We talk to organisations on a weekly basis, in Europe, North America and Australia, who have a Sitecore website, but are not using Sitecore to its full capability.
Any of these sound familiar?
- We don’t know how to set up Sitecore behavioural or geo-IP personalisation.
- We haven’t had training on Sitecore marketing automation.
- We’re not sure how to enable Sitecore goals and engagement measurement.
- We don’t know how to use Sitecore path analyser.
- We want to use Sitecore’s A/B testing tools, but don’t know how.
- We’d like to use the Sitecore experience database and experience profile, but we’re not sure how.
- All our customer data is in different systems, and we want it all in Sitecore to help us make the right marketing decisions.
These issues often mean that organisations get frustrated with Sitecore and start to look for a different website platform.
But these problems are not caused by having Sitecore as your website platform.
All of these things will help optimise your website and give visitors a better customer experience, and they will help to increase conversions and revenue.
These problems are down to the lack of expertise of your incumbent Sitecore agency.
By going out to pitch for a new website platform, you could be costing your organisation more money in the long run, when what you really need is a Sitecore partner that knows Sitecore inside and out, and can deliver what you need.
The cost of re-platforming
The cost of re-platforming a website can vary depending on whether you have a brochure website designed to simply showcase your services, a B2B website designed to drive leads into the business, or an ecommerce website where you sell direct to consumer and have a direct impact on your revenue and margins.
It will also depend on the agency you choose and their capabilities, and the website platform you choose (or the one selected for you by your digital agency) and its out-of-the-box functionality and flexibility in meetings your business needs.
When it comes to designing and building websites, the old adage is true – you get what you pay for.
The cost of a new website design-and-build could be anything between 50k and 250k or more. And that’s before you’ve added in the cost of website hosting, ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and integrating it with different systems.
There’s also no guarantee that your new website platform will come with all the tools and technology that are available in Sitecore, which can make a huge difference to your digital marketing success.
The cost of adding martech
There are a number of marketing technologies (martech) that come with Sitecore that make things easier for you: email marketing, marketing automation, personalisation, A/B testing, multivariate testing, artificial intelligence (AI) to drive automatic customer-led context marketing, and let’s not forget the API connectors to sync with and pull in third-party data from other systems.
There are only a handful of all-in-one website platforms out there with the same capabilities – and none comes close to Sitecore.
When you start looking at re-platforming away from Sitecore, you will also need to assess all the different technologies you will need to achieve the same as you would have done within Sitecore. And you will need add the ongoing costs – both in terms of money and people – of maintaining these and integrating them with your chosen website platform.
You could soon be looking at a new website, new hosting agreement, new email marketing platform, new personalisation tool, new A/B testing tool, and a new website analytics tool – as well as the cost of going out to pitch for the work, all the time spent searching and selecting the right vendors and technologies, and training and upskilling your teams.
How much will all this cost your organisation?
You will quickly find that the effort spent in searching for and selecting the right martech, and the costs involved in integrating these tools with your new website platform – if indeed you even can – will outweigh simply looking for the right Sitecore agency.
The cost of finding a good Sitecore partner
There are Sitecore partners and then there are Sitecore Platinum Partners.
The cost of finding a Sitecore partner in the UK and Australia with an outstanding track record, with a long history of successfully designing and developing Sitecore websites for brands, and the capabilities to make use of all the clever digital marketing tools within Sitecore that deliver better customer experiences, and increased conversions and revenue, is "free" – it’s just time.
We’ve been working with Sitecore for over a decade, and we’ve helped numerous brands around the world successfully launch new websites on Sitecore and we’ve helped those already on Sitecore make it work for them.
Want to talk?
If you have a Sitecore website, before you even think about re-platforming, give us a call.
We’ll help you make the best of this powerful experience platform and get results, and we’ll help you save money!
