What’s New in Sitefinity 13: The Secret Ingredients for Marketers

Marketers get content management with enhanced digital experience capabilities for personalization, image management, developer tools and more.

You've probably seen the What’s New in Sitefintiy 13 page and may have checked the release notes that our tech team has put together. Yes, it’s a great product release and you should consider upgrading.

Here’s why:

There is a huge number of new capabilities that you might have missed if you are still running an older version. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken, I hear you say? Wrong. A whole lot of new things really make this release exciting and will give you some extra boost this spring on top of your daily greens and vitamins.

Sitefinity 13 packs a punch, so let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

New Interface for Managing Your Images

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what can be better than the ability to manage tens of thousands of images with ease? The new user interface (UI) of the images module really makes things even easier, and even more intuitive. Consistency is key here, and you will immediately reap the benefits of the new interface when you switch between pages or other modules to managing your media.

It is faster, smoother, more powerful, awesome. Not only does it look good, but you can extend it to interface with third-party image optimization services for a host of additional benefits.

New Taxonomy Managing Experience

Are you leveraging taxonomies? No? You don’t have to be as busy as eBay, or as big as Amazon to benefit from a powerful taxonomy manager. Because the power of taxonomy is now even closer than you’d think.

First things first, why use taxonomy? Classification is awesome for making sure things are properly categorized. And yes, one of the key aspects of productivity is your ability to declutter the workplace or personal space. Taxonomy helps things stay where they belong. And, there are two more benefits of using classification in Sitefinity.

• You can tag your content to add dynamic filtering to specific items, such as documents, products, files, images, anything that needs a label to filter on.
• You use taxonomy and push data to your analytics system to improve segmentation. By tagging the content you create, you can gain visibility on what gets consumed by your audience and contributes to generating pipeline. Would you like to learn more about it? Let us know in the comments below and we will create a quick how-to tutorial to get you started.

Well, there is a third benefit of using taxonomy. I will keep it kind of secret for the time being, but I promise … marketers who want to stay ahead of competitors will love it. So, stay tuned.

OK, back to the new taxonomy management experience. As with the updates we have made to the images UI, the classification interface is now the kind of UI that really makes things smooth, fluid, powerful and keeps you productive. We love it. And so will you. Instead of going into the tech details, why not give it a try here (cloud), or there (download).

Persistent Personalization

Marketers often overlook the power of delivering tailored messaging. Call it personalization if you wish. A powerful ally, what it really does is help you improve engagement, increase conversions, grow revenue. The key to succeeding with personalization is consistency and persistency.

We have created a how-to get started with personalization guide for you to check out, but as we are talking about Sitefinity 13 here, it is worth mentioning that we have added another cool feature. You can now keep personalization persistent between visitor sessions. Here's how it works: Let’s assume you have created one or more campaigns to promote a new product. You advertise this campaign on Facebook, Google or any other site out there. When linking back to your product page you will want to account for the slightly different demographic or attributes the social media users will have vs. those who come from search engines.

And, because very few people will complete a purchase on their first interaction, you will want to keep this personalization stick during subsequent visits.It is like remembering the name of your neighbor, and the fact that they like tofu, instead of asking them the same question over and over again. Although this can be hard to achieve with many other systems, by storing information about the user’s first visit in Sitefinity Insight, even novice marketers can use the data to create personalized experiences for their audience. And have a meaningful conversation, too.

Sitefinity Insight Alert

This is one of my favorite new enhancements. Not only because it leverages Azure Cognitive Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) brain, but because marketers can marry the framework of Sitefinity with the versatility of AI to gain superpowers and predict the future. Or, in other words, it’s about understanding when the friction at a specific conversion point or page is likely to negatively impact the business. Or when a sudden spike in conversion rates becomes an opportunity for you to generate even more leads. Such proactive alerts can really help marketers stay on top of everything, and help you win big.

Redesigned Personalization Report

Marketers love pie charts, bar charts, line charts and all kinds of charts. The problem with many reports is, that they often provide irrelevant information. Sitefinity 13 solves this problem. We have redesigned our personalization report to make it easier to use, and easier to read so you can really make data-driven decisions. And you do not need to invest in yet another third-party system. Analytics, personalization and optimization capabilities came as standard with Sitefinity.

Headless AKA Multichannel Content

Whatever you call it, Sitefinity is now even more powerful. Yes, many other platforms support headless content delivery, but can marketers control the layout of the presentation layer via an API? With Sitefinity 13, developers can create powerful experiences with ease, and marketers can control how content appears on the target device using the same interface they already know. How cool is that? Whether you call it headless or decoupled—Sitefinity can help you up your multichannel content delivery game. And we love it.

.NET Core Renderer (Technical Preview) and Developer Framework

In other words—developers can use the new widget development framework to create magic. This is the kind of thing that you really need to get your hands on, so have a look at our documentation pages and check this blog post to learn more.

Faster, better and awesome!

Sitefinity 13 packs everything you need to keep your business running so head to our download section to give it a try. And don’t forget: We’d love to hear back from you, so, don’t be shy—join our Customer Validation Program, or suggest a new feature.

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