Looking for ways to level up your Amplience implementation?
Here on the Customer Success team we provide audits and diagnostics for hundreds of Amplience customers every year, and we’ve learned a few things along the way!
Here are some of the best ways to get more value from Amplience and improve the experience for your customers…
1. Use Live Text for Images
We get it. Baking text into your images is quick and easy, and creative likes the control. But you lose tons of value like being able to resize and reposition the text depending on the device type, screen orientation and resolution of the display.
Plus, live text is a must-do for SEO as it allows crawlers to understand what the image is about beyond the alt-text description. And assistive devices will be able to read to the users, making your website more accessible to all.
You’ll also gain a ton of flexibility because you can shift to producing fewer image assets – you can change imagery and copy independently of the other, whenever it’s needed, without having to start over from the beginning.
In Amplience you can have some controls over layout, font family and more with cropping options for the images, so you can consult with stakeholders and make quick changes (even minutes before go-live or during the campaign itself) without breaking everything!
2. Use our Free Extensions
Sure, Amplience is great straight out of the box. But what if it could be even better?
Enter: extensions.
We’ve built a selection of super useful extensions available to install and use today – for free!
Here are some of our favorites:
Use our Maps UI for store finder type content
Use our Date & Time Picker for appointment setting type content
Use our Rich Text to have blog-quality copy content without leaving our CMS
Use our DI Transform to crop, rotate and add POI to images inside our CMS
Use our Product Selector to pull in product data and images from your platform catalog to make building shoppable content fast, easy and visually merchandised
Use our Localization to connect to translation services to make regional content management something to get done instead of dread
There are plenty more extensions available, plus you can build your own custom extensions to suit the specific requirements of your business.
3. Make Your Content Shoppable
Customers love lifestyle imagery and video because it makes them feel like they’re in the moment. It also allows you to showcase a variety of products at the same time. But if your customers want to buy the items it can be difficult to do without long lists of links or swiping through a bunch of product cards.
Instead, use our Hotspots feature to tag your images in Content Hub/Dynamic Media. Or use the new extensions to tag up content in Dynamic Content.
In either case, you’ll take a piece of content and enrich it with clickable CTAs, most likely a modal that pops showcasing core product details and an add to cart option. This means you can create a more immersive experience by combing commerce and content while not cluttering pages with conflicting CTAs and broken journeys to and from PDPs.
Plus, if the pages serve as a campaign landing page, you’ll drive higher engagement and conversions as shoppers will experience value immediately and not have to work so hard to get to a decision point and find what they’re looking for – everything will be pieced together for them.
4. Use Smart Images (And Other Dynamic Media tips)
Having product imagery, videos and content look great and load fast are key to a great customer experience. But there are often plenty of opportunities for optimizations when it comes to your assets.
Using Smart Images is a great place to start as it reduces frontend code and lets Amplience determine which image format to deliver: WebP, JP2 or JPG. You can also set your desired quality (compression) setting.
Speaking of quality, we recommend using values of 65-80 in most cases. Any lower and you’re likely to see some softness – any higher and you’re just adding filesize without appreciable quality gain.
You should also pay close attention to sizing – it’s common that images are too big for their eventual display container, resulting in wasted pixels and heavier pages.
Be sure to review your Transformation Templates as it’s much easier to make bulk changes from the Content Hub UI than devs to push code releases. You can also create new templates to experiment with various settings, then roll them out if they work better for you. Because it keeps your URLs tidy, they’ll look nice and make more sense than a bunch of ampersands of meaningless words and numbers.
Don’t forget you can tag images to use Point of Interest to dynamically crop images while maintaining focus on whatever is most important. You can also add Hotspots to make images shoppable. Those two together make your creative workflow more efficient and enrich the customer experience.
Finally, if you’re needing to get assets updated and can’t wait for caches to clear, use the Dynamic Media App to purge our CDNs to get things swapped much sooner.
5. Use Workflow to Manage Content Statuses and Assignments
Quick – what’s the status of the 15 pieces of content for next week’s campaign? You don’t know? Shame…
You could use the built-in Workflow statuses to keep track. Simply select the status of your choosing and keep tabs using the Kanban board in the Amplience dashboard. You can even assign work to teammates so nobody misses their part of the work.
If you’re like most teams, you use a project management tool combined with email and Slack. No worries. You can use custom webhooks to integrate, allowing Amplience to work with those external tools so everything stays in sync. Your content team can stay focused and productive in Amplience, with fewer hops in and out of project management tools.
6. Use Your Visualizations for Real-Time Collaboration
Each team has their own preferred tools and processes, so collaborating can be hard. You’ve just spent weeks – likely months – putting together a campaign, building comps and getting approvals. Now it’s time to actually author the content and publish it.
Instead of screenshots or asynchronous commenting (eg: emails and Slack), simply schedule a short call and share the visualization link. Boom! Everyone sees the same content at the same time, and you can revise and proof together, getting to final approval and publish faster and with fewer headaches along the way.
If you’re using a headless setup, the real-time visualization service means you don’t even have to click the save button. Just watch as content updates as you click and type. Magic!
Even if you’re not headless, it’s so much more gratifying to view the work together and ensure everyone’s on the same page. Then when you push to production there are fewer surprises and you haven’t spent priceless hours trying to decipher @ comments and squinting at printouts on the wall.
7. Evaluate Your Content Model
When’s the last time anyone reviewed your content model? Do you have one? Do you have a “content Bible” so to speak – a master style guide combining brand styling and content type options? If not, you should consider building one or at least evaluating your existing content.
A content model we recommend is atomic: breaking down your individual content into component parts that can be reused and repurposed. It’s the driver behind “COPE” (create once, publish everywhere). For example, a banner typically consists of a background image, main copy/headline, some descriptive copy and a CTA like a linked button with a label.
A content model would take each of those parts of ask whether they should be their own content type or be connected somehow. And then you’d ask things like whether there should be required settings like CTA label, optional settings like theme (eg: dark vs light) and if there will be a layout or presentation preference (eg: split block image on right or left?).
Taking if further still, will you be content managing just parts of a page (such as a slot), an entire page as a single entity or some container with various parts, some prefilled and others optional? Those are all considerations for your content model.
Included here, too, is how the content will be used. Consider how to classify it (eg: evergreen vs campaign), which channels will display it (eg: web vs app), the consumer persona engaging it (eg: repeat buyer vs new visitor) and so on.
All those points help guide the team to build a strong content model and ultimately a content graph that can be woven together for the ultimate customer experience.