What's new for marketers in Sitecore XC 9.3

During the Sitecore Symposium 2019, Sitecore announced its latest version - the Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.3 with a bunch of new features, which you can find here.
Primarily, this release focused on product updates and enhancements that enhance usability and performance to market faster.

Highlighting Sitecore's focus on Content, Commerce and Cloud is the following diagram that was produced by Pieter Brinkman, Senior Director Technical Marketing for Sitecore:

The above graphic clearly states that Sitecore is enabling itself as an 'enabler of context marketing for commerce cloud websites and apps'.

Let's now look at some of the new and exciting features that have been introduced, as part of Sitecore 9.3:

Horizon:The Next-Generation editor
Horizon is the next generation page editor from Sitecore. It has a page editor which can be used to create and edit web pages using drag and drop features. It also provides a "Preview" functionality to simulate end-user experience when a user views the page in real-time across devices for a fluid experience.

The "Insight view" feature enables users to see the various analytics related to the web page - 'Visits/day/device, time on page, Bounce Rate, Time on Page', to name a few.

It also has a built-in Angular 7.2 utilities and utilize Node.js, along with GraphQL based API.

Marketing Automation and enhanced Template Management
Marketing automation is an integral part of the Sitecore Experience Platform that helps in real-time interaction with visitors and automates responses based on how visitors interact with your brand. It is dependent on the proper tracking and segmentation feature of the Sitecore Experience Database. Further, it is integrated with the Email Experience Manager to push campaigns to customers, based on their behaviour or product selection. Also, from a commerce perspective, it helps in defining personalized promotions.

With the help of accurate tracking and segmentation data, you can also provide personalized content based on the visitor's location and other parameters.

Enhanced features of EXM include:
- It provides users with a simplified block layout for HTML email-to allow them to set up improved campaigns.
- Eliminates the need to create HTML and move towards executing the idea
- EXM email messages can now have a call to action, alternating columns and announcement features
- URLs are now case-sensitive.

Sitecore Experience Forms
Sitecore 9.3 offers added enhancements to out-of-the-box forms since the new module will include file upload features. You can create a wizard to add multiple pages in the form - add a Submit button to navigate between pages.

A user can also add an inline 'thank you message' on Submit, without redirecting to another page. With Sitecore 9.1 onwards, a condition feature has been aligned to form fields that can help users to specify some conditions for field values.

It also helps with usage stats associated with Forms. Users can check how many times the form has been viewed; this can be extended to form fields also.

Forms also provides users with the facility to specify their styling guidelines by overriding the default style in .cshtml file.

Sitecore AI
Sitecore AI was one of the most significant announcements at the Sitecore Symposium 2019. This is Sitecore's own machine learning platform that is aimed towards auto personalization.

Sitecore AI, powered with Sitecore XP, delivers a contextual experience to help visitors in their journey with a fluid experience. It can analyze their behaviour to understand their interest and intent, enabling marketers and retailers to learn about where each person is in their journey, and determine the best content for each customer. This is while continuously optimizing their experience and nurturing them towards conversion. Its real-time, high-performance data processing and analysis has the power to forecast behaviour trends and generate smart campaigns with less human interaction and supervision. Sitecore AI is planned to be part of Sitecore SaaS offerings in 2020

Sitecore Javascript Services JSS
Another announcement was welcome news for MAC developers, who can now perform live debug on their JSS app by connecting to a remote Sitecore server. It also gives them the ability to build JSS Apps on their local machines, by merely connecting to the Sitecore server through a tunnel.

Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3, with its new added enhancements and features, is excellent news for marketers, as the new platform with Horizon and Sitecore AI will enable them to craft personalized customer experiences. Sitecore's new editing platform will help marketers to optimize websites and speed up to the market with enhanced marketing automation functionalities.

The bottomline

2020 will see Sitecore revolutionizing the technological landscape for marketers, with some great and exciting product offerings, the movement to the cloud-based solution (SaaS), and AI and ML feature for underlying data analytics and more. It's time to wait and watch!