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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