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Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine ways in which companies can improve data analysis, the battle that US retailers are facing, lessons the top mobile-retail apps can teach us about improving customers’ mobile experiences, and more.

• This Is How You Move From Reporting Into Serious Data Analytics [Forbes]: When moving from reporting to data analysis, it’s important to leverage your organization’s internal resources to understand the insights the data is revealing.
• US retailers battle big, expensive spaces and bored consumers [Digital Commerce 360]: With more retail space per person than any other country, large changes could be in the future for US retailers.
• Three Lessons From Top Mobile Shopping Apps: How Retailers Can Improve Customer Experience [MarketingProfs]: A look at some of the top mobile apps and how they are succeeding with mobile.
• Using Product Content to Boost Conversions [Practical Ecommerce]: Ninety-five percent of the respondents in a recent survey felt that online product descriptions were important to their buying decisions.
• Why retailers need to rethink what they think about mobile [Retail Dive]: With more than one-quarter of online retail sales coming from smartphones, retailers need to continue improving mobile shopping experiences.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-24/

Legacy DTM and the New Launch – A Closer First Look

This past week at Summit, we announced our upcoming next-generation tag management capability Launch which is built into the Adobe Cloud Platform. At Summit, the Launch team was in high gear with a full slate of sessions around the Adobe Cloud Platform with: a demo on main stage during the keynote presentation; a full-day user group session on CAB day; four brand new, sold-out technical labs; and numerous presentation sessions to over 600 attendees. With so many announcements coming out of Summit, there’s been some confusion around the upcoming new Launch product release. Let’s take a look at the most frequently asked questions to clear things up.

What is Launch?
Launch is the next-generation of our tag-management capability, and it’s build into the Adobe Cloud Platform. Launch enables clients to:

• Deploy client-side web products using integrations called extensions
• Consistently capture, define, manage, and share data between marketing and advertising products from other vendors and from Adobe

An advanced JavaScript delivery system that evaluates conditions and executed actions to efficiently and effectively deploy client-side libraries and products, Launch also provides a highly scalable approach to managing and building extensions together with a robust set of APIs for programmatic interaction with the Adobe Cloud Platform.

I heard Launch is already available. How do I get access?
Unfortunately, Launch is not yet available in production. The product team is just finishing up the alpha program and we’re about to start the beta program. If you’d like to be considered for participation in the beta program, please email your account team and ask them to forward your request to the beta Program Manager.

If it’s not available now, when will it be released?
The official release date for Launch is “soon”. The product team is working very hard to make Launch ready for GA as soon as possible. As we close out the alpha program and start up the beta program, we are focused on making Launch the best it can be for a production release as soon as possible.

Is this just an updated DTM?
No. Launch is an entirely new product with a new code base. The system has been re-architected from scratch using modern front end development practices and an API-first approach – everything is built on a robust set of APIs which makes the system very powerful and very flexible.

Will legacy DTM still be available?
Yes, legacy DTM (the existing production version) will be supported for the foreseeable future. Adobe will continue to fix any significant bugs and ensure consistent performance. At this time, no major feature enhancements are planned for legacy DTM.

We’re working to make the migration process from legacy DTM to Launch as easy as possible so customers can take advantage of the more than twenty new features, extensions, and APIs available with Launch.

How much will Launch cost?
There is no additional charge for Launch, it will be available for any Adobe Experience Cloud customer.

Will I have to change the embed codes in my current DTM implementation?
Good news: no, you won’t have to change your Staging or Production embed codes if you’re currently using the existing (legacy) DTM system. You can continue to work in your current DTM Company and Web Properties without worrying at all about changing those embed codes. The product team has not finalized the migration process just yet, but we’re working to make it as easy and automated as possible.

I heard there are plug-ins now. What’s that about?
Launch is built into the Adobe Cloud Platform and it’s fully extensible. Customers, Adobe Partners, agencies, and marketing or advertising technology vendors will soon be able to build Launch extensions that add new functionality or modify existing functionality. The system allows our partners and clients to build, manage, and update their own integrations. This is just one way we’re opening up the Adobe Cloud Platform so customers and partners can build products and businesses on the Platform, and so everyone can more easily connect our technology to the marketing and advertising technologies from other vendors. Over time, this will be the place for customers to install and configure all of their client-side technologies.

Those extensions sound cool, but will all third-party tools be available right away?
When Launch is released, we plan to have extensions available for all Adobe solutions and for a select group of independent vendors. The product team is already working closely with several technology partners to ensure the availability of these extensions at GA. After that initial release of Launch, we’ll work to expand the number of extensions as quickly as possible. Since extensions can be built, managed and updated by the Extension developer, vendors won’t have to wait for Adobe engineering to build them, so this should be a very rapid process going forward.

When will clients or Partners be able to build extensions?
Launch will open its virtually self-service portal that extension developers can use to build their own integrations with the Adobe Cloud Platform after general availability.

Is Launch secure enough to meet my company security standards?
Yes. Launch is SOC–2 and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act ready. Launch also offers the capability of being self-hosted as the JavaScript libraries can be served from the customer’s own servers, or the CDN of their choice. For I.T. and security teams, this gives you the ability to run automated testing, to check the files into your own version control system, and to fully comply with any internal production migration processes, security-related or otherwise.

I have a project coming up very soon. Should I wait for Launch to, um, launch?
Customers who are already using legacy DTM, or are currently deploying DTM, should continue to do so – don’t wait. Move your projects forward using the existing legacy DTM and when you’re ready to move to Launch, we’ll have a migration process in place that’s as easy and automated as possible (no on-page embed code changes, and automated migration of Rules and Data Elements).

Which capabilities exist in legacy DTM that won’t exist in Launch?
None. All capabilities that exist in legacy DTM will be available in Launch.

Which capabilities exist in Launch that don’t exist in legacy DTM?
There are four major capabilities that Launch will offer that aren’t comparable to legacy DTM:

• Deploy non-Adobe client-side browser technologies quickly and easily
  Using extensions, clients and Partners can control in-browser technologies simply in the interface, without managing custom code.
• Enterprise-grade publishing
  Compartmentalize and control each piece of your libraries to deploy precisely what you need, where you need it, and when you need it.
• Robust approval workflows
  Flexible approval workflows allow custom processes to match your existing internal approval processes.
• Granular rights management
  Administrators will designate which extensions users can, and can’t use. They will also control which areas within Launch are accessible to certain users.

Does Launch support single page apps and my favorite framework?
Yes, Launch has capabilities to give users and Extension developers flexibility in collecting, managing, and distributing data within single page application experiences or Ajax-heavy pages or sites. This applies regardless of your development framework preferences whether that’s Angular, React.js, Ember, Meteor, etc.

Does Launch support dynamic data layers?
Yes, Launch includes an Extension that specializes in listening for changes in dynamic data layers.

Which event types does Launch support?
Event types are available through extensions. The pre-loaded DTM Extension includes 30 built-in event types. Other extensions may add additional event types. For example, the YouTube Extension includes four video event types: play, pause, end, and time played. Through extensions, Launch can support any other browser event types or synthetic event types like specific visitor activity sequences.

Will the new Launch speed up (or slow down) my web site?
Launch is designed to deliver and run marketing and advertising technologies on your web site as efficiently as possible using today’s best practices. When used properly, Launch has proven to improve performance of web sites over alternative methods of providing similar functionality.

Which browsers will Launch support?
Browser support in the Launch client-side libraries:

• Chrome (latest)
• Safari (latest)
• Firefox (latest)
• Internet Explorer (9 and above)
• iOS 7+
• Android 4.4+

Browser support in the Launch application interface:

• Chrome (latest)
• Safari (latest)
• Firefox (latest)
• Internet Explorer (11 and above)

In Legacy DTM we supported older versions of Internet Explorer, but over the last few years, the percentage of overall web users with older, outdated browsers has dropped to a very, very small segment for our clients. Most of our clients now leverage more modern web platform features in current browsers and create better user experiences like single page applications and interactive Ajax-heavy web sites and pages. As most of our clients move to more modern approaches with their sites, they demand a solution like Launch that enables those approaches.

Does the new Launch work on native mobile apps?
Adobe continues to recommend the Mobile Services App SDK to implement data collection and delivery in a native mobile app environment. With Adobe mobile services, we’ve streamlined the process with a single SDK that works with multiple Adobe Cloud Platform solutions. Going forward, clients will see additional tag management-like functionality in the Mobile Services interface as the Launch and Mobile teams continue working closely together for more seamless Cloud Platform access and user experiences.

Hey! You didn’t answer my question?!
These are the questions we’ve received most often from customers and Partners since the Launch announcement at Summit. If you have other questions, feel free to ask away in the Adobe Community on the main Launch page located here.

Launch is just one example of where our platform is headed – more open, more integrated and as always dedicated to customer success.

The post Legacy DTM and the New Launch – A Closer First Look appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/legacy-dtm-and-the-new-launch-a-closer-first-look/

Customer Web Experience: Desktop Edition

The post Customer Web Experience: Desktop Edition appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/customer-web-experience-desktop-edition/

Analyzing your audience: a how-to

Tracking your SEO with Google Analytics: a how-to

Sliders suck and should be banned from your website

Ask Yoast: Impact of host location on SEO?

Reaching Enterprise Customers Through Personalization

More than 7,000 companies worldwide rely on Informatica software tools for establishing and maintaining enterprise data warehouses. In five years, Informatica wants to double its value to $10 billion by focusing on customer experiences.

Informatica currently serves customers from 30 websites and in 8 languages. After charting the path for growth, IT and marketing teams quickly realized that the existing content management system (CMS) couldn’t scale to meet stakeholders’ goals. The company needed a CMS that could help convey complex information about enterprise data-management solutions by integrating with multiple backend systems and delivering personalized experiences.

How Adobe Solutions Help Informatica Achieve Its Goals
“The powerful features in Adobe Experience Manager and its proven track record and ease of use made the Adobe solution the obvious choice for a CMS,” says Gary Gamitian, director of Web Development, Informatica. “We also wanted to be sure that every online experience we deliver is tailored to a customer’s needs, so we selected Adobe Analytics and Target along with Experience Manager.”

Informatica uses Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to increase digital traffic, capture timely customer information, support electronic forms, and improve search engine results. For example, Adobe Analytics and Target allow marketers and sales representatives to analyze data captured in diverse systems to deliver specific information regarding top leads via Experience Manager. Since adopting Adobe Marketing Cloud, Informatica has seen global website visits jump 61 percent and organic search visits increase by 55 percent.

Learn more about how Informatica benefits from using Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, including Experience Manager, Target, and Analytics.

The post Reaching Enterprise Customers Through Personalization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/reaching-enterprise-customers-personalization/

SEO basics: How to use social media

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine the importance of artificial intelligence in the retail space, seven best-practice tips for SMS marketing, and Instagram’s launch of Instagram Shopping.

• Why Commerce Players Must Invest In Artificial Intelligence Today [Forbes]: With the ability to empower store associates — enabling better search and recommendations — having an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy could differentiate many retailers.
• Seven SMS Best-Practices and Tips for Marketers [MarketingProfs]: Consistently adding value, creating mobile-friendly landing pages, and getting the timing right are some of the key ways to be successful with SMS marketing.
• Instagram launches Instagram Shopping [Internet Retailer]: Instagram wants to play a bigger role in helping consumers discover products to purchase.
• Study: Email Marketers to Focus on 4 Key Areas in 2017 [Practical Ecommerce]: Improving real-time relevance and growing reach are two main areas of focus for many marketers in 2017.
• Loyalty programs tend to increase mobile visit frequency and spend: report [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Mobile users who participate in loyalty programs drive more visits and spend, a new report finds.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-23/

How to Become an Experience-Led Business

The post How to Become an Experience-Led Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/become-experience-led-business/

Adobe and Sling TV Bring Real-Time Advertising to Live Streaming TV

Adobe and Sling TV have opened the streaming TV service’s premium live video ad impressions to all Adobe Advertising Cloud U.S. clients. Sling TV’s programmatic debut on partner platforms including Adobe marks an industry first. Never before have advertisers had access to a distributor’s live linear TV impressions, bid on and delivered in real time.

And Adobe advertisers are jumping in. Days before opening tipoff, brands broke into the NCAA tournament – a marquee advertising event famous for selling out months in advance. Within the Adobe Advertising Cloud, clients gained quick access to basketball fans during live tournament games and surrounding sports coverage on Sling TV.

Adobe and Sling TV’s partnership enables marketers to bid in a private marketplace environment via the same platform they already use to manage their cross-channel advertising initiatives.

“Through real-time bidding and delivery, an Adobe client could seize an opportunity to air a live linear ad during must-see events as early as primetime tonight,” explains Adam Lowy, general manager for Advanced TV, Digital and Analytics with DISH Media Sales, which operates direct and programmatic sales for Sling TV. “This type of availability is a total mind-shift in how TV can become part of a dynamic digital ad buy.”

Sling TV ads reach consumers wherever, whenever they’re watching with the full screen viewability of traditional TV and the advanced targeting, reporting and controls of the digital world.

Ads can be geo-targeted in real time, targeted by platform or even by specific device so that advertisers can drill down to smartphone viewers during their daily commute, or only those watching in their living room on a Roku. Adobe Advertising Cloud clients can also target specific Sling TV audiences by demographic, daypart, network, genre and more.

Earlier this week at Summit, Adobe unveiled the Adobe Experience Cloud to an audience of more than 12,000 digital marketers from across the globe. Learn more about Adobe Summit here.

The post Adobe and Sling TV Bring Real-Time Advertising to Live Streaming TV appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/adobe-and-sling-tv-bring-real-time-advertising-to-live-streaming-tv/

Social buttons: How to add and track them on your site

The Experience Business: How Do You Measure Success?

The experience business. Not to be overly simplistic or obvious, but the term “experience business” is made of two important words: experience and business. Of course, you want to provide your customers with amazing experiences wherever they touch your brand — on your app, website, kiosk, and even with your customer-service representatives or in-store salespeople. Doing a good job creating those customer experiences? That’s a point of pride for you. You want people to like your company and probably have multiple ways of determining where you stand with your customers — everything from ratings and surveys to evaluating their willingness to recommend you to their friends. You’re not immune to the need for recognition.

All that goes without saying.

But, as a business, you know you can never take your eye off what sustains your business and moves it forward. Let’s face it — at the end of the day, we’re usually talking about money. The type of business you’re in determines how you make money. For example, retailers sell goods, hotel companies book rooms, banks approve credit, and many nonprofits generate revenue through donations. So, while companies like US Bank, Marriott, and Australia Post — as well as many other brands who are with you at Adobe Summit this week — all make money in different ways, what they have in common is a strong desire to optimize those all-important experiences they deliver against their most vital financial-success metrics.

The Adobe Target Payoff Infographic
So, how does Adobe Target — the experience-optimization technology behind Adobe Marketing Cloud — help you succeed? Well, just like you, those of us on the Adobe Target team take experience optimization very seriously. Target helps you deliver personalized experiences, as well as experiment with them, and then it ensures that those experiences pay off. What measures point to this success other than the conversion-rate lift you see associated with an experiment variation?

To give you just a hint at how much of a payoff companies stand to gain from Target, we looked at the aggregated figures across our user base and created the Adobe Target Payoff infographic — an infographic that is simply chock full of interesting stats and numbers, all based on data from the Adobe Target system.

Following are a few examples of what this infographic highlights.

Experiences and Revenue
In 2016, Target delivered experiences to over 18 billion people — that’s 2.5 times the world population! And, through those experiences, we had a hand in generating over $99 billion for our customers.

But, let’s dig down into the success of Adobe Target’s users, focusing on a few key industries.

Retail Industry
If you’re in retail, you’re seeing big payoffs with Target. Our own research shows that the retail industry’s average conversion rate is 2.3 percent — Target retail users are beating that rate by 6 percent. So, hypothetically, if each conversion leads to a $30 sale, and you have 20,000 visitors — that’s an additional $36K in your pocket compared to those who are just hitting the industry average.

Media and Entertainment Industry
If you work in the media and entertainment industry, you’ve also seen massive returns from Target, increasing your revenue per visitor (RPV) by 60 percent just in the last year alone. That’s easy math. If you had 20,000 visitors, and the RPV was $5 last year, then you made $100K last year. And this year, you’ll make $160K.

Financial Industry
If you’re in financial services, you’re using Target to experiment more and learn what makes visitors tick. What you’ve learned has helped your company double the number of conversions from each visitor in 2016 compared with 2015. That’s big progress.

Travel and Hospitality Industry
Similarly, travel and hospitality companies delivered 28 percent more experiment variations in 2016 compared to the previous year. As a result, your visitors took almost one-hundred million more actions that you wanted them to take — such as booking rooms or joining customer-loyalty programs. If you tie even a fraction of those actions to revenue, it’s clear you’re significantly increasing your bottom line.

From Experimenting — to Experiencing — With Adobe
As part of the Adobe Target team, we get to take part in these really creative ideas that can be put to the test through experiments — to become experiences. So, how do you measure the value of an idea? Let’s consider a real example — adding an anxiety clock to a website to let visitors know when Black Friday deals ended. The clock generated an additional $209K for a retailer on Black Friday. A brilliant idea — and, as it turns out, a highly profitable one as well.

When you look at these types of successes across many customers in many industries, you can imagine the impact that these experiments and experiences have. Experimenting with Adobe Target pays off for our customers in big ways.

We’re privileged to work with you and other amazing brands across industries — brands that continually stretch the bounds of how to express ideas, make experiences richer, and experiment with new things in digital that will continue to offer even more ways to realize business payoffs down the road. And, all from the experiences that you already enjoy giving your customers.

Take a look at the Adobe Target Payoff infographic to see where your business contributed to these exciting measures.

The Adobe Target Payoff from Adobe Marketing Cloud

The post The Experience Business: How Do You Measure Success? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/the-experience-business-how-do-you-measure-success/

Contact page examples: What makes a great contact page?

Yoast SEO 4.5: update your PHP version

Auto-Target: Personalization reimagined by Adobe Target, Powered by Sensei

We’ve been talking about personalization for more than a decade now. So, why then does the conversation always feel roughly the same when so much has changed. In that timeframe, we’ve had advances both in algorithms and machine learning. Marketers can now take matters into their own hands, applying data science to personalize across the enterprise. Just look at our Visual Experience Composer as exhibit A for that point. The appetite for personalization hasn’t diminished — report after report show it’s a top priority for investment on every vertical.

So, why hasn’t the personalization conversation changed? Why do at least half of businesses limit their personalization to the homepage hero, carousel, marquee, primary banner, or secondary banner of their sites or apps? So much untapped potential.

We’re Excited to Introduce One-Click Personalization With Auto-Target.
At Adobe, we know the potential of personalization and have been on a mission to reinvent this space. We have been developing technology both to blur the lines between testing and personalization and to democratize personalization at scale across all businesses and in all industries. To blur those lines, we needed to remove the artificial barriers between A/B testing and personalization from within the activity setup workflow — and we did exactly that in our newest Adobe Target Premium feature: Auto-Target — one-click personalization available in the A/B testing workflow of Adobe Target Premium.

Now, more people in your company can do more types of personalization — all with just one click.

Auto-Target Enables Faster — and More — Personalization.
Here’s the path we took to develop Auto-Target as well as some of the reasons for the choices we made as we worked to develop this single-click personalization.

Just a decade ago, you might have used three or more vendors to do everything you needed in online testing and personalization — A/B testing, multivariate testing, rules-based targeting, algorithmic personalization, and even recommendations. Adobe Target Classic had these functions and more spread across a few user interfaces and workflows. Then, we launched Adobe Target Premium in 2013. The entire spectrum of testing and automation suddenly became available under one roof for the first time ever — with one common set of rules, governance, and workflows.

We’ve come a long way with Adobe Target, but we’re still working on removing the vestiges of outdated ways of thinking in our solution. For example, while Adobe Target Premium’s Automated Personalization feature drives significant lift for many of our customers, you select it in the user interface (UI) as the first step in setting up a Target activity. Only later do you specify the experiences that will be part of that activity. We wanted to give you — as a marketer or product owner — the option to fundamentally flip this around, defining the experiences first and then choosing what activity type to apply.

Auto-Target is this brand-new option. From within the A/B-activity setup workflow, you can now choose whether to use Manual Allocation (traditional A/B testing), Auto-Allocate (a multiarmed bandit), or the new Auto-Target after you’ve made your experience decisions. By selecting Auto-Target, you choose to apply our specialized personalization — based on random-forest machine learning — to the entire experience. We’ve placed this choice in the second step of a three-step workflow so that, with a single click, you can now experiment with and discover the power of personalization on your experiences.

By the way, we’ve noticed that, when we’ve made this feature available to customers, they’ve naturally decided to give it a try — its placement in the workflow sequence seems to coax customers into trying it. And they like it.

Auto-Target Enables More Types of Personalization in More Places.
Our one-click personalization is the feature that’s moving the ball forward with personalization. That’s pretty exciting. What’s more exciting though is learning all the great ways you might use this new personalization feature in Target. To really understand how Auto-Target offers a different way to personalize, you need to look at it in comparison with Automated Personalization. It’s different, and I’ll explain how.

We designed the activity-type Automated Personalization for full factorial personalization; meaning, each change you make on any given page multiplies the number of experiences being created for the activity. So, if you have three background images and two different sets of offer copy, you have six different combinations you can examine to determine which is best to deliver to a visitor. Automated Personalization was built for personalizing at the content level, not the experience level.

But, it’s 2017, and we’re well beyond simply personalizing content alone. Auto-Target, as part of the A/B workflow, does not have the multivariate strings attached that Automated Personalization does. With Auto-Target, if you change five things on a page, that doesn’t represent five different variables that multiply the possible experience combinations to test and personalize. Instead, those five changes produce one holistic experience that you can add as a personalization-experience option.

Why is that so important? With our custom code editor and Visual Experience Composer, the types of changes you can make are unlimited. Just a few years ago, you might have run an A/B test on your checkout flow (1-step versus 3-step, for instance) to find the best overall performer. When the test concluded, you’d deliver the better-performing experience to everyone. With Auto-Target, you keep both journeys and personalize the appropriate journey to the right person based on each person’s history, context, and user profile.

The beauty of Auto-Target is that, with just one click to turn it on, you can transform any A/B test in Adobe Target Premium into a personalized activity. In other words, every A/B test can have multiple winners — each one mapped to an individual visitor — that adapt over time based on additional actions the visitor takes.

Extend Machine Learning Beyond Web and Mobile With Form Composer.
We understand that personalization goes well beyond web and mobile sites. To meet your need to apply machine-driven personalization beyond the web, we added the Form Composer to Adobe Target, enabling you to use Auto-Target with native and hybrid mobile apps, set-top boxes, videogame consoles, Internet of Things (IOT) devices, and in-store kiosks.

When you think about personalization, it tends to involve both the marketer and the consumer. The marketer wants to deliver the best experience possible to the consumer and uses a machine-learning sidekick to get the job done. But, imagine a scenario in which your consumers are interacting with a human face of your brand and not a screen. Personalization at this level needs to involve a third voice — the brand ambassador. You can use Auto-Target in these non-digital scenarios, too. For example, a major telecommunications provider could use it to test, personalize, and optimize their call-center scripts to improve the consumer experience while building a more efficient customer-support team.

Personalize in More Ways and Places With Adobe Target.
If you’re an Adobe Target Premium user, Auto-Target allows you to truly address the goal of the experience business — to deliver exceptional experiences that cater to your customers and make them feel valued. It does this by letting you personalize experiences — not just content — and it extends that ability any place your visitor connects with your brand. We also believe that, when you see how easy it is to give it a try — you will. And, once you experience the results, we’re confident that you’ll start personalizing with Auto-Target everywhere. The conversation around personalization is finally about to change.

Auto-Target: Personalization reimagined by Adobe Target, powered by Sensei from Adobe Marketing Cloud

The post Auto-Target: Personalization reimagined by Adobe Target, Powered by Sensei appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/auto-target-personalization-reimagined-by-adobe-target-powered-by-sensei/

Designing for Email: Empowering Designers to Deliver for Brands

Many of the world’s leading organizations rely on agencies or freelance creative teams to help inspire bold ideas that set them apart from the pack. Outside perspectives and fresh ideas are always beneficial for any marketing campaign. Yet, we all know the creative process and workflow can be laborious — and even more so when it involves external parties.

Email marketing continues to be the channel that delivers, and beautiful, compelling emails are paramount to a brand’s success, which is why it’s so important that we help designers easily execute on their email designs. To address this, Adobe is integrating two solutions to enable designers and, ultimately, brands to create exquisite, engaging, and best-in-class emails. Together, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Campaign promise a seamless process and relationship between creatives and brands.

Integrating Adobe Dreamweaver With Adobe Campaign Benefits Agencies.
Creative agencies and marketers alike are wasting precious time with the many steps required to bring an email from conception to execution. The time-consuming process of moving back and forth from design software to an email-marketing solution demands transformation. We recently announced the beta program for integrating Adobe Dreamweaver with Adobe Campaign, enabling email designers to not only create emails in Adobe Dreamweaver that automatically sync with Adobe Campaign, but also send personalized, contextual emails more quickly. This integration is in beta for Adobe Campaign Standard customers and will be showcased onstage at Adobe Summit 2017.

The integration of Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Campaign benefits agencies by empowering them to:

1. Accelerate Delivery to Clients: Designers can design and create emails in Adobe Dreamweaver that automatically sync every edit with Adobe Campaign. The result is stunning emails that look great on every screen and are created much faster and more efficiently than ever before.

2. Alleviate the Back-and-Forth With Clients: Gone are the days of managing multiple HTML files or manually transferring and uploading images saved locally. When designers make edits from clients in Adobe Dreamweaver, they are automatically synced with Adobe Campaign.

3. Personalize With Ease: Data is vital when it comes to designing personalized content. Access to an Adobe Campaign toolbar in Adobe Dreamweaver enables designers to pull personalization fields directly from Adobe Campaign.

Integrating With the Creative Software-Development Kit (SDK) Offers Further Benefits.
We recognize that not all businesses utilize agencies. In many small- and medium-sized businesses, creative designers also handle the email-marketing functions. This audience tends to have more organizational flexibility when it comes to email design and lacks the approval process that agencies must undergo with brands. Last-minute design and image modifications are needed before they hit ‘send’ on emails.

To address this, we’re announcing plans today to integrate the Creative Cloud’s Creative SDK. Email marketers will now be able to leverage the Creative SDK’s ability to edit and manipulate images within an email, making it easier and faster for designers to create and send emails.

In Sum
Standout email-marketing campaigns are core to delivering memorable and meaningful experiences to customers. By combining the power of Adobe Creative Cloud with that of Adobe Campaign, we’re bringing creative magic to email marketing today — with even more in store for the future.

The post Designing for Email: Empowering Designers to Deliver for Brands appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/designing-for-email-empowering-designers-to-deliver-for-brands/

Introducing Real-time Campaign Analysis at your Fingertips

Though the potential of cross-channel marketing is significant, so are the obstacles to delivering the cross-channel experiences it promises — even for the most sophisticated digital marketers. The challenges faced by businesses are often present from their inceptions, starting with how most companies are organized. Because internal teams aren’t connected to each other, experiences are often designed, executed, and measured in isolation. In fact, the biggest challenges that marketers encounter with cross-channel marketing are typically related to data. Each time an individual interacts with a brand, marketers are offered a new data point. Sometimes, there’s not enough information available to glean helpful new insights; other times, inaccurate data leads to campaign misfires; and oftentimes, even when all the right data is there, it’s still not synthesized into insights quickly enough, leaving marketers unable to act on customer needs.

Without a complete and integrated analysis of your campaign’s effectiveness, it’s nearly impossible to adjust your interactions accordingly — even automatically.

Adobe Campaign’s Dynamic Reporting Tool Delivers Real-Time Marketing Data.
Today, at Adobe Summit, we’re announcing a new capability that blends our legacies in both cross-channel and data-driven marketing.

Gone are the days of canned reports that fail to drive action within an organization. Analysis Workspace combines Adobe’s creative heritage with data analysis, offering intuitive tools to support data-driven marketing and enabling companies to analyze, share, and utilize data within an organization. We’re now extending this capability from Adobe Analytics to Adobe Campaign Standard. The new Dynamic Reporting tool provides a flexible “canvas” approach so data points are easily curated and presented in ways that will resonate with the intended audience, and performance is prioritized through analysis at the speed of thought, dramatically improving Adobe Campaign’s reporting capabilities.

What Makes Dynamic Reporting Unique?
Dynamic Reporting provides unique, state-of-the-art visualization to place real-time marketing data at your fingertips. It starts with out-of-the-box business reports that deliver real-time insights into campaign execution and results — but, it doesn’t stop there. Dynamic Reporting also offers an opportunity to interactively customize out-of-the-box reports using predefined metrics, dimensions, and time variables. Drag-and-drop and slice-and-dice as much as you’d like and filter reports by program, campaign, delivery, organization, or geographical segment. In addition, you can create your own dashboards to analyze campaign data and optimize your strategy or export data in your own business-intelligence tool for broader analysis.

With Adobe Campaign’s Dynamic Reporting, you don’t have to be a data analyst to quickly and easily identify and act on insights. You can surface campaign results in real time to quickly determine not only which channels and promotions are driving the desired results, but also where course corrections might be needed. Essentially, you turn plain data into deep and meaningful insights, providing you with more power and flexibility to drive your business forward.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/introducing-real-time-campaign-analysis-at-your-fingertips/

Introducing Adobe Advertising Cloud

Advertising is one of the largest businesses on the planet. Globally, companies are spending more than $570B a year to generate brand awareness and drive sales through both traditional and digital advertising channels.

One of the biggest trends — and sources of uncertainty — in the advertising business has been the transition from traditional to digital channels. We have all talked about digital transformation across marketing, but nowhere has this change been more dramatic than with digital advertising. Even television — the king of advertising — is shifting to digital buying and delivery processes. It’s still early, but it is happening.

Digital Transformation Is Altering the Advertising World.
This shift is changing how we need to think about and manage our advertising campaigns. You’ve probably heard Adobe’s CMO, Ann Lewnes, talk about how Adobe has managed this journey — by transitioning to spend around 80 percent of our advertising budget through digital channels. We’ve been highly successful in maintaining Adobe’s brand and perception in the market while driving adoption of both the creative and marketing businesses.

The market is evolving to make these changes too, just at different rates. In 2016, digital ad spending accounted for almost $200B of total ad spend — more than one-third of total ad spend. Overall, ad spend is growing at just about 6 percent year over year. However, over the next three years, global ad spending is estimated to grow by $100B — and that will all be driven by digital ad spend.

We recognize that this transition is challenging. As we talk with advertisers, several areas come up as common pain points:

• Aligning Teams and Technology — Teams must work together more closely. Part of that is leveraging technology to deliver connected campaigns. For advertising, that means using a single, seamless platform to create and manage all ad buying.
• Assigning Accountability — A major benefit (and challenge) of digital advertising is that we have never had greater insight into campaign performance. CMOs and advertising teams are on the hook to prove the value or return on ad budgets.
• Doing More With Less — The pressure to deliver more from the same, or even less, is something we all face.
• Leveraging Data in Meaningful Ways — Understanding and reaching both your customers and potential customers is all based on data in digital advertising. If you can’t do this, you don’t have a chance.

Adobe Advertising Cloud Takes Advertising to a New Level.
Even if you’re not directly involved with advertising strategy at your company, it definitely impacts your job. Typically, advertising is the largest line item in any marketing budget because experiences matter more than ever before. Good, effective advertising is critical to your company’s success. It needs to work hand in hand with all other marketing efforts to deliver a connected brand and user experience for your company.

Today, we are launching the Adobe Advertising Cloud — the first independent, cross-channel advertising platform that delivers both brand and performance campaign management across any screen and in any format.

The Advertising Cloud gives advertisers all the functionality they need to plan, purchase, measure, and optimize global advertising in a single software platform that is tightly integrated with the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud. This means brand and performance campaigns working together under a single platform for the first time — search, display, social, video, and television across all screens and all formats.

Some of the key benefits of the advertising cloud include:

1. Cross-Channel Planning
Adobe Advertising Cloud is the most comprehensive platform for planning, buying, and measuring advertising. Advertisers can reach audiences where they spend the most time — including across search, social, and linear TV. The platform de-duplicates TV and digital audiences, enabling marketers to build cost-effective incremental reach with audiences that were underexposed or did not see an ad.

2. Media Activation
Adobe Advertising Cloud’s seamless integration with Adobe Experience Cloud means that marketers can easily reach discrete audiences across screens. In early tests of the new platform, match rates — meaning, the percentage of an audience segment that an advertiser can actually reach with his ads — exceeded 90 percent, which is double the industry standard. According to the latest Adobe Digital Insights’ “State of Advertising” report, 47 percent of global marketers said that not having an integrated data and media-buying solution was one of their biggest challenges.

3. Performance Without Compromise
While Adobe Advertising Cloud is built to help advertisers achieve their goals, it does so without compromising on brand safety, media quality, or transparency. Advertisers have access to a wealth of tools and safeguards as well as independent measurement.

4. Independence
Adobe Advertising Cloud is the largest independent advertising platform that does not have direct ownership in media or content. Having no media markups or transparent fees ensures Adobe Advertising Cloud’s incentives are always aligned with advertisers.

5. Creative
Once you’ve defined audiences and know how to reach them, what message will be most effective? Through Adobe Advertising Cloud’s dynamic creative-optimization product, advertisers can create powerful, personalized ads based on customers’ interests or past behaviors, allowing them to select the best-performing ad content with confidence.

In Conclusion, I Would Like to Leave You With a Few Key Thoughts to Consider.

• Adobe is in the advertising-technology business. We have been for years. And, with the acquisition of TubeMogul, we have extended our reach and capabilities.
• Adobe Advertising Cloud is a key pillar in making the experience business complete.
• Explore more about how Adobe is helping some of the largest brands in the world create and run more efficient advertising campaigns.

The post Introducing Adobe Advertising Cloud appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/introducing-adobe-advertising-cloud/

Achieve Adobe Certified Expert Status with New Adobe Target Exams

Digital optimization and personalization expertise has become one of the hottest, most sought after skillsets for today’s business—no matter what industry you’re in. If you’re among the talented few who have skills in this area, the world may be your oyster. However, digital agencies need to give potential clients confidence that they have the chops, knowledge, and expertise to deliver on optimization initiatives. Individual practitioners also need to prove to their teams—as well as potential employers—their level of experience in this space and their ability to gain insights and maximize ROI using the industry-leading capabilities of Adobe Target.

That’s where the new Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) exams for Adobe Target come in. These certifications test and measure your abilities using Adobe Target and your knowledge of optimization and personalization. They set your agency or you apart from others by stating that you have a deep level of understanding certain core competencies. These certifications also enable you to make the strong case that you bring greater value to an employer or client. As an agency or individual practitioner, you’re in a better position to pursue better opportunities and program ownership.

Announcing two new Adobe Target ACE exams for Adobe partners and enterprise practitioners
So why are we bringing all this up? Adobe Target recently undertook the development of a new certification process and recruited digital optimization partner Brooks Bell to help develop two completely revamped certification exams—our Adobe Target Business Practitioner and Adobe Target Analyst certifications:

• We designed the Target Business Practitioner exam for people who have used the tool for at a minimum of two years. A pre-requisite for the Analyst exam, it tests an individual’s knowledge of and ability to use Adobe Target functionality.
• The Target Analyst exam is our more advanced exam. It’s designed for users who have worked with the solution for a minimum of three years. This test focuses more on the skills the person has in optimization and personalization, along with how to analyze the results and interpret the statistics provided in Adobe Target.

Jason Hickey, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Target explains, “Over the last few years, Adobe Target has been reinvented from the ground up. We knew we had to reinvent our certification exam from the ground up, too, to support today’s Adobe Target solution. Working with a team of experts at Brooks Bell, we did exactly that. I’m so excited to help usher in the next generation of Adobe Target Certified Experts. These individuals will be crucial in realizing the promise of the experience business in 2017 and beyond.”

The hard work that made these heavyweight certifications
Most of you have likely taken a certification exam or a test like the SAT, and you’ve probably never really considered what goes into developing these exams. In our case, we really wanted these exams to clearly show ability. Jay Dettling, Vice President, Global Partners for Adobe emphasizes, “The ACE certification exams represent a critical part of our enablement strategy around ensuring customer success. We’re excited to be able to offer such rigorously developed exams to our partners who can use this certification to offer clients much-valued proof of ability and expertise.”

Here’s a quick run-down of the exam development process. You can read in three minutes what it took us months to do (you’re welcome).

Step 1. Build the team.
First, we assembled the team to create the exam. We approached Brooks Bell, one of our top partner agencies, to help flesh out the team. They offered the assistance of six incredibly smart, motivated analysts and developers, all of whom had years of experience working with Adobe Target and a deep understanding of practice of optimization and personalization.

We then added our experts from Adobe Target product marketing and product engineering, along with consultants from Adobe Global Services (AGS) who had worked with numerous clients on a wide variety of projects using Adobe Target.

As an agency, Brooks Bell well understood the value of bringing in hired guns when you lack specific expertise. They suggested bringing in a third-party agency that was well-versed in developing such exams to guide the entire team through developing the exam questions. They coached us on nuances specific to creating exams.

Step 2. Define the role and minimum knowledge and skillset.
To develop questions, we first had to conduct a job task analysis. In this, we identified the tasks that individuals had who met the minimum standards for the roles of Target Business Practitioner and Target Analyst performed. We considered what tasks they could perform independently versus those that required some assistance. We also identified the technologies and tools they used in the job role.

Step 3. Identify key knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)
We then worked with subject matter experts to determine the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required for each task that we’d identified in our task analysis. These KSAs were essential, because they drove the actual objectives on which we would base our exam questions.

Step 4. Write the exam questions.
Next, we wrote (and we wrote and we wrote) exam questions. In fact, we wrote many more questions than we actually used so that we had a great selection of high-quality questions that covered the wide range of exam objectives.

Step 5. Review, select, and refine the questions.
There’s nothing worse than taking a test in which the questions or answers are poorly worded—or worse yet, the answers are just plain wrong. We spent a lot of time, and asked numerous subject matter experts and copy writers to review the exam questions to make sure we didn’t expect exam takers to be the ones to find those bad questions.

Step 6. Set the passing score.
Certifications tend to be a pass/fail proposition. To determine what constitutes a passing score, we went through a “standards setting” process in which our subject matter experts (SME) assigned numerical values to the test questions based on their difficulty level. The SMEs had to rationalize why they rated a question at a certain level to make sure that they were applying similar approaches to the ratings (that’s the “standards” part of the standards setting process).

We then conducted a statistical analysis of the ratings, using the range of potential scores to choose the passing score. We then determined the number of questions on the exam to include and the amount of time an exam taker had to complete each exam.

Step 7. Make the exams available worldwide.
With our exam questions, scoring system, and time limits all solidified, we then turned to our testing vendor, Alpine Solutions, to develop both exams in their visually pleasing and easy-to-read format. The Target Business Practitioner and Target Analyst exams are now available through the Pearson VUE network of exam testing centers worldwide.

Get Adobe Target certified today!
Without a doubt, adding an ACE certification to your resume and LinkedIn profile can give you a leg up in your career as an optimization and personalization professional. For agencies, it’s a key differentiator for clients seeking expertise in this field. So why not invest in boosting your profession or helping your agency stand out? If you’re an employer or a client, these certifications are equally valuable to you. They provide you with that essential yardstick you need to determine which applicant, current employee, or agency can help you use Adobe Target to power your successful experience business.

The post Achieve Adobe Certified Expert Status with New Adobe Target Exams appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/achieve-adobe-certified-expert-status-with-new-adobe-target-exams/

Ask Yoast: One or multiple domains for campaigns?

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles discuss recommendations for reducing e-commerce abandonment, the keys to Adobe Target becoming a leader in digital marketing, reasons why some companies are starting to move away from chatbots, and more.

• How Marketers Can Plug These 3 Leaky Areas Of E-Commerce Abandonment [Forbes]: Making it easier to purchase from emails, minimizing distractions on product pages, and reducing friction in purchase processes are three key ways that marketers can help reduce e-commerce abandonment.
• Target comes out on top in digital marketing [Internet Retailer]: Email, social media, and search strategies helped to establish Adobe Target as a leader online.
• Drop it like it’s bot: Brands have cooled on chatbots [Digiday]: Many companies are now realizing that chatbots are not having the impact they believed they would.
• Three Steps for Crafting More-Personalized and Better-Performing Content [MarketingProfs]: Learning about your customers, segmenting your audience, and experimenting with content are three key steps to driving better content for customers.
• Retailers, There’s A New Game In Town: Gen Z [Forbes]: A new study reveals that digital touchpoints are key drivers for Gen Z shoppers — but, they prefer in-store shopping.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-38/

SEO basics: How to optimize a blog post?

2017 Digital Marketing Trends: Are You Ready For This?

The post 2017 Digital Marketing Trends: Are You Ready For This? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/2017-digital-marketing-trends-ready/

Mobile at Adobe Summit 2017

Adobe Summit just keeps growing bigger every year. With well over 10,000 attendees in 2016 — and even more expected in Las Vegas next week — it’s the biggest digital-marketing event on the planet.

Ironically, despite Adobe Summit’s enormous size, it’s the best place to focus on small — that is, on the relatively small devices we carry with us everywhere nowadays. With more than 49 sessions dedicated to mobile (and hundreds more that reference mobile strategies), Adobe Summit is the best place to learn how to make mobile an essential part of your customer experience.

Adobe’s End-to-End Solutions
With consumers nowadays spending much of their lives staring at tiny screens, any brand that hopes to remain relevant must have a way to deliver compelling mobile experiences. Adobe offers solutions that help brands manage content across digital and physical touchpoints; acquire new users and link them between web and app; understand user behaviors — whatever they happen to be; and engage users in meaningful ways.

The Real Power of Adobe Summit
While Adobe Summit gathers experts from Adobe to demo the latest technologies and walk attendees through winning mobile strategies, the real power of Summit lies in hearing your peers reveal the secrets to their mobile successes. Here are just a few highlights:

• Marriott will describe how to personalize the in-app experience;
• Major League Baseball Advanced Media and Cars.com will talk about using attribution and deep-linking strategies to drive acquisition campaigns;
• Allstate will discuss ways in which messaging can drive greater levels of user engagement;
• Walgreens will walk attendees through its strategy for understanding the differences between mobile-web and app users — as well as how to profitably reach both; and
• Wyndham Hotels will reveal how to funnel mobile-web users to your app and the types of experiences to build into each.

There will also be groundbreaking sessions on progressive web apps and using machine learning to improve marketing effectiveness, real-world examples of end-to-end connected experiences, and much more.

Hope to See You There
Whether your focus is on web or app, whether you’re an analytics-data jockey or more aligned with multichannel messaging strategies, Adobe Summit 2017 offers everyone an opportunity to get the inside scoop from the best and brightest mobile-marketing minds of today. I hope you’ll not only join me there, but also stop to talk. I’d love to hear your story, too.

The post Mobile at Adobe Summit 2017 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/mobile-adobe-summit-2017/

Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics

Becoming an Experience-Led Company: Customer Experience Management Track at Adobe Summit

Digital is changing everything — consumers have infinite choices in content, they’re connected to an explosion of devices, and they want every experience with your brand to be seamless. To meet the demands of digital, you need to become an experience-led company — a company that delivers in-the-moment experiences that are compelling, personal, useful, and delightful to the customer at every touchpoint.

With these qualities, your brand experiences can create real connections with your customers and, ultimately, build lasting loyalty. The Customer Experience Track at this year’s Adobe Summit will show you how to deliver a standout customer experience — from content creation to delivery, measurement, and refinement. Join Adobe experts and partners for insightful discussions and best practices to help organizations of all sizes create these standout experiences that generate real connections with customers.

This year’s Adobe Summit sessions will focus on three core competencies:

1. Building a digital foundation for delivering experiences;
2. Delivering more relevant content, faster than ever before; and
3. Connecting these experiences among an ever-growing number of channels and devices.

Along the way, you’ll also learn how optimized customer journeys form the centerpieces of the most effective content strategies and customer experiences for top brands around the world.

Don’t-Want-to-Miss Sessions at Adobe Summit 2017
Here are my recommended sessions for Adobe Summit this year, including both general and industry-specific sessions.

S4304: Digital Transformation: Patterns for Success
While transforming customer experiences to meet the growing demands of connected consumers is critical, the road to achieving this can be perilous. Various studies cite failure rates of 70–80 percent. In this thought leadership session, we share some of the trends we believe are going to change the game in the year to come. Learn about the patterns of success that have emerged from the thousands of companies that Adobe works with, what has worked in the area of digital experience, and what innovations and resources are available to help organizations increase their success rate.

S4305: Wyndham: Where the Experience Business Has Come to Stay
Legacy technology, multiple brands, and a growing number of digital properties are creating challenges for brands, specifically as they strive to be successful in their digital transformations. Hear how Wyndham Hotel Group embarked on their year-long digital-transformation journey and how they reimagined customer engagement on web and mobile, raising conversions and customer loyalty.

S3985: Adobe Experience Manager Rockstar: The Top Tips Are Here
Come hear from the winners of the first Experience Manager Rockstar contest as they share the digital-experience tips, tricks, and project strategies that were voted the best of the year.

S3942: Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Top 10 Innovations
Learn about the top 10 digital experience-management innovations that will emerge in the next release of Adobe Experience Manager Sites 6.3. We’ll walk you through these new features — must-haves for all organizations that want to be successful — and show you how you can get a head start on today’s constantly evolving landscape of digital transformation.

S3944: What’s New in Experience Manager Assets: Top DAM Features
We know that you want to get the most out of your Adobe Experience Manager Assets investment, but finding the time to track every innovation is difficult. Get the latest updates and ensure your teams are empowered with the cutting-edge features of 21st-century digital-asset management (DAM).

S4194: Delivering Tomorrow’s Optimized Customer Journey (and the Mail) Today
Australia Post, the country’s postal service, wanted to remain relevant and valued by its customers in this changing world, a world “completely transformed with digital, with our customers being more connected and living at a faster pace.” So, the 200-year-old institution had to completely reinvent itself, rolling out a variety of services with a central focus — to make the lives of Australians easier and better. In this session, you’ll find out exactly how they did it.

S4192: Build It, and They Will Come: Growing a Successful Optimization Program
Many organizations hear about the big wins of optimization and know they need to get in the game. They buy the optimization solutions but quickly discover that they don’t know what to do next. In this session — presented by members of the US Bank optimization team — learn how to staff an optimization-program team and build support for its efforts, develop key partnerships and program processes, and expand optimization across the organization and ingrain it into the company culture.

S4384: Personalization Strategies Leveraging a Data Management Platform (DMP)
Adobe Target is an optimization solution that allows data-driven marketers to rapidly experiment and create high-converting personalized experiences. Find out how the combination of Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Target can take your personalization initiatives to the next level.

The Road to Adobe Summit 2017
There are so many great sessions at Adobe Summit this year — so, make sure you check out the entire Summit catalog to find the best sessions for you.

The post Becoming an Experience-Led Company: Customer Experience Management Track at Adobe Summit appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/becoming-experience-led-company-customer-experience-management-track-adobe-summit/

Metadata and SEO part 3: social, internationalization and more

Adobe Target: Optimization for the Experience Business

We want to give you a preview of something that you’ll be hearing about a lot at Summit next week—Adobe Target’s new Experience Optimization Framework. We also want to take this opportunity to describe an important new governance feature that simplifies the way the experience business works. Why now? Rising customer expectations, technology re-platforming projects on shiny new architectures, increasing IT restrictions and growing use of artificial intelligence (AI). Sound familiar?

Welcome to the modern web. In this era, customer experience rules supreme, and every part of the business must be in lock step with that goal. More than ever, businesses for which digital is a key piece of their strategy—in other words, all businesses—need to take well-honed data-driven practices beyond marketing and embrace experience optimization in all aspects of their CX strategy.

Experience Optimization is all about the marriage of CX strategy and personalization with a purpose; it’s a practice that allows you to easily and rigorously experiment with and personalize exceptional customer experiences across expansive web sites and mobile apps—or for that matter, all your brand’s digital and customer touchpoints. Those experiences must meet and exceed a customer need and do it in a way that makes each customer feel uniquely valued, and helps the business achieve a desired outcome (think stellar conversion rate, NPS, record sales… you get the picture). All this requires much more than a basic A/B testing tool or hard-coded targeting rules that simply help you deliver a pleasant-looking web page.

How Adobe is empowering experience business practitioners:
Several years ago, we set out to democratize optimization and personalization across organizations. We knew that your marketers increasingly wanted a direct hand in driving revenue from the company’s digital and customer touchpoints. They didn’t want to have to rely on your IT teams and developers to try out their ideas. We also understood that by giving more people a hand in optimization, your company could scale its efforts and multiply its success.

As we built out Adobe Target, we knew that good governance would allow your users to focus on the projects that were important to them and give them the appropriate permission levels with those projects. We also provided much-needed guide rails through our user interface and its workflows to promote adherence to optimization best practices.

New digital touchpoints rapidly emerged, expanding opportunities for optimization to mobile apps, kiosks, set top boxes and more. Today, we see more opportunities for optimization—for example giving your call center workers optimized scripts while on calls, providing more meaningful responses to your customers from AI-driven voice assistants like Alexa, and delivering customer insights on tablets, so your salespeople can provide personalized in-store assistance. In anticipation of these opportunities, we built our Experience Optimization Framework. This framework now extends the reach of Adobe Target, enabling you to optimize for three main areas—Web, Apps and Connected Experience. It also leverages a common user interface, set of workflows, architecture, and governance.

Just as the web doesn’t stop changing and innovating, neither do we. We want to share some valuable new governance features that overlay all three areas of the framework. We also want to introduce you to a totally new Enterprise Optimization Framework for Web. Finally, we’ll point out a way to use the framework for Connected Experience that’s perfect for when you need—or just want—ultimate control of Target.

Governance that fits your business, not the other way around.
We believe that technology shouldn’t dictate how you do business—that only creates unintuitive workarounds that make more work. Instead, we want to give you control and flexibility in how you apply user roles and permissions so that our governance molds to how you did business, not the other way around.

Adobe Target administrators can now create “properties” based on how you organize your business or optimization projects, and assign users access to those properties and appropriate permissions within them. For example, a multi-national auto manufacturer with a dozen automotive brands that cater to different personas doesn’t want all users from business units personalizing experiences across the company. Instead, they could assign properties by business unit and allow appropriate users to personalize associated web, app, and even in-car experiences from one shared user interface.

With the new governance capabilities in Adobe Target Premium, you can now assign a user to one or more of these properties based on the work they do, and then assign them specific roles and permissions within each property.

New Experience Optimization Framework for Modern Websites
For years, we’ve offered and meticulously updated our established implementation framework for web and mobile sites. About a year ago, we realized that to fully address the web of today, the modern web, we needed a fresh start. So, as we maintained the old single-line-of-code framework, we began creating its replacement in parallel. We are now excited to offer you the Experience Optimization Framework for Web, AT.js, an implementation framework that’s state-of-the-art today, and future-proofed for emerging trends. This isn’t just a theoretical framework—many Adobe Target customers have started to use it.

Here’s a quick glimpse of why we’re getting so many “likes” for this framework:

• Takes advantage of the asynchronous content delivery offered by single page application (SPA) websites by offering extensions for popular SPA frameworks like Angular and React. This means better customer experiences with responsive delivery, and high fives for your IT department who gets to offer high performance sites using fewer resources.
• Enjoys backing from a dedicated, growing SPA developer community because our extensions support the work of your developers. We developed this from the ground up for SPAs. Your developers understand what true support means.
• Provides a validation layer in the communication between receiving an experience from Target and delivering the experience to your site—essentially a space station airlock in which you can validate data, insert security code, or take other measures. More high fives for your IT team. Now they have more control over changes made to sites through optimization and an additional layer of security to help them sleep more easily at night.
• Eliminates delays in display caused by document.write(), making Google’s announcement that they’d block document.write() on slower 2G mobile traffic a non-issue for you. We suspect that in the future, Google may place this block on other mobile traffic speeds, and that other browsers currently taking a “wait and see” approach may adopt this change.

So, what does this all this mean for your experience business?

“Marriott adopted AT.js as part of an overall reimagining of our web technology strategy. Its modern architecture is noticeable faster with today’s web browsers,” explains Marriott’s director of digital experiments Lee Carson. “We have strong reason to believe that the page speed gains alone have led to millions in revenue. Along with the Adobe APIs, AT.js will be critical to rolling-out omnichannel experimentation and personalization across not only our natively digital channels, but call centers and front-desks.”

Experience Optimization Framework for Connected Experiences
If you’re like most of our customers, you believe that our Adobe Target APIs are designed to extend the Experience Optimization Framework to IoT devices. That’s absolutely spot on. Target can truly be used everywhere, from ATMs, to in-store kiosks, set top boxes, gaming consoles, smart displays, and even call centers. But these APIs have another critical use—allowing you to implement Target directly on your web servers if you need or want more control over Target, and have the technical chops to do so. In other words, you can deploy Adobe Target on your website server side.

We’re seeing a trend in the number of you who are interested in server-side implementations of software as a service. If you’re among these customers, you have strong technical abilities and are willing to trade off the use of the Visual Experience Composer for creating compelling experiences for more control. Some of you need this control as a result of company policy or industry regulations. Others of you simply want the ability to embed Target directly into the DNA of your website to collect additional data and conduct more complex tests. Still others of you may have concerns over privacy, performance, or both associated with JavaScript-based implementations.

Regardless of your reason for wanting a server-side implementation, you expect the same performance, governance, and enterprise scale offered by a client-side implementation. With the Experience Optimization Framework, server-side deployment of Adobe Target offers exactly that.

Resting on our laurels—not an option.
We understand that for you to succeed as an experience business, we can’t view our job as done—ever. We must constantly evolve Adobe Target to stay out in front of changes in the customer experience, the web, and technological innovation. We think these latest developments and ways of using Adobe Target speak to that.

So, what’s next? Just wait and see. In the meantime, we’ll keep scanning the horizon for the first sighting of something new that impacts your work and your world and help you get ready for it.

The post Adobe Target: Optimization for the Experience Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/adobe-target-optimization-experience-business/