What is a DXP? (Digital Experience Platform)

How can we find new customers, and make sure they come back?

This question is always driving the best brands' digital strategies, and it leads to their deep focus on the customer experience.

A great customer experience is crucial to your company's bottom line. Customer-centric companies generate 60% higher profits than their counterparts. Customers are no longer the second or third thought for brands hoping to increase profits; they’re now quickly becoming the top priority.

To maintain great customer experiences growing teams on different channels and across multiple markets, brands are investing in more powerful and deeply integrated tools than their traditional CMSes - digital experience platforms (DXPs).

More than just a content management system, DXPs provide the DX architecture and flexibility that allow brands to deliver the customer experiences that their audience increasingly see as the standard they expect.

According to Forrester, a digital experience platform “provides the architectural foundation for flexible, agnostic core services to maximize scale, quality, and insights across channels and systems while delivering context-specific tooling for practitioners to build, manage, and optimize digital journeys on "owned" channels (web, mobile, messaging) and orchestrate third-party experiences (e.g., social, retail marketplaces).”

There’s a lot to unpack within that definition!

Essentially it means that a DXP helps brands to optimize the digital customer journeys and control the customer experience much by bringing them into one platform rather than many different ones. This is much cheaper, more effective and more cohesive than managing everything on disconnected platforms. It’s also a lot less stressful for the teams doing the work—meaning that they work faster and at a higher level.

The number of content channels available today keeps growing, and customers expect high-quality experiences on all of them. Options are a customer’s best friend. 59% of shoppers enjoy shopping on mobile when deciding which brand to purchase from, and 87% of internet users rely on more than one device online.

With so many channels and so little time, DXPs help companies manage all of their content and data in one central location and connect to other pieces of the tech stack to provide the insights and tools that drive constant improvements.

The content management world has always been one filled with acronyms that, at least try to, help simplify things. However, CMS, WEM, and DXP aren’t just fancy buzzwords; they go a lot deeper and speak to how industry requirements have evolved over the years.

Let’s take a look at these three tools to see how the industry has evolved to what it is today.

First came the standard content management system (CMS), the original tool for non-technical users to create and update websites. Whether that content came in the form of written blog material, images, data, or anything else meant for a website, the traditional content management system was able to handle it.

The CMS provided a means of organizing everything and access to authoring tools and workflows that made delivering this content much easier. The traditional CMS platform, as it’s classified today, is perfect for websites that provide a simple experience.

Next came web experience management (WEM). Content started to live on more than just websites, and therefore required a new way to manage these experiences. New channels began to emerge, such as mobile phones and tablets, plus the rise of the internet of things (IoT).

WEM offered the ability to create personalized experiences for audiences and deliver different blanket content to everyone. The technology also began to change with more open-source capabilities and the introduction of headless and hybrid headless CMSes.

With these changes, companies could not only deliver content across multiple channels; they could improve collaboration between departments.

Now, we have the digital experience platform (DXP) - the next stage of the evolution. DXPs provide a more connected experience to go along with everything WEM platforms could offer.

With headless capabilities, web content management focuses on making it easier to deliver to multiple channels. On the other hand, a DXP focuses on connectivity and integration.

Many organizations today favor a best-of-breed approach to building their tech stack. This differs markedly from the suite approach that was common among legacy CMSes.

A DXP makes it easy to connect to other parts of the marketing tech stack, providing access to a suite of tools, including analytics, customer data, marketing automation, customer relationship management, and ecommerce, to provide the ultimate digital experience for customers.

Magnolia provides deep interface integration with other tools such as Salesforce, Commercetools and SAP Commerce, making it easy to build experiences with content and data from everywhere you need. These integrations are far more than an API connector, and are built for productivity from day one.

[Read our white paper on how deep integrations unlock great digital experiences.]

Having a flexible foundation only scratches the surface of what is possible with a DXP. There are also quite a few other benefits. Here are some of them.

DXPs offer brands one central point of control for everything that they put into the digital world. In 2025, it can be complicated, if not impossible, to use a suite approach when building a martech stack. There are so many different options and processes that each organization is better served by choosing the technology that works best for a particular purpose rather than relying on a single vendor for everything.

DXPs allow brands to have separate vendors for each of their core technology needs by making it easy to integrate with the preferred automation or eCommerce tools. Data gets pulled using APIs and delivered to the central digital experience platform, giving brands more control over their data. They can track the entire customer lifecycle from a single platform instead of toggling through different tools to find the key piece of data they’re looking for.

How Magnolia DXP delivers

Magnolia offers one platform that deeply integrates with every other tool in your martech stack. You have everything you need to create the perfect digital customer experience by unifying every tool and available data source. Some of the tools include: Magnolia AdminCentral for orchestrating a unified experience, Magnolia DAM for managing all your assets in one place, and Magnolia Campaign Manager for pre-scheduling and creating your campaign.

Building off of the single point of control, DXPs have the architecture and flexibility that make it possible to view everything in one place. The classic headless CMS includes integrations with other tools, but those integrations often need to be customized to a particular use case, and don’t have deep support for features like search.

With a DXP, integrations can be smooth and seamless, allowing for the creation of a connected software stack. For example, searching for an asset in Magnolia will show results from Magnolia’s DAM, but also any external DAMs and assets that are stored in a connected commerce platform. This cuts down the time it takes editors to build pages, as well as reducing the costs of duplicated work.

DXPs also rely on microservice-based architecture, making it easy to build, test, and deploy applications.

How Magnolia DXP delivers

Magnolia’s open and flexible architecture lets enterprises compose their tech stack as they see fit using their preferred digital technologies.

With traditional content management systems, it can be challenging to build a reliable omnichannel strategy and deliver the same quality of content for more than one or two channels.

With a DXP, omnichannel marketing can become a reality. Developers can easily connect the platform to new channels and touchpoints, and marketers can more easily create and manage the content that gets delivered to those channels. They can also create more consistent experiences across these channels.

How Magnolia DXP delivers

Customers can then benefit from personalized content at scale wherever they interact with their favorite brands. Magnolia allows you to create and manage omnichannel campaigns, whether you want to build a new customer portal for your website or facilitate other digital interactions with customers.

Access to the right data at the right time can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that misses the mark. The integration of a DXP means that brands don’t need to rely on one data source and then guess how that data affects another part of the business.

A DXP provides total visibility in a single location, allowing companies to maximize the data and insights they receive from multiple sources and use it to improve the customer experience.

How Magnolia DXP delivers

Magnolia’s digital experience management capabilities are enhanced by integrations with leading analytics tools, which help brands assess user behavior and leverage it to improve user experiences.

A DXP can help brands improve their time to market by allowing them to publish digital content across numerous channels quickly. The marketing team can manage content without being dependent on developers, giving both groups more freedom and enabling businesses to release new products, markets and features faster.

As the world continues to change, so will the world of content management. As technology continues to advance and other factors like chatbots, voice assistants, and generative AI become more prevalent, the technology that delivers content will also need to advance.

Gartner already recognized this shift and discontinued the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management in early 2020, citing a maturity of the market and a shift in demand for digital experience platforms instead.

Some of the core requirements for a platform to be considered a DXP included:

These requirements only begin to scratch the surface of a DXP, but they do indicate where the overall industry is heading, and the requirements brands will have going forward.

The needs of the customer experience are constantly changing, and organizations are investing in digital experiences to close the gap between customer expectations and reality. A DXP helps to bridge that gap is a key part of that process, for both the immediate transformation project and to ensure that an organization can continue to meet those constantly changing expectations.

At Magnolia, the best-of-breed approach is the center of our philosophy, so our architecture is built in such a way as to provide options and flexibility for brands that need it. Our composable DXP provides the foundation that brands need to innovate at scale and achieve a faster time to market. Magnolia relies on a fast enterprise-grade architecture that is known for speed.

Magnolia also ships with integration capabilities that help provide a unified experience for your brands. This includes pre-built integrations with Connector Packs, ecommerce integrations such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud and SAP Commerce, and many more extensions on the Magnolia Marketplace.

Connector Packs help to integrate additional tools that aid in your content management, including eCommerce, Analytics, Marketing Automation, and Digital Asset Management, and the platform has everything you need to deploy in the cloud.

Also flexible integration options via:

If your business needs to revamp the customer experience from the ground up, break down limiting silos and plan ahead, then it may be time to consider a DXP to create the foundation for a better digital future.

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a potent tool that empowers businesses to design, edit, and deliver tailored digital experiences across every channel they need. A DXP can assist businesses in enhancing consumer engagement, boosting conversions, and developing deeper, more significant connections with their clientele.

Magnolia is an excellent example of a DXP that provides a wide range of features and capabilities to help organizations deliver exceptional digital experiences. Magnolia's adaptable architecture, omnichannel capabilities, low-code development, integration possibilities, and unified experience orchestration are just a few of the standout features. These characteristics allow businesses to maintain a centralized content management and delivery system while delivering highly targeted, personalized digital experiences across various channels and touchpoints.