Headless CMS: The Ultimate ROI Guide

A headless content management system (CMS) can deliver a better ROI for your business, regardless of your industry or department, by enabling you to:

Create, reuse, and manage discrete components of structured content rather than pages and large blocks of unstructured content. You may have heard the metaphor: Content like LEGO. This allows experiences to be composed of components, also called modules or atoms, for multiple contexts.
Deliver the personalised omnichannel experiences that audiences have come to expect

Learn more: What is a headless CMS? and What is omnichannel?

What’s the difference between a traditional CMS and a headless CMS?

Warning: this may sound a bit techie or boring, but if you care about efficiency, and performance (in the sense of either efficacy or profitability), the results are worth reading on for.

A traditional content management system, for example, WordPress, populates a website with the information contained in its own content repository. In a traditional CMS, the entire system is one application with two different areas

the repository where content is authored and managed – the body, and
the website where people interact with and consume content – the head.

In a headless CMS, the repository is decoupled from all delivery channels, including the website. The body and head are independent parts of your tech stack and the one body can have multiple heads of multiple kinds, not just websites.

So what, right? This simple decoupling allows you to publish content from your repository out to an infinite number of digital platforms, applications, and touchpoints, including

websites
mobile apps
emails and newsletters
digital ads
social media
chatbots
artificial intelligence streams, or
the metaverse.

The head and body can be from one software vendor, or you can build your perfect tech stack, integrating the best-of-breed tools from wherever makes the most sense for your situation. Even if they’re from one vendor, they’re not one inseparable thing. You may have heard the term “composable” floating around the tech world. That’s this ability to put together the solution that suits you instead of being locked into rigid architectures by your vendor or vendors.

To get the most from your headless CMS, however, you need to create organised and structured “componentised” content that can be recombined and reused across channels. You’ll not get the full benefit by just dumping your old content into a new CMS. Structuring content does require some up-front effort, but it pays long-term and extensive benefits. We’ll address this step in more depth in future articles.

What are the benefits of a headless CMS?

By decoupling the repository from the touchpoints, a headless CMS offers several benefits:

Because content creators write reusable content components instead of long-form copy, they spend less time crafting, updating, and managing material.
In a headless CMS, content components can be categorised according to numerous contextual criteria, such as persona, industry sector, market, customer need, and buyer stage. They can also be tagged with metadata such as content type, function, journey touchpoint, and channel. These blocks can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of custom combinations. (More on personalisation later)
Both humans and machines can access the content in a headless CMS. So, you can manually build personalised content, or you can program your system to dynamically serve up this content to the right customer at the right time.

Yanko Ivanov at information management company Enterprise Knowledge, LLC says:

With a headless CMS, content authors do not have to get distracted by how the content they author will be presented. They can focus on where their expertise is most valuable—the actual authoring of the content itself.

Do a simple thought experiment: Consider the big picture of what your organisation does to get content to market just for your website, or websites, or even on a channel-by-channel basis. In terms of time and money, content is complex and costly. The entire content lifecycle can include

strategy
ideation
drafting
planning and creating audience-, product, or market-specific variations
review – possibly by multiple groups and stakeholders
formatting and styling
post-formatting review – usually separately for each format
translation and localisation, and
post-localisation review.

Now instead imagine doing each of these steps only once, reusing everything that was common, and only adding the differences that are required for each site, context, channel, and format.

Cecil Lee of Eli Lilly likened this concept to an automotive assembly line that reuses components to deliver custom experiences with maximum efficiency. In our work with them, they were able to achieve 77% reuse of source content.

Learn more: Read or watch the full Eli Lilly case study

Do some quick math in your head and you can already get a sense of the ROI that lowering content production, review, and translation costs by even 50% would deliver to your organisation.

How does a headless CMS enable an omnichannel experience?

According to a Forrester survey, described by principal analyst Ryan Skinner, between 2019 and 2020, the importance to marketers of improving the customer experience (CX) grew from 26% to 46%, surpassing revenue growth and brand influence in terms of priority.

Companies are investing in CX enhancements because they’re feeling the pressure to secure customer loyalty in a competitive global marketplace where customers are spoiled for choice and can always look elsewhere for a better deal, and they want to use the channels they prefer.

A key expectation of modern customers is that you meet them where they are. If a customer’s first contact with you is over email, and their second contact is over chat, you must ensure that their journey is seamless and your story is consistent across channels.

The only way to do this is with an omnichannel strategy. A headless CMS can facilitate this strategic shift.

The content chunks you write and maintain in your headless CMS are the building blocks for your cross-platform communications. By reusing these content components and keeping them up to date, you ensure consistency in your messaging, so customers don’t encounter conflicting, outdated, or inaccurate information.

How does a headless CMS enable personalisation?

Another key ingredient of a successful customer experience is personalisation.

This term can evoke unwelcome notions of privacy invasions—of robots tracking your website visits, search inputs, and purchasing history. But personalisation doesn’t have to be as nefarious as that. Personalisation done right is simply relevance by another name. It means companies trying to ensure that at every interaction point along their journeys, audiences are seeing the content that’s most relevant to them and their context.

Both enterprise (B2B) and consumer (B2C) audiences actually want more personalisation, because no one wants to sift through irrelevant content. In numbers:

Personalised emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them (source).
Triggered emails (based on user actions) receive 70.5% more opens than other types of emails (source).
74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalised (source).

Even in B2B which often has a highly hands-on and human-interaction-driven sales process, in the end, content and digital are a huge part:

⅔ of B2B brands capture half of their revenue from eCommerce, and ¾ expect to capture half or more from it in the future (source)

So, the content your audiences see can, and often should, be customised based on

the link they use to visit a website
the searches they do on the site
responses to forms and chat questions
the content consumed while on the site, and
everything you’ve got in your Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) about them.

When you personalise content experiences for your audience, you reduce the level of effort they expend trying to find answers to their questions. The metric Customer Effort Score (CES) is rising in popularity because it asks the question, “How easy was it to solve your problem with us today?”

A low rating means “not at all easy,” and a high rating means “very easy.” According to the Gartner article What’s Your Customer Effort Score?, CES is 40% more accurate at predicting customer loyalty than customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

If you think about it, “satisfaction” is only the measure of whether you met expectations, not if you really helped or went above expectations. What if expectations were low? You might have satisfied them while leaving many opportunities for improvement unaddressed. Thus, CES is joining the ranks of commonplace metrics like CSAT and Net Promoter Score (NPS) because it focuses on the value you’re able to add to audience tasks.

With the demise of third-party cookies and the corresponding increasing importance of first-party audience data, being able to maximise relevance has never been more vital to developing, understanding, and defending your audience.

An example: Commercial Microsite

Let’s say your sales team wants to create a microsite to show a potential client all your company’s capabilities and pertinent case studies.

With a traditional CMS, the sales team would have to

head to your marketing website
search and click around for the pages that might contain the paragraphs they want to copy-paste, and
write a new copy to smooth out the bumpy shifts in voice and tone.

With a headless CMS, your salespeople can apply the relevant filters, call up the appropriate content components, and stitch them together into a coherent story. In a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the energy, the team can publish a custom microsite that contains the right content in the right format for the right customer. And they can save any new content they created back to the CMS repository for future reuse.

Why transition to a headless CMS?

We recommend implementing a headless system if your organisation wants to:

Create efficiencies by enabling content reuse, simplifying content governance, streamlining publication processes, and reducing content time to market
Reduce content time to market by allowing content creators to call up prewritten, regularly updated content chunks into templates whose business logic applies the right formatting
Personalise content to improve the customer experience
Unlock new possibilities in omnichannel customer engagement
Generate savings for one department—such as marketing, sales, or customer support—or across your entire enterprise
House your content in the same system and link it across all the touchpoints in the customer journey
Surface content progressively to move customers through the sales funnel from awareness to discovery, evaluation, purchase, and loyalty
Democratise content creation by allowing content authors to publish web pages without developer involvement
Free up your developers to focus on building new products rather than troubleshooting the website

We feel strongly that headless is the way of the future. Although the term “headless” is newly popular, the underlying principles of managing structured components instead of whole pages or deliverables go back decades. Now that the secret is out, we expect to see a sharp increase in demand for consolidating channels and properties onto a smaller number of source repositories.

Putting it all together

Your investment in a headless CMS has more potential to deliver a better long-term return than your investment in a standard system.

When a headless approach is combined with omnichannel strategy and personalisation, the results can be truly transformative. For an example of putting it all together, Enterprise Strategist and Solutions Architect Carlos Ablerdesigned and implemented such an approach during his time at a household name brand in their Medical Supplies area targeting nurses and healthcare practitioners.

By licensing third-party research, and then componentising it to deliver a mix of derivative and additive outputs, the initiative returned some of the biggest percentage improvements in metrics and analytics numbers the company had ever seen.

Metrics like

796% more marketing-qualified leads
32% more sales-qualified leads
50% more sales, and
65 less cost per site visit.

And engagement data like

1060% more email subscriptions
3646% more engagements, and
1284% more site visits.

But it’s not all good news

Although absolutely worthwhile, there are many unique challenges to moving to or implementing a headless CMS such as

defining a structure content model
defining a solid migration strategy
defining and governing consistency of style, tone, voice, and metadata
retraining authors
previewing content, and
designing your new tech stack.

We’ll be adding more articles about these challenges in the future. Watch this space!

Is a headless CMS for everyone?

If you’re a small operation with only a few dozen pages of content, not personalising, and working on only one or two channels, the overhead in defining and governing structured content and building the connections between the body and the various heads probably isn’t worth it.

Today, headless CMSs generally make sense for large organisations. If you have a lot of sites, channels, or inherently complex content – or simply vast amounts of it, it’s highly likely to improve your situation.

What questions or concerns are you left with? Let us know in the comments.

If you want to learn more, check out our case studies across a range of industries or get in touch.

This article was co-authored with our friends at Enterprise Knowledge who have insights and articles on their site. Also special thanks to Joy Herbers for her editorial support.