored in xDB.
Now, with the latest release, you can make use of this connection in real-time, no need to wait for a nightly batch. A new Sitecore Marketing automation activity, specifically for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, allows marketers to configure a realtime event to integrate with SFMC.
By connecting directly to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketing teams can respond to events in Sitecore and immediately send information about the current visitor over to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and place visitors into Journey Builder marketing automation plans.
This means that you can respond across all your channels to events, in real-time, in the marketing automation tool that you use.
Continue learning!
Make sure to check out the business user documentation for Sitecore 10, and subscribe to Discover Sitecore to see new videos on Sitecore 10 as we release them!
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