Adobe Enhances Retailers’ Workflows to Power Personalization

With heightened shopper expectations and 2017’s challenging retail climate, retailers must deliver a shopping experience that delights and differentiates. Consumers demand fluidity and personalization across every digital and physical touchpoint, raising the bar for retailers. Thanks to innovations in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning and voice interfaces, cutting-edge retailers can leverage technology to reinvent the shopping experience to differentiate, delight shoppers and increase revenue.

At Shop.org, we’ll feature an Adobe Experience Cloud-powered demo showing how retailers can leverage experience-driven commerce to deliver more timely, relevant experiences with the power of Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework. Picture this — as a consumer progresses through the shopping journey from awareness and discovery to conversion, the experience is personalized and adapted based on her preferences, and real-time context. Using Fluid Experiences, which integrates Adobe Sensei personalization features, the scenario delivers a frictionless shopper journey that engages with consumers on their terms, in the channel of their choice. Shoppers can seamlessly engage their favorite brands across chat, voice, mobile and in-store touch points. Retailers can create and manage this experience from a single platform.

Insights into conversions must inform retailers’ strategies. For example, social networks’ visit share volume to retailers’ website more than doubling from social networks since January 2015. This quickly growing channel presents an opportunity to reach shoppers. We’re announcing our Retail Industry Report based on aggregated and anonymous data from Adobe Analytics, providing insights for retailers.

Additionally, Adobe Experience Cloud is unveiling new capabilities that help retailers:

• Create fluid, personalized experiences that adapt to consumer context: It’s critical that retailers create and manage personalized omni-channel experiences across all touchpoints. By combining Experience Manager’s ability to deliver content across channels with Adobe Target for personalization and testing, retailers can easily test and personalize content at scale. This new capability — Fluid Personalization — removes the bottleneck to personalization at scale by leveraging Adobe Sensei technology to automatically deliver and optimize the experience based on situational context. Based on where the shopper is in the journey and situational context, the message will adapt. A fashion retailer may email customers to promote its fall fashion line, for instance. The content leveraged for email marketing could automatically be leveraged for Instagram, its mobile app, and in-store screens, providing personalized information such as an invitation to its local runway event, and targeted offers. We’re unveiling Fluid Personalization on the heels of our one-click personalization release.
• Intelligently adjust images based on bandwidth. With Experience Manager, retailers can easily author and deliver rich, dynamic imagery and video for any screen at scale. Today, we’re introducing a new feature in Experience Manager for Dynamic Media — Smart Imaging. During delivery, Smart Imaging intelligently adjusts imagery based on bandwidth, screen pixel density, and browser version to deliver expertly optimized images at a smaller size with zero loss in visual fidelity. Focused on mobile platforms, Smart Imaging dramatically reduces page size and ensures fast loading, high quality experiences regardless of bandwidth. This increases the engagement, conversion and satisfaction of shoppers. A user may begin researching a new purchase on a high-bandwidth network in the office, then continue browsing later while on-the-go via a mobile device with lower bandwidth. Smart Imaging assures that experiences load quickly, and images maintain the same high quality in both scenarios. This capability will be available later this year.
• Obtain insights and inform recommendations from voice-based interfaces: Voice-enabled devices and digital assistants are being integrated with retail apps to be capable of ordering dinner or replenishing laundry detergent via delivery. Today, Adobe Analytics Cloud is helping retailers advance voice-driven customer experiences with robust audience insights that inform recommendations. Rather than requiring cumbersome, manual analysis, Analytics Cloud automates the analysis of voice data from all major platforms, so retailers can unearth actionable insights. Integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud ensures the data insights drive action, informing automatic personalization on channels such as voice, mobile app, and the connected car. Analytics Cloud is also introducing powerful workspaces that build on Analysis Workspace to help retailers discover meaningful insights faster with pre-built product and merchandising templates.
• Increase conversions with user-generated content: With Experience Manager Livefyre in Marketing Cloud, brands can already integrate authentic social content on owned channels. New innovations enable retailers to:

1. Seamlessly connect products with UGC by syncing catalogs in Experience Manager Commerce with Livefyre or through a simple file upload with other e-commerce solutions. This helps retailers incorporate product-specific UGC into purchase experiences. They can embed photos, videos, and comments from social channels directly into product pages to influence purchase, and place customizable call-to-action (CTA) buttons alongside product-related UGC surfaced on Livefyre Media Walls, Mosaics, and Filmstrips to drive customers into the purchase path. By early 2018, Adobe will open the Livefyre API, enabling retailers to incorporate websites leveraging any commerce platform, beginning with Google Shopping.
2. Optimize and personalize UGC experiences with Experience Manager Livefyre and Adobe Target, the personalization engine of Marketing Cloud. Retailers can test static content versus real-time UGC, or test to learn which source, presentation, or location is best — for example, Instagram or Twitter, a Media Wall or Mosaic, the center module or right rail. To further increase engagement and conversions, retailers can personalize the best UGC experience for each visitor based on a combination of behavioral, contextual and offline data. This new Adobe Target capability is powered by Adobe Sensei, our AI and machine learning framework.

• Personalize ads with more product details: Adobe Advertising Cloud offers product catalogue-driven campaign creation, management and ad personalization. Enhanced dynamic creative optimization (DCO) capabilities for retailers can incorporate catalogue data directly into ads to drive purchase intent and personalized experiences across the customer journey. By performing multivariate tests, brands can algorithmically determine the most effective creative elements and messages to serve a consumer. These ads contain detailed SKU-level information about individual products, such as price, model, description, rating and more, and are targeted to consumers to drive conversions. For example, a retailer can retarget a person searching online for a Viking oven featuring an image and detail of the exact model and a 10-percent discount offer – or deliver an up-sell or cross-sell offer. Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager integrations also allow for even deeper personalization of the ad.

Retailers leveraging Adobe Experience Cloud include 80 percent of the top 100 U.S. retailers. Adidas, Dior, Jet.com, John Lewis, Kao, Nissin Foods, Safeway, Sephora, Shop Direct and more, are among Adobe Experience Cloud’s customer base.