With every new release, the most important thing you want to know is: what are the new features and how can they help me? Major improvements like the effective email building, greatly expanded e-commerce capabilities (even its customization is easier than ever before to meet your business needs), or data protection (GDPR) enhancements, are super easy to spot.
Kentico 11 lets the creative spirits of marketing teams create and optimize experiences that differentiate their brands, and attract, connect, and engage with the customers across multiple channels.
Focusing on What Truly Matters
We are proud to present a solution focusing on usability for both IT professionals as well as marketers. Kentico 11 saves you time and resources so you can focus on what really matters. It helps you turn your vision and goals into reality relying on proven and secure technology to drive long-term growth and get immediate results.
To make the most out of the 12 months we had to prepare the new version, we have narrowed down our focus onto the following three key areas:
- Data protection and GDPR
- Email marketing
- Commerce
Data Privacy and GDPR
The digital age we live in requires a different set of legislation and regulations to govern the processing of individuals' personal data. To protect our personal data and make sure personal data is treated as something that belongs to you and you decide which data, why, and with whom you want to share. And because data privacy and protection legislation in many countries are pretty outdated, a new fresh set of rules is being prepared all around the world. The most discussed one these days is definitely the new GDPR legislation with an impact on businesses all around the world.
The CMS is an integral part of the digital marketing technology stack in many organizations. It plays an essential role in delivering contextually relevant experiences, in part because CMS tracks, stores, and processes visitor personal and behavioral data. Our goal with the new version was to help organizations accomplish the GDPR compliance process easier, faster, and cheaper. Kentico 11 ships with tools that help organizations with their GDPR compliance efforts in a couple of ways:
- The Data Flow Map, available for CMS and EMS editions, provides detailed information on how the personal data flows within the Kentico platform. It'll save organizations hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in data audit costs.
- The new Data Protection application available for all EMS editions is going to help organizations manage consents and fulfil the rights of data subjects (right to access, right to be forgotten, and portability).
Even though it's the ultimate responsibility of every organization to comply with the GDPR's requirements, we feel a responsibility to help digital agencies and their customers navigate the complicated topic of GDPR.
Next Generation Email Marketing
We have been told for years email is dead. The fact is the role of email has never been stronger, despite the fact social networks and messaging apps are growing in popularity. According to the Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 report, email is top rated by marketers, with 53.6% of respondents rating it as excellent or good for the purpose of direct marketing. The report also states that 58% of the companies surveyed said that they are planning to increase their email marketing budget. Email continues to be a channel preferred by consumers to communicate with brands. And with over $44 ROI on every $1 spent, we can expect investments into email marketing to only grow further.
To allow marketers to craft beautiful personalized and responsive emails and engaging customers to build loyalty, we completely overhauled the email marketing solution to put more power in the hands of marketers. The new Email Marketing Solution improves the way marketers build, manage, optimize, and run email feeds and campaigns. It provides all the bells and whistles you'd expect from modern email marketing. What is included? Pretty much everything—a widget-based visual Email Builder, Personalization, A/B Testing, Plaintext Support, CSS Inlining, Pre-header Support, Enhanced Reporting, and more.
The main benefit of the new integrated email marketing solution is that all the content and context stored within Kentico is available to use in emails. That allows marketers to render existing content within the emails and A/B test them based on total customer engagement values rather than an isolated clickthrough rate available in external email management platforms.