Adobe Delivers New Customer Experience Management Innovations for Retailers at NRF 2019

To stand out as a retail­er, you must be excep­tion­al which comes down to one thing – expe­ri­ence. The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is always right, and retail­ers must lead in Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (CXM) to stay com­pet­i­tive and dri­ve shop­per loy­al­ty. Adobe is help­ing retail­ers address this, with 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retail­ers rely­ing on Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud.

Online retail is car­ry­ing the torch for retail growth over­all. Yet it’s the retail­ers with a com­pelling online pres­ence (web + mobile), cou­pled with engag­ing phys­i­cal store loca­tions that had the advan­tage. Adobe Ana­lyt­ics found online retail sales increased 16.5% dur­ing the 2018 hol­i­day sea­son, and buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS) increased 50% YoY.

Today we’re intro­duc­ing inno­va­tions in Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud that help retail­ers excel in CXM across phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal store­fronts. Adobe Sen­sei, our AI and machine learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy, fur­ther auto­mates CXM, help­ing retail­ers work smarter and faster. Our new capa­bil­i­ties for retail­ers include:

• Uncov­er insights that dri­ve con­ver­sions & loy­al­ty: Retail­ers are strug­gling to keep up with an avalanche of data from web­sites, mobile apps, smart speak­ers and more. Vir­tu­al ana­lyst in Adobe Ana­lyt­ics lever­ages Adobe Sen­sei to scour retail­ers’ data and pri­or­i­tize changes that will improve the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and ulti­mate­ly dri­ve the busi­ness. Its aim is to auto­mat­i­cal­ly sur­face and answer ques­tions that retail­ers nev­er thought to ask, and adapt over time to user feed­back to make its insights more and more per­son­al­ized. A retail­er may, for exam­ple, uncov­er and resolve a bug on a crit­i­cal web page that would have result­ed in lost revenue.
• Close the mobile con­ver­sion gap: Mobile shop­ping con­tin­ues to sky­rock­et, yet retail­ers are grap­pling with low con­ver­sion rates and the com­plex­i­ty of build­ing and man­ag­ing engag­ing expe­ri­ences across chan­nels. In fact, the 2018 hol­i­day sea­son saw 51.4% of vis­its from smart­phones but only 31.0% of rev­enue from smart­phones accord­ing to Adobe Ana­lyt­ics. The new Pro­gres­sive Web Appli­ca­tions (PWAs) Stu­dio in Magen­to Com­merce Cloud, part of Expe­ri­ence Cloud, solves this chal­lenge by enabling mer­chants and devel­op­ers to build online stores with fast, engag­ing app-like expe­ri­ences that boost con­ver­sions and enhance the per­va­sive­ness of the in-store expe­ri­ence. Mer­chants can lever­age PWAs to improve engage­ment, sim­pli­fy pay­ments, issue push noti­fi­ca­tions and dri­ve traf­fic in-store to enhance the shop­per expe­ri­ence at a frac­tion of the cost.****
• Eas­i­ly design, per­son­al­ize & opti­mize ads: Retail­ers gain con­trol over basic design ele­ments for adver­tis­ing copy and assets used in dis­play ads with a new self-serve plat­form, Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud Cre­ative. Ben­e­fits include rapid roll­out of new offers and designs with­out the painful and expen­sive steps of re-traf­fick­ing or start­ing the design process over from scratch. The plat­form fea­tures native inte­gra­tions with Adobe Cre­ative Cloud and Adobe Ana­lyt­ics Cloud to enable retail­ers to more eas­i­ly per­son­al­ize ads based on a poten­tial customer’s shop­ping behav­ior, loy­al­ty pro­gram sta­tus and more. Also, new Adobe Sen­sei-pow­ered capa­bil­i­ties enable retail­ers to man­age, opti­mize and report on search ad cam­paigns specif­i­cal­ly for retail pro­mo­tions and events. Adver­tis­ing Cloud’s per­for­mance opti­miza­tion and fore­cast­ing capa­bil­i­ties increase traf­fic to retail­er e‑commerce web­sites and phys­i­cal stores dur­ing pro­mo­tion­al periods.
• Lever­age pho­to-based prod­uct search and videos from social media: Imag­ine upload­ing a pho­to of an out­fit you saw on TV or in a mag­a­zine to a retailer’s app to find sim­i­lar items for pur­chase. A project we’re pre­view­ing from Adobe Research for poten­tial inte­gra­tion in Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er does pre­cise­ly this, offer­ing the industry’s most accu­rate pho­to-based search results. Adobe Sen­sei in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er auto­mat­i­cal­ly search­es a retailer’s entire inven­to­ry online and serves up cloth­ing sim­i­lar to the pho­to. We’re also enhanc­ing Smart Tags in Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er to han­dle video. Retail­ers can now auto­mate video dis­cov­ery with tags that cor­re­spond to the actions, attrib­ut­es and objects in video elim­i­nat­ing the need to man­u­al­ly sort through hun­dreds of rel­e­vant clips for retail­ers’ brand chan­nels, or to be dis­played in-store.
• Cus­tomize prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions based on audi­ence: Retail­ers can har­ness Adobe Sen­sei-pow­ered capa­bil­i­ties in Adobe Tar­get to auto­mat­i­cal­ly choose the best algo­rithm to deliv­er per­son­al­ized rec­om­men­da­tions to each of its audi­ence seg­ments, all from the same cam­paign. For exam­ple, a fur­ni­ture retail­er can auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­play new con­tem­po­rary liv­ing room fur­ni­ture with­in its app or on its web­site to its main audi­ence, home own­ers. At the same time, it can deliv­er inex­pen­sive, space-sav­ing fur­ni­ture rec­om­men­da­tions to its sec­ondary audi­ence, col­lege students.
• Eas­i­ly add lists to emails: Adobe Cam­paign is mak­ing it easy for retail­ers to embed per­son­al­ized prod­uct lists into pro­mo­tion­al emails, elim­i­nat­ing the need for cod­ing. Retail­ers can cus­tomize ship­ment emails to dis­play 15 items pur­chased by one shop­per, for exam­ple, ver­sus the two items a dif­fer­ent shop­per ordered. Only Adobe com­bines this abil­i­ty with its cre­ative her­itage, to enable cus­tomized, engag­ing emails with sim­ple design tools.****
• Con­nect data and act on it in real time: Retail­ers strug­gle to attain a com­plete view of shop­pers’ inter­ac­tions and their own oper­a­tions. Adobe and Microsoft’s com­bined CXM and sales capa­bil­i­ties, cou­pled with Adobe, Microsoft and SAP’s Open Data Ini­tia­tive, address this, pro­vid­ing retail­ers with a holis­tic view of their cus­tomers and the abil­i­ty to cre­ate real-time, per­son­al­ized retail expe­ri­ences both on and offline. Expe­ri­ence Cloud’s inte­gra­tion with Microsoft will be on demon­stra­tion at Microsoft’s booth #3301, includ­ing joint cus­tomer Footlocker.

These new inno­va­tions will be on demon­stra­tion at NRF at booth #4837 (Adobe) and booth #4125 (Magen­to, an Adobe Company).

Expe­ri­ence Cloud played a piv­otal role in sup­port­ing retail­ers dur­ing the busiest time of the year — the hol­i­day sea­son. On Black Fri­day, Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er enabled shop­pers with a record 42 bil­lion rich con­tent inter­ac­tions. Adobe Tar­get deliv­ered 28% more engage­ments on Black Fri­day and 45% more on Cyber Mon­day in 2018 in com­par­i­son to 2017. Advertising Cloud han­dled 18.44 mil­lion search clicks in Decem­ber 2018, and aver­aged 170.1 mil­lion demand-side pro­cess­ing (DSP) and cre­ative impres­sions daily.