Rite Aid Taps Adobe Experience Cloud to Drive Connected Retail Experience

Consumers are embracing new ways of shopping, and the lines between online and offline retail continue to blur. The surge in “click-and-collect” for instance, which grew 73 percent between Thanksgiving and Black Friday (according to data from Adobe Analytics), is an indicator that people enjoy the convenience of beginning a shopping journey online before completing it in-store. Retailers have ramped up innovation to address these opportunities and are working to create a common thread amongst all the different channels they engage shoppers.

Rite Aid opened its first store in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a focus on serving the health and wellness needs of the local community. As the company grew and expanded its operation, the focus has remained the same. What has changed however, are the dynamics of the retail landscape. Competition is fierce in the pharmacy and retail world, with the expectations of tech-savvy consumers ever on the rise. Rite Aid is embarking on its own digital transformation to serve these needs and have selected Adobe as its technology partner.

A new kind of retail experience

Many of the world’s largest retail brands use Adobe Experience Cloud to drive their business, including 80 of the 100 largest U.S. web retailers. Rite Aid will be leveraging a full stack of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions that include analytics, personalization, web content management, advertising and e-commerce tools. These technologies will help further break down friction points between the online and in-store experience. It will become a glue that stitches together riteaid.com, the mobile app, retail stores and in-store pharmacy services, along with fulfillment services.

“By utilizing Adobe Experience Cloud, Rite Aid will have access to deep customer insights enabling the company to personalize the Rite Aid experience for millions of customers, while also creating more opportunities for our pharmacists to provide clinical services and value based care,” said Justin Mennen, senior vice president and CIO, Rite Aid. “From medication reminders to customized promotional offers, Adobe Experience Cloud will enable Rite Aid to continue to be the trusted partner for our customer’s health and wellness needs.”

Rite Aid will be coupling an interconnected shopping experience with personalization for every customer. From the very beginning, Rite Aid wanted shoppers to engage with them as a trusted resource for a variety of health and wellness services. Adobe Analytics provides a base to take personalization efforts and scale it to millions of individual customers. Rite Aid is able to collect and analyze data in real-time, across channels like desktop web, mobile and more. With Adobe Sensei (Adobe’s AI and machine learning platform), the company can build rich customer segments and activate content based on individual preferences and the stage of the shopping journey. It will enable Rite Aid to personalize everything from medication reminders to promotional offers.

The evolving shopper

While every industry has been impacted by digital, the retail world has gone through some of the most dramatic change. The initial surge in eCommerce was seen by some as the likely downfall of physical stores and dramatically dubbed the oncoming apocalypse. But what consumers have shown us is that shopping is not rooted in digital or physical—but a blend of the two instead; It all just needs to work in harmony and make the shopping experience easier and more intuitive. Rite Aid is beginning an incredible journey to deliver on this promise and strengthen the relationship it has with each one of its customers.