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

Nowadays, customer expectations are at an all-time high. The ways in which consumers discover and purchase goods continue to evolve. Customers expect their shopping experiences to be intuitive, convenient, authentic, and available anytime both online and in-store. Online and mobile shopping both hit record highs during the 2016 holiday season — $91.7 billion spent online, and $28.43 billion spent 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, memorable experiences for digitally sophisticated shoppers is not an easy feat — and that’s where Adobe comes in. Adobe enables retailers to not only seamlessly create experiences using Creative Cloud (CC) for Enterprise, but also manage, analyze and optimize experiences with Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC). Retailers like GANT, Express, and Adidas currently use CC for Enterprise to solve for the increase in content velocity. CC services (such as Libraries and Stock) in apps (Photoshop and InDesign, for instance) accelerate the design process and reduce low-value, repetitive tasks, allowing retailers to bring the latest designs to market faster and at lower costs. Today, eight of the top ten retailers leverage AMC and CC for Enterprise.

At the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) ‘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:

1. 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, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and smart-screens. Content is centrally managed and optimized, as Fluid Experiences for Retail automatically edits and resizes images and copy based on the channel, taking advantage of the unique capabilities and role of each touchpoint to deliver a powerful brand experience. For example, a department store that’s promoting its semiannual runway event may feature a new fashion line on Twitter, using no more than 140 characters. The same campaign content can be presented via Facebook, web, and email with further details about the sale, including event timing, locations, and more. When shoppers visit the brand’s brick-and-mortar stores, its digital signage, clientele apps, point of sale (POS), and consumer technologies are all in sync to create a consistent, choreographed experience. (Fluid Experiences for Retail is in private beta today with AEM customers.)

2. 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 the 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. For instance, a consumer can opt in to share specific personal information with a retailer, enabling store associates to access size information or home décor preferences to help the person quickly locate an item and check out more efficiently.

3. Email Marketing Enhancements for Retail
Nowadays, email marketers 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, requiring several additional steps to bring an email from conception to execution. We’re addressing this challenge by integrating Adobe Campaign with Adobe Dreamweaver, enabling email designers to create emails in Dreamweaver that automatically sync with Campaign and send personalized, contextual emails more quickly. More than half of email marketers code emails in Dreamweaver, and more than 750 customers power their email with Campaign. (The integration will be in beta for Adobe Campaign Standard customers in February.)

Adobe Is Unveiling New Partnerships.
Adobe also continues to redefine commerce, creating richer interactions and making every experience transactional. Supporting this mission — and expanding on our recently announced partnerships with Symphony Commerce and Magento — Adobe is unveiling partnerships with Memomi, commercetools, and Valtech, elevating omnichannel shopping experiences and further unifying digital and in-store retail experiences. These partnerships encompass integrations with AEM and AMC and will be on demonstration at NRF (Adobe booth #4411):

_1. 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 patentholder of the Memory Mirror solution commonly used in fitting rooms. As people interact with the mirror, it becomes “smarter,” offering shoppers customized experiences. Content is delivered by AEM and measured and optimized with Adobe Analytics (AA) and Adobe Target — all 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 — such as a matching pair of winter boots — based on their preferences.

2. Valtech: A global agency with offices in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, Valtech has been a key partner of Adobe for many years. Our partnership with Valtech has spawned a proof-of-concept demo highlighting the capabilities of AMC in a grocery/big-box retail store. This demo showcases ways in which shoppers can move from physical experiences into digital experiences by using the camera in a phone or tablet to scan items from the weekly circular and assemble them in a digital, mobile shopping list that household members can add to. Additionally, this grocery experience helps retailers maintain not only consistent, seamless, and contextual experiences between all the different devices; but also engaging ways to interact with customers.

3. commercetools: Connecting commercetools — the open, cloud-native, microservices-based commerce platform — to AMC 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 any kind of digital content. Retailers create experiences across all touchpoints with AEM, and commercetools makes these moments shoppable with a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that dynamically connect to devices, channels, and backend systems like inventory and shipping. The modern design of the commercetools platform offers retailers a customized commerce experience for customers.