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Gal Oppenheimer

Gal is a Senior Solutions Architect at Contentstack and is passionate about helping companies re-invent customer experiences across mobile, web, AR/VR, and IoT. He has worked with many well-known tech and consumer brands including Miami HEAT, Elastic, Sacramento Kings, Dell, EMC, VMware, and Twilio.

Posts by Gal Oppenheimer

Mar 13, 2018

Headless CMS: The Solution to Top Challenges in Ecommerce

In a rapidly evolving environment with technology and content demands existing in a multi-channel – and devices – world, Marketers in ecommerce face many unique hurdles that are both challenging and exciting — but can be very stressful. In conversations in the last few years with prospects, most retail organizations believe they lag behind their competitors when it comes to marketing performance and managing the right CMS technology (web content management system). We often see these three common problems that online retailers face today: Large number of SKUs. The number of SKUs and configurations retailers manage can easily reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of options. Breakneck speed promotions. Working at a breakneck speed with weekly sales, promos, and campaigns in between major sales events like Black Friday. Juggling different content. Handling multiple, unique sales events and projects, all with varying content, different phases and timelines. Traditional CMS in Retail In a traditional CMS, you have to set up many individual installations and, they are all siloed on their own database/infrastructure. Migrating content and pages from one instance to another is often a manual process, or you’ve maybe spent the time and money to automate it with scripts and other technologies that have to be constantly maintained. Headless CMS in Retail With Headless CMS, all of your company’s content is stored centrally. You set up one installation for content and then different "view" for each project. Unfortunately, most Headless CMS solutions have only two “views” (APIs) to access content – preview and production. “Preview” will deliver all content for all projects in the same view whether it’s ready for testing, and regardless of whether the content is relevant to this week’s or next week’s project. “Production” will show all live content, regardless of where you want it to appear. This can make it a nightmare to properly test and stage content each week. For example, every week you may have sales, ads, and related content to set up and stage. test next week’s promotions if in the same view, you also saw the discounts queued for the week after and some of the marketing content for the upcoming Black Friday sales event. The Solution: Project Spaces with Contentstack Contentstack solves this by supporting as many project spaces as needed. You can create a project space for each individual event and deliver only the relevant content. For example, you may have three discounts to set up: one for next week, one for the week after, and a third that spans both weeks. A CMS solution like Contentstack lets businesses create a project view for each testing before the promotions even begin. An added advantage to this approach is that you can easily update the discount and roll it out to both weeks when you need to change it.

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Sep 25, 2017

Headless Content Management System now an SAP Partner

Today at SAP’s TechEd Conference in Las Vegas, SAP officially named Contentstack as a partner for omnichannel headless content management. In order to keep up with the constant expectations from customers wanting flawless and consistent digital experiences, we’ve partnered with SAP to remove the headache from developing and managing content across all channels. At its core, the SAP Cloud Platform Portal enables companies to provide holistic digital experiences by building better ways to push content to users. With Contentstack, content on websites, mobile apps, IoT, etc. can be delivered with the push of a button and instantly optimized for every screen, device and channel. Contentstack simplifies and accelerates content management by allowing business users to manage and update content across all channels without the hassle and complexity of a traditional content management system (CMS). We’re very excited about this new partnership and how it will enable SAP customers to seamlessly deploy their headless CMS platforms. By using the SAP Cloud Platform Portal with Contentstack, companies can create easy-to-use, enterprise-grade websites, portals and mobile applications and conveniently separate the underlying data structure from the presentation layer. This gives companies the ability to organize content logically without being restricted by visual or device considerations. Here are just some of the benefits SAP customers will see by using Contentstack: Omni-channel content distribution. SAP customers increasingly manage content across more than the traditional web channel. From mobile applications to IoT devices, VR headsets, kiosks and jumbotrons –Contentstack allows organizations to publish content across all of today’s and tomorrow’s channels Guaranteed uptime. With the CMS decoupled from the website itself, developers can guarantee site uptime and reliability, without any dependency on data being served by the CMS or an underlying database Reusable apps. Content managers can create and package components, such as blogs, resource libraries, events etc. that can be shared and reused as microservices Multi-environment deployment. Users can create multiple environments (development, staging, production, etc.) and push content everywhere simultaneously, or to one environment at a time We are looking forward to the future with our friends at SAP, helping its users enjoy how easy it is to use Contentstack. Want to see how it works? Be sure to stop by booth #3 in the Engage section of the SAP Experts and Solution Center at SAP TechEd and check out the live demo of Contentstack!  For more news on our partnership, read SAP’s press release and on their blog this morning.

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Jul 14, 2017

Contentstack at SEAT Conference with Sports Tech Panel

We’re thrilled to announce we’ll be at the SEAT (Sports and Entertainment Alliance in Technology) Conference in Atlanta, GA, July 16-18. We’re excited to attend SEAT since the SportsTech conference is in perfect alignment with our recent offering, the Digital Fan Experience Platform. Announcing The Joint Sports & Entertainment Digital Accelerator Since launching the Digital Fan Experience Platform we’ve partnered with BeyondCurious, a digital transformation consultancy, to form an industry-first, joint offering for the SportsTech world: the Sports & Entertainment Digital Accelerator. The Digital Accelerator program helps sports teams transform their venue, team and fan experiences through innovative use of digital technology. To learn more about the program, read our announcement. If you're ready for next steps, sign up for the accelerator today. Hurry, space is limited! We only accept 5 teams. Join us here: https://built.io/seat2017. Join Us For Our Panel, “Mapping Your Digital Journey to the Future” This Monday, July 17th, Built.io will be participating in a case study panel discussion with catered lunch featuring Andrew Nicholson, Senior Director of Digital at the Sacramento Kings, Matthew Jafarian, VP of Digital Strategy & Innovation at the Miami HEAT and Nikki Barua, CEO of BeyondCurious. CEO Neha Sampat will represent Built.io. Description and info below. Monday, July 17, 2o1712:00PM-1:00PM  Today’s modern sports fans expect that their experiences be digital, smart and automated whether watching a game in-person or at home. This panel, comprising SportsTech thought leaders from the Sacramento Kings, Miami HEAT, Built.io and BeyondCurious will explore the ways sports franchises are using cutting edge technologies to create connected, digital experiences for their fans. Learn how professional sports teams integrate physical and digital touchpoints to build loyalty and a better experience for fans. By attending this panel, attendees will: Learn how to connect the modern fan to the game via a mobile experience that provides exclusive content and features before, during and after the game. See firsthand how the Kings and HEAT are using connected apps to achieve greater fan engagement via a seamless, frictionless and intuitive experience. Gain insights into the dramatic business results the teams have seen as they share key success metrics around monthly active users, sessions and dwell time. Both the Miami HEAT and the Sacramento Kings--through the help of Built.io and BeyondCurious-- have revolutionized the ways fans can engage with the team and game. This session will empower attendees to map out their own digital journey into the future. To RSVP, email sports@built.io. Joint Booth With BeyondCurious Join us at booth 707 for demos, Q&A’s, and to catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s fan experience.

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Jul 13, 2017

BeyondCurious Partnership Offer: The Digital Accelerator Program

Dovetailing the recent launch of the Digital Fan Experience Platform, we’re thrilled to make another announcement! We’ve partnered with BeyondCurious, a digital transformation consultancy, to form an industry-first, joint offering for the SportsTech world: the Sports & Entertainment Digital Accelerator. About the Sports and Entertainment Digital Accelerator The Digital Accelerator program helps sports teams transform their venue, team and fan experiences through innovative use of digital technology. It is designed to provide immediate value and impact to participants through actionable insights, design concepts, prototypes and demos. How Does It Work? The six-week program leverages BeyondCurious' CatalystGo methodology and Contentstack's Digital Fan Experience Platform. The Digital Fan Experience Platform is the technology foundation that helps professional sports teams venture into the digital world and offer better, more engaging fan experiences through connected spaces, customized applications and content delivery to any channel. Sign up Now The Sports & Entertainment Digital Accelerator will accept a limited number of sports teams into its inaugural class to ensure a VIP experience and competitive edge for participants. Teams can apply by contacting us or sign up in person at SEAT.

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Sep 24, 2014

How to Build a SaaS Marketing Website.

Building a website for a SaaS (Software as a Service) product is different from building a website for a traditional software product. There are a few do’s and don'ts that I’ve learned from developing dozens of websites for SaaS and non-SaaS products. SaaS Marketing Best Practices A few things to consider when building sites to support SaaS products: Marketing Website It needs to teach the customer about the product, funnel them to sign up and house all marketing campaigns. It’s important for the website to be flexible so you can make changes at any minute, so it’s crucial to use of an approachable, and easy to use CMS. Product Site Products are driven by engineering teams, on sprint-driven schedules and should not be interdependent with marketing sites, content and funnels. We typically recommend keeping product (or even its web access portal) separate from marketing sites. Community and Support It’s important to use best-of-class tools to enable your support team to serve customers successfully and collect valuable insights for engineering. Documentation and Resources This can include implementation guides, tutorials, videos, release notes, and more. It’s important to make sure this is fully indexed by search engines and is simple for users to navigate. Depending on product needs, this can either be developed in house or be built with off-the-shelf resource centers. Lessons Learned Why Separating the Marketing Site From the Product is a Good Idea Our team was approached by a team who’s engineering team originally build the marketing website as a part of the product. When the engineering team built the marketing website, it never occurred to them how often the marketing team planned on making updates so they built the website following the same policies they set for their product. This crippled the marketing team as a simple marking change required the team to go through the entire product build cycle. They needed to schedule changes weeks in advance. Contentstack team worked with the marketing and engineering teams to separate the marketing website from the product and enable the marketing team to work independently. The team also needed to build an instant sign up for trials and automate provisioning of all account tools. The final setup included: Dynamic marketing website managed through a Contentstack, a business-friendly CMS so the marketing can update messaging and run campaigns daily Signup portal to enable onboarding and lead capture Automated scripting to provision the cloud account and allocated necessary resources for each trial. This also automatically spun down all resources when a trial ended or an account closed A Developer-Friendly Solution The www.built.io website is architected following the blueprint above. The site includes all marketing content, campaigns and our community (we use a platform called Muut). The product is accessed at manage.built.io where users can also create a new account. The product team enabled marketing to create custom trials and a funneled onboarding experience in minutes without any custom product development. For documentation, it was important to empower the developers to iterate without oversight by the marketing team so it was launched separately at docs.built.io. The built.io team can manage the documentation in Markdown, their preferred format and update it through Contentstack at any time. Educate Users to Drive Targeted Conversions Built.io is managing development of a microsite designed for two different but similar products. Currently, per product requirements, neither is available for a direct user signup so both are accessed by filling out a form. This connects the potential customer with either the sales team or the engineering team depending on what is selected. The teams then engage directly with the customer. The website is managed entirely by Contentstack. This enables the marketing team to make changes to anything in the microsites in seconds. Because this site is completely separate from the two products, the product engineering teams do not need to be distracted from their goal by supporting marketing campaigns and content updates. The marketing team can move at their own speed, launching new pages in days or weeks with powerful integrations such as DemandBase, Eloqua, Olark, and Qualtrics, to target customers effectively and measure campaign success. In Summary Develop and manage the product separately from the marketing website; enable each respective team to do what they do best. There is no single correct approach for areas like community, support, documentation or resources. Find the tool that’s best for you. Remember, all team members have a common goal, so don’t block them from helping you accomplish it!

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