Adobe has announced new capabilities in Adobe Experience Cloud to help brands across all industries, including retailers, succeed in their first-party data strategies to deliver more personalised customer experiences at scale, and effectively prepare for peak sales periods, including the festive shopping season.
Adobe Experience Cloud’s cutting-edge personalisation enhancements – including an AI-powered search capacity and a collaborative data sharing function – will help brands deliver the tailored, contextually relevant experiences that consumers have come to expect, as digital commerce becomes a dominant channel for business growth.
According to a recent forecast from Adobe Analytics, global e-commerce is expected to hit $4.2 trillion for 2021. Demonstrating the digital economy is continuing to grow, as the pandemic produced a rare step change in online spending, equivalent to a 20 per cent boost and future growth is expected to build from this gain.
Consumers’ online shopping habits, purchasing behaviours and expectations have all changed since the onset of the pandemic. Click and collect continues to gain traction as customers prioritise safety and convenience, while branded shopping days like Black Friday are now seeing month-long spikes in promotions and revenue compared to just a single day.
“As digital commerce has reached new heights, so have customer expectations,” said Amit Ahuja, Vice President, Experience Cloud Products and Strategy, Adobe. “Scaling personalised experiences in a world where customers have control over how brands use their data, is the next big thing for marketers in any business to tackle. To succeed, brands must put quality first-party data at the centre of their customer acquisition and engagement strategy, helping build trust and deliver brand experiences with only the information customers choose to share.”
New Adobe Experience Cloud innovations include:
· Adobe Experience Platform Segment Match: Integrated into Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), Adobe Experience Platform Segment Match, now in beta, lets brands collaborate to expand their own first-party data sets through partnerships. It allows brands to securely enrich their matching first-party profiles with segment metadata for better insights and improved personalisation. For example, a retailer that sells hair products and accessories may partner with a skincare brand to exchange non-sensitive segment data about their matching customers, like the type of hair accessories that a subset of their customers is buying so that the skincare brand can recommend products for those groups. The non-sensitive customer data can only be referenced in Segment Match when the customers for both the hair accessory retailer and the skincare brand permit them.
· Enhanced Adobe Experience Platform Insights: To help retailers better understand their customers through first-party data and create more personalised shopping experiences across customer touchpoints, Adobe Experience Platform is now offering new capabilities that will streamline the data collection process and enable more actionable insights. With the general availability of Profile, Audience, Activation & License Usage Insights directly integrated into Adobe Real-time CDP companies will receive a daily delivery of key insights such as audience growth trends and customer growth analysis like which channels drive the most engagement.
· Adobe Journey Optimizer with Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials: The competition for shopper attention increases exponentially particularly during busy shopping periods like the holidays. For retailers vying for shoppers’ attention and looking to maximise conversions, it’s critical to get the customer experience right at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Available today, Adobe Journey Optimizer helps companies from all industries design, orchestrate and intelligently deliver personalised messages and promotions based on real-time customer data. Multiple data types including behavioural and transactional are combined with AI and machine learning so retailers can proactively address customer needs in real-time.
Busy shopping moments also call for creation of themed marketing campaigns as well as new site experiences that often require close collaboration on digital assets between marketing teams and creative professionals. Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials, a lightweight UI of Experience Manager Assets, serves as the default asset management experience for Journey Optimizer. This native integration, beneficial to any digital business, provides a simplified user experience for marketing and creative professionals to store, discover, and distribute digital assets across teams, all in a centralised, cloud-based workspace. The application also integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud applications to allow teams to work in their preferred environment. And finally, AI-supported workflows and search powered by Adobe Sensei allow for intuitive search and discovery of digital assets.
· AI-powered Live Search for Adobe Commerce: When it comes to online shopping, buyers expect to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. In fact, shoppers who utilise the search function on a storefront are up to four times more likely to transact, making the site search capability a crucial element of a merchant’s customer experience strategy. With the availability of Live Search powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe Commerce merchants can now provide their shoppers with relevant and personalised search-as-you-type results. Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, helps reduce tedious, manual merchant tasks, while delivering search results with speed and accuracy based on what the shopper is looking for.
