Kentico’s latest version – Kentico 11 – was released this week. Kentico has a strong product roadmap and development team, and their updates are always highly anticipated; releases combine user experience improvements, updates based on customer feedback, and responses to market trends. This newest version also includes some particularly exciting features which are set to significantly improve the way in which you can manage and control content across your digital assets.
Here’s a quick overview of 11 of the new features and benefits, and why we believe Kentico 11 is worth getting excited about:
1. Simpler, easier navigation and tools
Kentico CMS has always been an easy-to-use solution with a well-designed interface and straightforward navigation. It’s one of the reasons why it’s typically our first choice of CMS for businesses of all sizes.
Kentico 11, however, boasts an even more streamlined architecture and even easier to use tools – particularly when it comes to email marketing and ecommerce. This has important productivity benefits for both developers and non-technical users.
2. Enterprise-ready enhancements
While Kentico has always been suitable for large-scale corporations, the enhanced ecommerce functionality and powerful data insights in this new version make it even more so.
According to an article published this week on Business Insider , Kentico 11 is “by far the company’s most enterprise-ready product release to date.”
Kentico’s Founder and CEO, Petr Palas, says of the new release:
3. Simpler, smarter email marketing
One of Kentico’s key strengths has always been its broad range of tools and features. As well as straightforward content editing, Kentico CMS Base, Kentico Ultimate, and Kentico EMS versions allow you to communicate with your visitors and build online communities through forums, blogs, online forms, or polls. Read more: Why choose Kentico for your content management system?
Now, Kentico 11 boasts an entirely new email marketing engine, which has been designed from the ground up, for ease of use.
In the past, using Kentico’s robust email templates relied upon using macros and were fairly developer-focused. With version 11, this is no longer the case. Kentico has now re-built these templates, and the CMS includes drag-and-drop functionality, which enables non-technical users to create modern and responsive emails.
The drag-and-drop email builder is similar to Mailchimp, and enables users to easily re-use common elements, restructure layouts quickly, and configure dynamic content (often from your website). For greater personalisation, you can also design and insert you own pre-built email components called email widgets.
To enhance email marketing campaigns, Kentico 11 includes support for plain-text versions, A/B testing, clean HTML output and CSS in-lining, and has a ‘view in browser’ function.
Read more about the new email marketing tools here
4. More sophisticated search capabilities
Kentico 11 comes with Azure search out of the box, which means it has more sophisticated, more granular search capabilities.
With Azure Search, you can use faceted search across your entire product portfolio in order to make your website easier to browse and use.
From an ecommerce-related search perspective, it means you can now segment your products by brand, size, colour, or availability, to let customers know how many items fall into each category of their search. Your users can apply multiple filters to return more accurate search results. Results can be further narrowed with the use of a free-text search.
Read more about the new faceted search capabilities here
5. Easier identity control
Kentico 11 includes added granularity of permissions, which gives developers the ability to sign macros with identities and avoid resigning.
According to an article by Kentico MVP, Brian McKiever (@mcbeev), the new identity concept in Kentico 11 “should make developers’ lives much easier when it comes to publishing objects from one environment to the next”, either through content staging or continuous integration (CI).
6. Greater insight into the customer journey
One of the most significant improvements with Kentico 11 is the level of insight it offers marketers – particularly regarding email marketing, contact touch points, and customer personas.
With this new version, you can create even more personalisation and gain more insight throughout the customer journey. You can drill-down into user demographics, and the campaigns report pages include a ‘journey map’ – which shows location-based analytics.
With the email marketing feature, for instance, you can now immediately see how many people opened an email and clicked the link. You can also see which content was the most engaging, and optimise your future mailings based on these results. While this is commonplace functionality for enterprise email platforms, the fact it’s native to your website platform ensures integrated and consolidated customer insights, faster computation, and better end-to-end reporting.
7. Significant ecommerce improvements
With version 11, Kentico has re-written their entire ecommerce engine from the ground up, meaning they now offer an extremely robust and powerful ecommerce solution for businesses of all sizes – from small operators through to large enterprises. For even more functionality, Kentico has partnered with, and integrated, ecommerce leader, UCommerce (read more about this below).
Kentico 11 includes Google Analytics e-commerce tracking, which can help you link your sales data with data on your website usage, and gain powerful insights into the behaviour of your online visitors.
Through Google Tag Manager, you can get a broader overview of your audience based on demographics and purchasing activities, and optimise the way you do ecommerce online.
Kentico 11 includes ready-to-use, pre-built macros, through which you can provide Google Analytics with all necessary product data. And you can seamlessly track exact details of product impressions, and the order, purchase, and check out process, and see the exact point at which customers interrupt their buying journey.
Other ecommerce improvements include:
- A solid modular architecture that allows for easy customisation and extensibility,
- A new price and tax calculation model that allows picking whether the tax should be included in the price or not,
- Product catalogue categories including brands, collections, styles, sections, and sub-sections,
- Support for gift cards and multiple discount coupons per order,
- Integration with Google Analytics E-commerce Tracking capabilities,
- Delayed capture of payments.
8. Integration with UCommerce
Perhaps the most significant improvement with this latest version is that Kentico 11 also integrates seamlessly with the large and very popular ecommerce vendor, UCommerce – making Kentico 11 even more appealing to enterprise-scale businesses. This means customers now have the option of relying solely upon Kentico’s significantly improved ecommerce features, or integrating with UCommerce for a globally-recognised, best-of-breed experience.
If you’re wondering how this change impacts your business, or want to discuss your ecommerce needs in greater detail, be sure to give us a call. As well as being a Kentico partner, Devotion is also now UCommerce certified, and can provide expert advice for both options.
Read more about Kentico and UCommerce here
9. Support for GDPR automatically included
Another key improvement in Kentico 11 is its support for the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is set to impact digital marketers the world over.
Kentico 11 EMS version includes a new, customisable data protection app which can help you comply with even the strictest data protection regulations, such as GDPR. It can handle right to access, data portability, and right to be forgotten, and even track the consents on your website, helping you avoid fines.
You also needn’t worry about the difficulty of mapping the data flow in Kentico 11. Whenever you need to find data to comply with GDPR or any other data protection regulation requests, Kentico’s extensive documentation makes it easier for you to locate data and navigate within it.
By giving you the ability to access all data from one point, you no longer need to worry about the difficult and lengthy process of gathering data from different sources, and missing costly deadlines.
You can selectively delete relevant data and comply within the strict deadlines imposed by GDPR and other international data protection regulations, and you can easily respond to demands for personal data deletion from your visitors.
Using the highly customisable app, you can also provide, upon request, data in machine-readable format. This allows personal data to be exported from one system and imported to another for easy movement of data.
10. Enhanced connectivity
The new Kentico 11 integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Marketo and Dynamics CRM.
This means you can synchronise your data bi-directionally with these popular and widely-used software solutions.
11. Native AMP
The new Kentico 11 includes support for accelerated mobile pages AMP, with an out-of-the-box Google AMP module, benefitting performance, engagement, and SEO.
To learn more about Kentico 11 and how it can help your business:
Or, simply contact us for a discussion and demo on how Kentico 11 can help your business.
