Adobe Debuts New Retail Capabilities at NRF: Advances Convergence of Online and Offline Shopping Experience

Today customer expectations are at an all-time high. The way consumers discover and purchase goods continues to evolve and they expect their shopping experiences to be intuitive, convenient, authentic and available anytime – both online and in-store. Online and mobile shopping hit a record high during the 2016 holiday season ($91.7 billion spent online; $28.43 billion via mobile according to Adobe Digital Insights). Retailers must support this digitization, ensuring that every interaction with customers offers a branded and personalized shopping experience.

Creating effective and memorable experiences for digitally sophisticated shoppers is not an easy feat. That’s where Adobe comes in, enabling retailers to seamlessly create experiences with Creative Cloud for Enterprise and manage, analyze and optimize experiences with Adobe Marketing Cloud. Retailers like GANT, Express and Adidas use Creative Cloud (CC) for Enterprise today to solve for the increase in content velocity. CC services like Libraries and Stock in apps like Photoshop and InDesign accelerate the design process and reduce low value, repetitive tasks, which allow retailers to bring the latest design to market faster and at a lower cost. Eight of the top ten retailers leverage Adobe Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud for Enterprise today (source Internet Retailer’s Top 100).

At the National Retail Federation’s The Big Show, we’re announcing several innovations that further personalize the retail experience and make the purchasing process for consumers easier and more intuitive:

• Fluid Experiences for Retail: With Fluid Experiences for Retail in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), retailers can create and manage omnichannel experiences across any touchpoint, including in-store associate apps, social channels, physical signage, IoT devices and smart screens. Content is centrally managed and optimized as Fluid Experiences automatically edits and resizes images as well as copy based on the channel, taking advantage of the unique capabilities and role of each touchpoint in delivering a powerful brand experience. For example, a department store promoting their semi-annual runway event may feature a new fashion line on Twitter with no more than 140 characters. The same campaign content can be presented via Facebook, web, and email with further detail about the sale, timing, locations and more. When shoppers visit the brand’s stores, digital signage, clienteling apps, POS, and consumer technologies are all in synch to create a consistent and choreographed experience. Fluid Experiences for Retail is in private beta today with AEM customers.

• Automated Personalization and Recommendations: True, authentic personalization is the goal of every retailer; it’s critical to interact with consumers based on their unique needs and preferences. With new automated personalization and recommendations engine powered by Adobe Sensei in Adobe Target, retailers can leverage shopping and behavioral information digitally to improve recommendations and optimize experiences across all touchpoints. A consumer can opt-in to share specific personal information with a retailer, for example, that enables store associates to access size information or home décor tastes to help the person quickly locate an item and check out more efficiently.

• Email Marketing Enhancements for Retail: Email marketers today lack a central place to code, personalize and send emails. The process of moving back and forth from design software to an email marketing solution is time-consuming and tedious, causing extra steps to bring an email from concept to execution. We’re addressing this challenge with the integration of Adobe Campaign with Adobe Dreamweaver, enabling email designers to create emails in Dreamweaver that automatically sync with Adobe Campaign to more quickly send personalized, contextual emails. More than half of email marketers code emails in Dreamweaver and over 750 customers power their email with Adobe Campaign. The integration will be in beta for Adobe Campaign Standard customers in February.

Adobe also continues to redefine commerce creating richer interactions and making every experience transactional. Supporting this mission, Adobe is unveiling partnerships with Memomi, commercetools and Valtech elevating omnichannel shopping experiences to the next level and further bringing together digital and in-store retail experiences. These partnerships expand on our recent announcements with Symphony Commerce and Magento. They encompass integrations with AEM and Adobe Marketing Cloud and will be on demonstration at NRF (Adobe booth #4411):

• Memomi: Integration with digital mirror pioneer Memomi’s Memory Mirror® offers retailers the ability to deliver customized content to shoppers via in-store interactive mirrors. Memomi is the developer and patents holder of the Memory Mirror solution, commonly used in fitting rooms. As people interact with the mirror, it gets “smarter,” offering shoppers a customized experience. Content is delivered by AEM and measured and optimized with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, without requiring heavy-lifting from IT. A shopper can try on a winter coat, for example, record a 12-second video and see how it looks from all angles. The retailer can then track whether the shopper purchased the item and offer suggestions based on their preferences, such as a matching pair of winter boots.

• Valtech: Valtech, a global agency with offices in North America, South America, Europe and Asia has been a key partner of Adobe’s for many years. Our partnership with Valtech has spawned a proof-of-concept demo highlighting the capabilities of Adobe Marketing Cloud in a grocery/big-box retail store. It showcases ways shoppers can move from a physical experience into a digital experience using the camera in a phone or tablet to scan items from the weekly circular and assembling it into a digital, mobile shopping list that household members can add to. Additionally, this grocery experience helps retailers maintain a consistent, seamless and contextual experience between all the different devices, along with engaging ways to interact with customers.

• commercetools: The open, cloud native, microservices-based commerce platform commercetools, connected to the Adobe Marketing Cloud, enables transactions at every touchpoint on any connected screen. It provides a wide, continuously expanded set of interfaces to create shoppable experiences across connected mirrors, mobile and social channels, and for any kind of digital content. Retailers create experiences across all touchpoints with AEM and commercetools makes these moments shoppable with a set of APIs that dynamically connect to devices, channels and back-end systems like inventory and shipping. The modern design of the commercetools platform offers retailers a customized commerce experience for customers.

 

 

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/adobe-debuts-new-retail-capabilities-nrf-advances-convergence-online-offline-shopping-experience/

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What Mobile Consumers Want NOW — And How to Deliver!

I’ve been pondering the meaning of mobile lately — or, more specifically, what comprises a “mobile experience.” Does it revolve around the device? Is it the user’s location or context? Or, might it even be the service the user is trying to access? Recently, I counted 14 screened devices in my home. In addition, I counted two smart devices in my home that are controlled by voice rather than screens — definitely not the case a few years ago! And, I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to where we’ll be 5 or 10 years from now.

Interestingly, as the definition of mobile and the landscape it encompasses has evolved and expanded, consumers have ceased to view certain experiences, extensions, and capabilities as luxuries or nice-to-haves. Now, some of the most sophisticated, relevant, and high-tech mobile experiences are simply expected.

What Can Brands Do?
So, what can brands do to meet consumer expectations in a constantly changing mobile landscape? I think it comes down to managing three key expectations from your customers.

1. Brands Must Do More Than Know Me — They Must Value Me.
Today, consumers expect brands to know them and value them tremendously — so much so, in fact, that those brands be able to deliver meaningful, personalized experiences, touchpoints, and content immediately. It’s not a customer/brand touchpoint anymore. Today, it’s a spectrum of relationships. And, as brands, stakeholders, and marketers, we need to be all-in when it comes to cultivating and deepening those relationships, which means analyzing data through a customer paradigm and associating engagement at this level.

Nowadays, brand building is essentially a never-ending loop. The deeper we dive, the deeper customers’ relationships become and their expectations skyrocket — and the cycle continues.

2. Content Must Be Relevant!
Those personalized offers had better be relevant — and, I’m not just talking about the content being consumed! I’m also referring to how it is consumed. Consider this: Gartner conducted a study on how individuals consume content by device. Following are the results based on the average number of sessions daily and their typical lengths:

• Desktop Users — 4 sessions daily at 36 minutes each;
• Tablet Users — 12 sessions at 7 minutes each; and
• Smartphone Users — 19 sessions at only 1.2 minutes each.

When planning for the smartphone experience, eliminating friction to achieve target goals is critically important. A key component of mobile success is how you construct experiences for short bursts versus long sessions.

Here’s another example that highlights the need for integrating cross-channel data. I love golf — I’m not good at it, but that doesn’t deter me. When it was time to pick up some new equipment (because talent sure wasn’t elevating my game), I headed to a local sporting goods store and had a fantastic experience. The pro came right over and helped me select the right items to improve my game while keeping me comfortable and within my budget. Awesome. As a thank you, he even tossed in a great bag and a few packs of golf balls — also awesome.

When I was ready to check out, he asked whether I wanted to sign up for their email newsletters, promising I’d receive updates on sales and promotions. Of course, I did — I was thrilled he even asked. A week later, I received my first email — offering 25 percent off the driver I had just purchased. Because they didn’t have an integrated profile for me, my view of the relationship with this brand turned a little sour.

3. Do It All in Real Time!
A key component of success will be run-time actionability. That’s lovely marketing speak that means machine-learning algorithms will kick off engagement experiences by utilizing real-time data.

There’s a real contextualization to mobile, and location plays a key part. Your consumer could be using his phone while waiting for a flight, walking past a coffee shop, or watching a video — but, because of the nature of mobile, it’s a moment. And, once that moment passes, it may never come again. Utilizing machine-learning and automated actions by customer-engaging technologies will be musts for organizations that want to stay ahead.

Maximize Your Mobile Analytics.
Done right, analytics unlocks mobile value for your brand, allowing you to assess how users interact and engage with your apps as well as how those apps perform. You’ll be able to discover what mobile users find valuable and what misses the mark — both in a macro-audience view and on an individual (or segment) level. And, you can create hypotheses, launch tests, and develop ongoing iterative processes for optimizing your brand’s mobile experiences so consumers obtain the level of real-time relevance and personalization they crave. That also means greater engagement, added conversions, higher retention and advocacy, and more access to the data you need to continue repeating, expanding, and delivering even better, more meaningful relationship-driven experiences.

What’s Next?
Mobile is no longer a channel or platform, but instead, the nexus of a customer’s journey. But — and this is really part two of the conversation — mobile isn’t the entire journey. There are still websites, ad networks, and stores — all of which feed into the total picture. It’s what we’re talking about when we discuss cross-device behaviors — and, it’s the next frontier for all of us.

The post What Mobile Consumers Want NOW — And How to Deliver! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/mobile-consumers-want-now-deliver/

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Are You the Next Analytics Idol?

It’s that time of year again when we begin our search for the next Analytics Idol! If you’ve attended Adobe Summit over the past few years, you might have witnessed this fun, fast-paced, and informative breakout session where real Adobe Analytics users share their top tips and tricks.

Is 2017 the year you decide to climb up on stage to share your own special tips and tricks? If you’re chosen as one of the presenters for this popular breakout session, you’ll receive a free pass ($1,895 value) to this year’s Adobe Summit (March 19–23) in Las Vegas, the opportunity to win some seriously sweet prizes, and plenty of bragging rights as an Analytics Idol.

Throw Your Hat in the Analytics Idol Ring!
To be considered for the Analytics Idol panel, you must use this online form to submit your two best tips. To provide some context for the types of tips we’re looking for, I’ve shared (below) what each panelist presented at last year’s Analytics Idol session.

Kristi Barrow (Suncorp Group)

• Shared a way to leverage campaign codes and classifications to identify successful call center-driven cross-sales; and
• Demonstrated why companies should be integrating analytics, VOC (voice of the customer), and customer experience tools for identifying customer experience issues.

Andrew Bowers (Comcast)

• Introduced a methodology for incorporating net promoter score into Adobe Analytics; and
• Shared the value of partnering with his technology team to improve user experience and provide better analysis.

Brian Cook (BMO Financial Group) — 2016 Winner

• Demonstrated customized, modular reporting in Excel via textboxes, shapes, and charts that are linked to ReportBuilder; and
• Identified ways — using dynamic text and data references in formulas — to save time and turn your data into plain language via automated commentary in Excel.

Chris Moores (Argos Ltd.)

• Provided a tip for transitioning users to Analysis Workspace, which gave his users the flexibility they needed; and
• Showed how he broke out Adobe Analytics security permissions that were based on internal teams using the tool’s group access rights and permissions.

Drew Norton (NFL)

• Suggested a tip for using calculated metrics to resolve historical implementation issues; and
• Revealed how his company used the Adobe Analytics API (application programming interface) to integrate data across 10+ data silos.

Even the Simplest Ideas Could Be More Valuable Than You Realize!
Hopefully, these tips spark some potential ideas that you could submit. Essentially, we’re looking for tips that would help your digital-analytics peers uncover new, deeper insights or perform their daily tasks more efficiently or effectively. Ultimately, your judges will be the session attendees in the audience, as they will be given the opportunity to vote for their favorite tips live during the session. If you’re debating whether your ideas pass muster, please submit them — you may be underestimating how valuable they could be to others. Remember, they don’t have to be overly complicated or technical to be well received.

Initially, we’ll be screening your tips by how innovative, practical, and valuable they are as well as how broadly they could be used by analysts at other companies in different industries. Participating in this session will be a great opportunity to attend Adobe Summit, establish your personal brand within the industry, and share your expertise with grateful peers.

All submissions must be received by Friday, Feb. 3, and we’ll reach out to all the applicants the following week with next-steps.

The post Are You the Next Analytics Idol? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/next-analytics-idol/

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