Innovations in Content Personalization that deliver Business Value

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Content and Commerce track for Adobe Experience League Skill Builder online. My name is Jamie Brighton, Director of Product Marketing for the Adobe Experience Cloud in EMEA. I’m delighted that you could join us for this event and to be able to share, along with my colleague Sean McCran, some of the key innovations in our Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce applications. We have a great program of content for you covering both AEM and Adobe Commerce topics. For AEM, you’ll be able to join sessions focusing on single page applications, delivering headless experiences, and taking your asset metadata and workflows to the next level. In Commerce, we’ll cover headless commerce approaches and what you need to know when getting ready for the Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 upgrade. As people interact with content and technology, their expectations and relationships with businesses evolve. The pandemic overwhelmed potential customers with mass content noise surrounding potential buyers and making them leave the conversation with businesses and turn to their own research and digital channels. The change in behavior is forcing business to cut through the noise with one-to-one personalized content delivered the way that the potential customer wants to digest and understand it. For many organizations, they’re having to go through some kind of transformation in order to be able to accomplish this. Today, over 70% of IT teams are maintaining or driving many digital transformation projects. This goes hand in hand with the fact that companies who are digitally mature drive more profit and revenue growth than lower maturity companies. In fact, more than 75% of respondents of a Deloitte survey said that digital is what makes them stand out from their competition. Digital transformation is now, and you’ve heard this time and time again, but especially during the pandemic, and I know that it’s potentially nothing new to you to hear that digital transformation is important, but instead of talking about why it’s critical, I want to talk a little bit about how Adobe can help you to get to your digital transformation goals. Many of our customers are already driving these transformation programs throughout their company, and in the beginning, there were often many challenges associated with digital transformation, many of which relate directly to how organizations think about and manage their content. I wonder if any of these things that I’m about to talk through apply to your company or those that you’re working with. We often find that teams creating content are often siloed, and this is exacerbated by the fact that as companies grow, silos are amplified, even more so when we think about working remotely. Not only is the content inconsistent across each team member and team, but content production gets more costly. On the back end, just like how each team creating content is siloed, teams on the back end delivering that content are bogged down by frequent requests, manual processes, and outdated technologies, which means that they have an inability to scale. And as teams scramble to understand how this content is performing, there’s a clear need to make data-driven decisions, and yet there’s a gap that exists today where everyone has data but can’t necessarily derive the right insights to deliver a great customer experience. What does this mean for your bottom line? Well, ultimately, it means more operating costs, less revenue, and poor customer experience, a lose-lose situation, however you look at it. That’s why with Adobe Experience Manager, we’re creating the keys to accelerating digital transformation, and these come in three guises. Firstly, content for all. At Adobe, we’re democratizing the way content is created. Now with Adobe Experience Manager, content can easily be created and streamlined all through a single platform. Omnichannel delivery with our latest capabilities, IT teams and R&D teams can easily deliver all that content through any channel, physical or digital, seamlessly. And finally, experience intelligence. With our deep analytics and data features, we’ll surface insights across each touch point of the customer journey. Some of these innovations will enable you to transform your business by delivering truly connected and personalized experiences to your customers and digital citizens. It’s no secret that many organizations want to run and operate at the speed of cloud, managing critical business applications to make the digital economy personal. And we’re delighted to see the rapid adoption of our cloud native application that has unlocked significant value for creatives, for marketers, and for developers. Recent cloud innovations like front-end microservices have unlocked significant efficiencies for our developer community in delivering rich, engaging experiences. And it’s exciting to see our customers bring these innovations into practice. I think it’s also important to point out that while Experience Manager as a cloud service enables us to bring innovation to market more rapidly, we continue to invest in and bring innovation to the product, whichever delivery model is right for you and for your organization. We think deeply about these problems and subscribe to a unified goal to help our customers deliver exceptional personalized experiences that drive real business value. The bedrock to our modern content system is built on three strategic pillars that unlock greater business opportunities. One, content for all, to empower all teams to collaborate in the creation process. Last year, we launched Assets Essentials, an application that allows sharing of content across every team and automatically surfacing of digital assets in the apps you use every day. In addition, with quick experience creation tools, you can quickly go from templates in Adobe XD to one of hundreds of sites in Experience Manager with low to no code required. Two, experience intelligence that leverages data and machine learning to unlock personalized experiences at scale. This cuts down mundane and error prone tasks and drives greater efficiency. For example, with features like smart color tags and constant automation, we’ve brought intelligent asset processing capabilities to generate asset variations into the dam. In addition, with advancements in automated form conversions, you can quickly convert static forms into modernized personalized experiences and serve customers wherever they are with minimal IT effort. Three, omnichannel content delivery ensures content can be created once and reused across multiple channels. Over the last year, we expanded our headless CMS offering with support for GraphQL delivery and React core components to manage decoupled content for your apps, SPAs, or any rich front-end experience. These strategic pillars are the reason that many organizations choose to partner with Adobe for their customer experience management needs. Take Volkswagen, for example, a global car manufacturer who built their entire classic car and parts business on Adobe Experience Manager. We talked about this relationship at our recent summit event. For the car enthusiasts out there, this is an emotional affair. Volkswagen is not only serving their loyal and fanatical classic car shoppers, but they’re also building a legacy with unique experiences built entirely on our headless and decoupled CMS capabilities. We are not resting on our laurels though. We’re accelerating the pace of innovation that can help you to drive and deliver business results. I’d like to talk through each of these in a little bit more detail, and I’ll start with content personalization, our biggest and most advanced set of features that allow every experience to be personalized. We’re bringing data to content and industry first, so not only can we answer what and where content is effective, but also why. Imagine if you knew exactly what audiences are converting to which content and why. It’s our goal to give content managers the right insights and ability to create and personalize content that drives those business results, be it headless, hybrid, or coupled experiences with Experience Manager. Next, we’re doubling our investments to better manage the asset lifecycle by bringing Experience Manager assets, Adobe Workfront, and Adobe Creative Cloud tightly together. We’re building deeper native integrations that will drive better content consistency and productivity across creative and marketing organizations of any size. That means creatives and marketers can manage their design workflows without having to leave their favorite tools and get the work done. Then we’re reimagining Experience Manager forms by simplifying the authoring experience and building new integrations. With a new wizard-based authoring tool for forms, we’re empowering users to build the right business forms they need with just a few simple guided steps. We’re also expanding on our product partnership with Microsoft, introducing new integrations with Power Automate and Teams so that managing critical forms and documents becomes a seamless experience, supercharging operational efficiency and boosting time to value. And next, we recently announced Adobe Learning Manager, an experience-driven learning system that will transform the way that learning is delivered. In this remote and digital first world, learning and upskilling requires focus on content retention rather than course completions. And that’s why we’ve built an industry-first personalized learning management system that uses gamification to enhance engagement and retention and can be delivered as a service within headless implementations. And we’re really excited to see how you can bring learning content to your teams and drive impact. And finally, Adobe Developer App Builder for Experience Manager provides a unified third-party extensibility framework for developers to integrate and create customer experiences. With this complete extensibility framework built on Adobe’s infrastructure, developers can build custom microservices, extend and integrate Experience Manager across Adobe solutions and the rest of the IT stack. And I’m excited to see the apps that our developer community builds using this framework. We’ll be touching on some of these capabilities and many more besides in our program today. And with that, I’d like to thank you again for joining us for these sessions today and hand you over to Sean McCran, Head of Product Marketing for Adobe Commerce in EMEA. Sean, over to you. Hello, welcome to this Experience League Skill Builders online session. My name is Sean McCran and I’m the Head of Product Marketing for Commerce in Europe. Let’s take a brief look at the content and commerce track for today. We’ve got Chris diving into single-page applications for Adobe Experience Manager. We’ve got Bethan hosting two sessions on a new version of Adobe Commerce that we released in April and discussing headless and progressive apps for commerce. Then we’ve got Russell, Thomas and Chris all discussing key topics across Adobe Experience Manager, such as metadata, headless experiences and workflow management. But first, let’s take a closer look at the world of commerce. So commerce is surging and brands are being asked to deliver more personalized experiences across more channels of engagement and at a faster rate than ever before. In B2C, buying options and consumer choice is here to stay. Customers want the flexibility to engage on the channel of their choice, often moving between channels before committing. In B2B, the sales models are rapidly shifting to digital and the B2C best practices are coming through, but also evolving to fit the B2B model. The lines are blurring and all buyers, whether B2C or B2B, expect a personalized experience. Retailers are seeing a 68% year-on-year growth in online sales and IBC recently found that 65% of B2B companies are finding new sales models are as effective or more so compared to prior to the March of 2021 with a 24% increase in overall revenue as a result of adopting a modern commerce model. How can you achieve this now and plan for the future? With that question in mind, let’s take a closer look at two key topics for you can approach this as a successful commerce business. First part of this is all about experience. At Adobe, we believe people buy experiences, not products. The result in this Forrester study showed that experienced businesses have higher revenue growth, average order value and customer retention. It’s official, focusing on experience is good for your customers and good for your business, but often we find it hard to deliver fully personalized commerce experiences. Do you have access to all of the right areas of your business to create personalized experiences? Key one of them is data. So data is still siloed. Although we’ve been talking about unified customer profiles for years and years, it’s still a significant challenge in many organizations. 50% of companies still manage their data through individual applications instead of having a joint actionable approach. And 37% of those also design their customer journeys manually according to the Winterby Group. For commerce, not having access to two types of data specifically puts you at a massive disadvantage. Customer data, this is the data about your customers such as their profile information, preferences and other personal information. And activity data, what your customers are doing on your site. How are they navigating? What do they look at? And how easy is it for them to complete the shopping experience that fulfills both yours and their objectives? If you have access to both of these types of data, the ability to create meaningful personalized commerce journeys is well within your ground. So how does experience and data relate to Adobe Commerce? Adobe Commerce gives you robust out of the box commerce platform with almost limitless experience management. The platform uses a hybrid headless model by including content authoring tools such as our progressive web application studio and page builder to drive your content experience or APIs to leverage any front end you want. So how does experience and data relate to Adobe Commerce? Adobe Commerce gives you robust out of the box commerce platform with almost limitless experience management experience or APIs to leverage any front end you want. We are of course partial to Adobe Experience Manager. We can help you get started with our commerce integration framework. Product recommendations powered by Sensei and built-in promotional capabilities including basic segmentation means your personalization journey is just a click away. Every great experience comes from utilizing data and insights to make improvements that drive real business value. All of this with near limitless flexibility in both use cases across B2B and B2C or from a single platform. In deployment options, Adobe Commerce comes with our built for purpose cloud infrastructure on either Amazon Web Services or Azure. If you have special requirements you can deploy with your own infrastructure using your on premise option. If you have business complexity, multi country, multi language, custom catalogs on multiple brands or sites, that’s all well within the capabilities of Adobe Commerce enabling you to scale easily and efficiently. Commerce has an ecosystem rich in partners, developers and technology vendors all adding their own unique insights into customer solutions and the commerce extensions marketplace. So what is the Adobe strategy for delivering advanced multi channel capabilities? This is all about offering greater business agility for your customers. Multi channel commerce means providing customers the greatest of flexibility to sell everywhere, deliver anywhere and support the widest range of digital business models that our customers are demanding. The first area of multi channel commerce, the first part on the left here, is supporting multiple business models all about meeting the demands of our customers and the various businesses that they participate in whether that’s B2B, B2C or hybrid. B2B is the fastest growing commerce segment with 90% of B2B purchases using digital technology or research to procure. The second area, providing our merchants to flexibility to sell on marketplaces, aggregators and social platforms is all about providing customers the greatest flexibility to sell differently. And finally the third area in multi channel commerce pillar is all about meeting shoppers demands and expectations and how quickly and where they want their products fulfilled. The battle for next day or same day delivery whether fulfilled through buying online or pick up in store or other fulfillment options continues to completely reshape shopper expectations for delivery. So let’s briefly take a look at three of the key topics that you can learn about more in our upcoming commerce sessions with my colleagues. When we look at personalized experiences, Adobe Commerce includes powerful content authoring and merchandising capabilities. They empower your marketing and commerce teams to easily create site content using our page builder which is a drag and drop content editing tool, works with commerce and progressive web app sites. You can actually see the tool in the screenshot here. You can create multiple sites for different customers or markets all from a single instance. Adobe Commerce excels at supporting tailored experiences for different brands, market segments and geographies with its multi site architecture and support for multiple languages, currencies, tax policies, shipping and payment options. We also help customers increase sales with intelligent Adobe Sensei search and product recommendations. Customers can deploy product recommendation units across their sites to display relevant products to each buyer. And now with the addition of Adobe Commerce live search, you can take advantage of Sensei powered search results that boost relevance and conversion rates. And finally, marketers can personalize content and offers to customers with robust segmentation and targeting included within the Adobe Commerce product itself. Clients can also use industry leading Adobe Target for more sophisticated AI driven personalized options if they have multi channel target strategy in place. Once we’ve got that experience driven approach, Adobe Commerce is also designed to fuel growth with business insights. It enables you to break down data silos for a complete picture of your business by centralizing data from across systems in the Commerce Business Intelligence warehouse. It also enables you to transform commerce data into business insights. There are over 75 KPI dashboards, report builds, builds and visualization tools. Reports can also be automatically emailed to key stakeholders in the organization for greater transparency and collaboration. Businesses can also add Adobe Analytics industry leading behavior reporting, segmentation and data collection to fuel targeting across touchpoints. Analytics also includes prebuilt commerce dashboards that cover marketing, merchandising and experience metrics and business operations. Adobe Commerce also delivers a modern headless commerce architecture that enables you to build the storefront experience with innovation and agility that you’re looking for. Robust APIs connect core commerce functionality with any front end, providing customers with complete flexibility in how they design their storefronts or integrate commerce into other touchpoints for a frictionless, personalized customer experience. Customers can build out their storefronts using the traditional coupled Adobe Experience Commerce storefront, a native progressive web application storefront framework that enables next generation mobile experiences or rich digital experience capabilities through Adobe Experience Manager. In fact, you can build almost any custom storefront you want based on your experience. Headless architecture approach. We also have an API platform which will allow developers to extend and customize API functionality using serverless functions in Adobe I.O. The API platform will provide a gateway for storefront and store management APIs and allow low code integrations with other APIs. It’s designed to preserve backwards compatibility and support existing APIs, meaning you can bring your own APIs to the platform. It’s a seamless and easy API application approach. It also allows tools to extend and replace out of the box commerce APIs by implementing the logic using serverless technology and runtime in Adobe I.O. And finally, Adobe Commerce delivers enterprise scale and security with a high level of security and a high level of security with a robust cloud offering, includes global deployments via AWS and Azure based cloud infrastructure, robust security with a fully compliant cloud solution that includes distributed denial of service and firewall protection, reliable and optimized performance with an integrated fastly content delivery network and New Relic monitoring system for real time monitoring of your platform and great onboarding and 20,000-plus cloud services. And finally, Adobe Commerce delivers enterprise scale and security with a robust cloud offering, includes global deployments via AWS and Azure based cloud services and great onboarding and 24-7 support, plus a managed service option for enterprises looking for application level SLAs and additional support across their commerce infrastructure. What does that all mean in terms of bringing your commerce solution to life and showing that it’s scalable and robust for your business requirements? So commerce application performance and increased scalability is a critical part of every Adobe Commerce release. We’ve made a number of improvements over the last few quarters and in fact, we’ve just completed a new performance benchmark. White paper comparing the performance of the latest M24 version and M23 version. Some of the highlights released include a 20 times improvement in supporting large complex product catalogs. So that’s from 10 million up to 200 million. And 3000 percent improvement in orders per hour with asynchronous order processing. The 400 percent improvement in uncashed page views. So from around 150,000 page views to over 600,000 page views. And the storefront and REST API response performance was consistent across all of those metrics. So we have really core stability in the platform itself. This is all now available for merchants on the 2.4.4 release, which is available now. We recently introduced support for asynchronous order placement. This is exclusive to Adobe Commerce merchants. The ability to queue orders for asynchronous placement significantly increases the orders per hour metric. And even more particularly useful for merchants with flash sales or experience unplanned significant spikes in their sales. It’s also improved our ability to spot very large carts, so carts with several hundred line items. Something particularly important to our B2B merchants. Here’s a brief example, a snapshot if you will, of some of the customers at Adobe Commerce has helped transform their businesses into commerce powerhouses. Note how this is a wide range of both B2C and B2B customers. It shows the flexibility inherent in the platform for its hybrid commerce solution. So to finish up, there’s a wealth of exciting engaging sessions coming up today across the continent commerce space. So make the most of the skill builder day and enjoy the stories our presenters have put together for you. Thank you for your time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .