If you rely on a CMS for your content management and digital marketing, do you know if your current platform is the right one for you? Does your CMS help you attract new customers, engage and retain the customers you have, improve customer satisfaction while growing your bottom line? If it doesn’t, maybe it’s time to reconsider your current platform. Unsure of where to start? In our DNN Evoq review we help you to recognize the factors you need to consider when choosing a CMS and outline the best features of DNN Evoq.
A content management system (CMS) is used to manage and deliver your website’s content. What’s great about a CMS is that it provides the user who may not know HTML the ability to manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a website without using a webmaster or a developer. The surprising fact is that 70% of sites worldwide do not use a CMS.
Factors to Consider
If you currently use a CMS or if you are thinking about it, there are a number of factors concerning your digital marketing strategy that you should consider – factors which will ultimately determine which content management system will work for you, including:
- How much content are you disseminating on a regular basis?
- How much control do you need to have over this content?
- What tools do you use to produce the content?
- Where is your content being published, and by whom?
- Who will be reading your content and where are they located?
A single solution to leverage content and digital assets to your community is key to the success of your digital marketing strategy. The days of aimlessly pushing out content without knowing how to measure the impact on sales is over. Nowadays, marketers demand a CMS that can measure customer-centric Web experiences and deliver real-time results.
PointClick has been working with a variety of different CMS applications for over 10 years and is pleased to provide DNN Evoq CMS to our customers. We believe this DNN Evoq review will help you decide if DNN Evoq will best suit your CMS needs.
What is DNN Evoq?
DNN Evoq™, formerly known as DotNetNuke® Professional Edition, is “A CMS built for marketers to deliver today’s modern Web experiences.” It is an open application interface (API) with thousands of plugins available. The CMS is used by over 2,000 businesses worldwide, including a number of Fortune 500 companies, and DNN Evoq has the largest community of CMS developers, designers, editors and marketers. Their program won the 2014 Critics’ Choice Award Winner for Best Small to Midsize Business .NET CMS.
DNN Evoq Review: The 10 Best Features of DNN Evoq CMS
1. Easy-to-Use Interface
The first thing to mention is the ease of use. It is the perfect platform for marketers who are in charge of managing the company’s website and who may not be the most technical-savvy. DNN Evoq has an easy-to-use inline image editor so there is no need for an external image editor as images can be added, resized and cropped very easily. This is a marketer’s dream, because there is no need to bother a designer for a quick image resize; the user can simply use the inline image editor that will automatically resize images for the best quality. The out-of-the-box templates also make it possible for the user to get pages up and running quickly, without the need for the technical expertise of a developer. DNN Evoq makes it possible for marketers to create content, edit content and add digital assets – think of how much time and money this can save your business!
2. Ready-to-Use Layouts
Our customers tell us that they are tired of purchasing programs only to find out that the templates that come out-of-the-box are bare bones and that they have to download and pay for the additional bells and whistles to get the look they want. Not anymore. Evoq has pre-built layouts that come right out-of-the-box and if you want to edit the templates, that’s easy too. You simply drag and drop images right onto your page and resize copy blocks with the slider.
DNN Evoq is also “mobile-ready” out-of-the- box, with templates and page layouts that incorporate responsive Web design. In addition, Evoq provides a mobile previewer to see how pages will appear across different mobile devices, so no surprises! For the more technically inclined, you can create your own templates in HTML and save for re-use.
3. Detailed Content Analytics
If you are a marketer, you will get really excited about this feature. DNN Evoq brings content analytics right to your fingertips, allowing the user to monitor the effectiveness of each Web page. There is no need to leave Evoq to access a separate analytics solution, or to ask your agency to provide you with an analytics report. Evoq makes it possible to monitor the effectiveness of each Web page directly from the analytics dashboard that is accessible from each individual page. You can find out page views, traffic sources, and time spent on the page. Marketing can immediately understand how content is performing, without navigating to a separate Web analytics system.
4. Advanced SEO Features
Not only does Evoq CMS provide you with templates that make your website visually appealing to help keep customers on your site, but they also help you attract more customers to your site with the advanced SEO features.
Only 3% of website visitors actually convert via completing an information request or making a purchase.
DNN recognizes that SEO can help your search results, so they provide the URL management tools to help create keyword-friendly URLs that will help improve organic search rankings and help you get to the first page of results with relevant search terms, helping you achieve higher conversion rates. Here are some of the advanced SEO features that Evoq offers:
- URL Redirects – If you move pages on your site, you can create and manage URL redirects. Redirects will tell search engines that pages have been permanently moved.
- Automatic XML Sitemap – If your site’s structure or content is missing or incomplete, search rankings will suffer. XML sitemaps help search engines understand your site’s structure and content. It will automatically generate your XML sitemap and submit it to leading search engines.
- Custom URL and page metadata – Search engines look for the metadata that describes the content on each Web page. Evoq lets you customize the page title, URL, and description metadata to include your keywords that will help search engines find your site.
- Canonical tag -This tells search engines which page is the authoritative URL that should be indexed and will help you avoid duplicate content penalties.
- Page and module caching – Page and module caching keep static components of your Web pages in memory, accelerating page load for visitors and avoiding search engine penalties from slow website performance.
5. Simple-to-Use Workflow
If you are tired of finding errors in content after it has been published and if your content manager is struggling to manage content approvals between the different departments, Evoq’s easy-to-use workflow is a content manager’s dream. Content managers can give individuals clearly defined permissions based on the level of authority and can create an approval stage where all content is reviewed and approved by the appropriate people before it goes live. Approvers are also given notifications when something needs to be approved. For companies with multiple sites, there is also the ability to update content on one site and share the content across multiple sites, so you can save time and stop recreating the same content across numerous sites. As a content manager, you will have better control of your team, your content, as well as your brand.
6. Integrates With Cloud-Hosted Repositories
“Where is that file saved?” is a common question shared by content managers, marketing execs, IT personnel and designers alike. When several departments are working together, it can be frustrating to find where files and images are located. Between the developer and agency’s ftp site, your marketing manager’s desktop and the IT department’s network file server, a CMS is yet another place for files to be stored – but what if they can all be retrieved from one place? Enter the cloud, and now all content, images and videos can be accessed through Evoq built-in connectors to Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3 and SharePoint – easy access to all through a single window, providing you with access to thousands of assets, across multiple repositories.
7. Integrates With Other Existing Programs
Another common request of CMS programs is the ability to integrate with other programs. DNN Evoq easily integrates with Marketo, Sparepoint and Google Analytics, as well as all social media platforms for a seamless user experience. Users also have the ability to login with their social media credentials through a Microsoft or Google account, or via Microsoft Active Directory.
8. Peace of Mind Security
Up to 70% of all security breaches originate internally from lost devices, employee accidents, or corrupt motives. That’s why DNN gives administrators the control to manage user access, protecting the site and all the content on it. The advanced security features of Evoq helps ease the mind of any administrator, especially if he or she has several users, as the greater the risk of a security breach increases with the more users you have.
Evoq has personalized alerts that will notify the administrator of any website modifications and will also provide a full audit of any changes made. There is a roll-back feature that allows you to roll back to a prior version of any page in just a few clicks, also noting who made the changes and when. You can have all information pertinent to the security of your website at your fingertips. In the event of a breach, the administrator will be notified immediately as well as sent links to download relevant security patches. There are iron-clad security permission levels and user authentication making a compromise unlikely.
9. Personalization
Our favorite DNN Evoq feature is its content personalization that can be tailored to each visitor. You can tailor the content based on behavior location and user profile. The program has a user role tool that allows you to assign user roles for employees and customers. Employees can have user roles based on their job function – for example a content manager can be granted editor rights and a HR manager can be given the ability to update the career section.
For customers, you can assign personalized offers to customers based on their user roles. For example, if you want to target all of your private cloud customers, you can specifically target content to them and also include an offer. Here are some other great personalised features DNN Evoq offers:
- Advocate marketing update – Reward brand advocates already on the website by offering them incentives for completing certain actions, like sharing content on their personal social networks.
- Customized welcome page and contact us page – Customize welcome and contact pages for all registered users on your site based on the product pages visited.
- Customized mobile experience – Customize offers and pricing based on how a customers access a site. If they access the site from a mobile device, there is the ability to tailor the experience, for example offer a lower price to reward the user for comparison shopping via mobile in an actual store.
- Multi-language homepage – Customize the homepage language for the user based on her location. If your site is in several languages, the language and even pages specific to the customer’s region can be personalized.
- Sales cycle customization – Tailor site content to where visitors are in the sales cycle.
We have yet to see a CMS platform with this much ability to conform to the user’s every whim. This is definitely our favorite feature of this CMS.
10. Support
DNN Evoq CMS comes with the usual dynamic load balancing, scalability and reliability as other CMS applications, but what sets them apart from the rest is the level of customer service you can expect. It is so apparent from the moment you come in contact with someone from the company that they truly value customer service. The company mantra, “Customer’s happiness should be top priority” is really evident in their day-to-day operations. These are words to live by and the bottom line is excellent customer service, which makes them a great PointClick partner. Their values match our key principles of Knowledge, Experience, and Focus, and with a belief in personalized customer support, we are proud to provide our customers with quality DNN Evoq CMS applications.
Want a Personalised DNN Evoq Review?
If you would like to learn more about how PointClick worked along with IowaComputerGurus – an Iowa-based computer consulting firm — to perform a challenging scale-up task for Budget Challenge and H&R Block, click here to download the case study. The DNN program optimized the CMS program to accommodate the expected 4,900% spike in traffic or the anticipated 50,000 concurrent users. Still have more questions after reading this DNN Evoq review? PointClick can develop custom CMS programs for your business, so contact us today.