Adobe takes on the challenge of personalization for eCommerce marketing
As the digital age continues its upward and onward march, a marketer’s job becomes increasingly difficult to manage. When there are so many touch points – websites, brick-and-mortar locations, social media platforms and an ever-growing handful of devices used by customers – it can be a challenge to create meaningful interactions.
Regardless of the challenge, “digital experience priorities must quickly evolve to keep up with fast-paced or fickle customer expectations. Given the frantic pace of digital, organizations invest or are left behind.”
Those were the words used by Forrester Research in a report that the firm published in February 2014. And those same words reverberated in a solution overview of Adobe’s Experience Manager.
Released in October of 2012, Adobe Experience Manager was designed to address the fragmentation of the multi-channel environment that marketers exist in. Inherently, the introduction of Experience Manager alleviated some of the major hurdles faced by marketers today.
Not only do marketers need to go to market quicker, they need to react in real time. And that means that brand assets need to be found, created and approved faster than ever before. Other challenges lie in the realm of personalization where memorable experiences need to be consistently delivered across multiple channels. And if that weren’t enough, it all has to be measured and analyzed to optimize messaging and visitor engagement.
For businesses in the eCommerce industry, the challenge gets a little bit trickier. Not only are eCommerce marketers supposed to create, deliver, measure and analyze brand messaging, they’re also expected to transform the shopping experience. With an omni-channel mindset driving those expectations, it can be a tall order to fill.
According to Adobe, the Experience Manager aims to help marketers take on the huge task of transformation and personalization. To do so, the tool takes into consideration the widespread challenges of marketing and gives them an eCommerce twist. In the solution overview for Experience Manager, the following eCommerce-specific items were highlighted:
- Build an eCommerce experience that differentiates your brand identity with personalized shopping experiences.
- Extend your shopping experience to mobile site and apps with support for native device capabilities such as GPS and camera by using Experience Manager mobile apps authoring.
- Enhance merchandising with Experience Manager dynamic media capabilities to deliver 360-degree rotation, pan, zoom, videos, interactive catalogs, product customization, and other dynamic media.
- Embed social capabilities such as user reviews and ratings across all owned properties using Experience Manager.
- Take advantage of flexible taxonomy and tagging to sort and search based on business-defined categories within Experience Manager.
- Use Adobe Target integration to optimize how shoppers browse, find, compare, and select products.
As personalization takes center stage, marketers are presented with more and more tools to better engage with customers in a meaningful way. And although Adobe Experience Manager is one of many tools on the market, Gartner ranked it at the highest position in its Magic Quadrant for Web content management. Execution of ability and completeness of vision were specifically highlighted as reasons for its high ranking.
For more insight on the tools and tactics that eCommerce marketers can use to go to market in a way that sets their business apart, subscribe to the NetSphere Strategies blog.