Experience Delivers

Build brand, drive demand and extend your reach with web experience management

Furnishing a room is all about getting the right look. So is selling furniture online.

The specialty stores of Furniture Row use Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to get the right look—for any device and any screen size. Dynamic media capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager help Furniture Row efficiently create rich, customizable interactive experiences that increase customer engagement and conversion. A single set of master assets is used and optimized for any device. That means all customers can get the same quality experience no matter the device or channel they choose to shop for home furnishings.

“We designed our website to complement our in-store experiences and empower customers to get all the information they need,” says Noah Linge, Furniture Row’s director of digital marketing. “As in our stores, the goal is to offer consumers 100% satisfying experiences online. Dynamic media capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager help make this a reality.”

So far, Furniture Row has realized double-digit increases in the amount of time spent on its sites that used Experience Manager dynamic media capabilities. And its optimized mobile experience has reduced bounce rates while increasing the number of customers who share purchase news or other information from Furniture Row on social media. http://adobe.ly/12Ff75l

Today, web launches can become major headaches for many organizations.  Coordinating between authors and technologists requires a careful plan to have a successful launch. Whether launching a few pages, a revised site or multiple sites, Adobe Experience Manager 5.6 (AEM) enables organizations to more easily collaborate without impacting the day to day performance of their website(s).

See for yourself as Gilles Knobloch, Adobe Lead Developer, presents: “Launches: concurrent preparation of multiple versions of a website (AEM 5.6) “ In this session, Gilles will demonstrate how easy it is to utilize AEM to coordinate between authors to prepare for launch. You will learn how the basic mechanisms of this feature have been integrated into AEM for streamlining your launch incentives.

Join us Wednesday, June 12^th at 8:00 a.m. PT!

The world’s largest international cable operator clearly understands that the quality and depth of digital experiences directly affects customer satisfaction. That’s why Liberty Global uses Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The company’s old websites provided access to basic services and information. Unfortunately, the content management system Liberty Global built in-house couldn’t adequately support increasing customer service demands or the need to generate new business opportunities online.

To create and deliver dynamic digital content across devices, Liberty Global chose Adobe Experience Manager. Its web content management and digital asset management capabilities helped Liberty Global build once and use everywhere. The company’s first new website using Adobe solutions was created in Germany and took six months to build—new experiences could be built even faster.

“By reusing the components and templates in Adobe Experience Manager, we built websites containing more than a thousand pages for our Swiss operation in only eight weeks,” says Morgan Evans, Director Online at Liberty Global.

Adobe Experience Manager integrates smoothly with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. Adobe solutions provide solid analytics across channels that help Liberty Global continuously measure, analyze, and optimize performance across its websites.

“For the company, the returns from optimization have been strong. For example, optimizing call-to-action buttons on the product page produced a 23% increase in clicks,” says Evans. “By using Adobe Marketing Cloud to optimize our websites, we are able to more readily take advantage of opportunities and trends we see in the marketplace in order to improve customer engagement.”

Learn more about Liberty Global and how it’s using Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to enhance customer experiences by clicking here. http://adobe.ly/YHZlDA

One of the first colleges in the United States to offer online degrees for art and design now powers its classes with content managed by Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

San Francisco’s Academy of Art University developed a highly specialized learning management system to manage and deliver dynamic, creative course content. For its web content management system, the school turned to Adobe to improve the look and feel of its interfaces and tools, as well as for managing and updating course assets.

Chris Lefferts, executive vice-president of online education at Academy of Art University, says, “Adobe Experience Manager offered the right content management environment to provide all the functionality we wanted, at the level of quality we demanded. Plus, it offered streamlined integration with our learning management system, which was essential for us.”

Experience Manager also integrates seamlessly with Adobe Creative Suite, which the university uses extensively to build online coursework and teach students. The university also leverages responsive design in Experience Manager to accommodate students accessing course materials from multiple devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Learn more about the ways Academy of Art University uses Adobe Experience Manager by checking out their full story here.

During last week’s Web Experience Management Wednesday webinar, we had an exciting discussion about “mobile,” focusing on the ability to deliver relevant experiences across the multitude of mobile and tablet devices available today. We had a good turnout from the community (thanks to all) and great conversation on the topic.

Our experts, Ray Pun, Gunnar Klauberg (@aeroid) and Gabriel Walt, illustrated why it’s important to invest in mobile personalization. They also demonstrated how Adobe Experience Manager mobile capabilities, combined with Adobe Target integration, uniquely enable the delivery of personalized experiences through mobile channels.

If you missed the live webinar, we’ve now got you covered with an on-demand version. Check it out here.

Also, planning is underway for our next WEM Wednesday webinar which will focus on digital asset management (DAM). We will look at how Experience Manager DAM and its integration of dynamic media capabilities (formerly Adobe Scene7®) and Adobe Creative Cloud™ can help you to simplify the planning, production and distribution of your digital assets.  Register here for this live webinar taking place on May 22^nd.  We’ll see you there!

Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company chose Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to engage clients in attractive and intuitive ways—regardless of the device they use or the language they speak.

Swisscom provides mobile, cable and broadband communications to millions of business and residential customers. To simultaneously improve customer experiences and streamline internal processes, Swisscom standardized web content management across business units using Adobe Experience Manager.

Christoph Bracher, online solutions manager for Swisscom’s Online division, says, “We wanted to attract and retain customers with intuitive, state-of-the-art web experiences. We chose Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics because the combined solutions offered an engaging experience for site visitors—and ease of management and use for us.”

Improved efficiencies include automated layout that adapts content to fit any device and automated translation of sources into four languages: German, French, Italian, and English. Plus, Experience Manager enables the ability to repurpose content across business units.

Measuring customer engagement and enhancing experiences has helped improve conversion by up to 150% for Swisscom, while providing new marketing efficiencies. For example, Virtual Business Club, the company’s customer self-service portal, is also close to reaching its goal of delivering new information and services 25% faster while cutting costs 20%.

Swisscom IT Services Ltd. (ITS) provides services and consulting for IT infrastructure and maintenance, enterprise applications, and content management. It’s leveraging Experience Manager to dynamically publish time-sensitive content directly to the web, including contact forms for technical information that help generate sales leads.

Check out Swisscom’s full story here.

By taking direct control of its web content with Adobe Experience Manager, My Move has increased customer satisfaction by 25% and reduced the time it takes to update online offers.

My Move offers tips, tools, and special offers to movers. Its original website, launched in 2011, was built using an open-source portal that required extensive customization. But limited publishing capabilities, including difficulty re-using unstructured content, prompted My Move to seek new tools.

Ada Vassilovski, vice president of product and marketing for My Move, says, “We needed a more robust web content management solution. Time to market is critical for us, so we looked to provide our editorial and marketing teams more direct control so they could publish more current content and targeted offers rapidly, without having to go through our development team.”

In partnership with CITYTECH, the company’s consultant and systems integrator, My Move chose Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, for is its ability to integrate easily with back-end systems.

Completed in four months, the new website leveraged web content management and digital asset management capabilities in Experience Manager. For customers, updated content loads quicker. Behind the scenes, My Move can use templates to rapidly develop new content. Plus, responsive design capabilities in Experience Manager minimize the amount of manual page resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices, including tablets and smartphones. Since launching the new site, My Move has seen changes to visitor behavior, engagement and e-commerce activity.

“Analysis showed us that when we switched to the new site, our customer satisfaction ratings improved by 25%,” says Vassilovski. “With the Adobe solution helping us to keep our content fresh and relevant, we’re better able to satisfy customer expectations and build brand affinity.”

Learn more about My Move’s full story here.

Our Tatiana Mejia had a chance to join in on CMSwire's most recent Tweet Jam, aimed at growing and engaging online communities. You can find a full recap of the online conversation below. Enjoy!

In March, with the peak holiday shopping season behind us and before merchants head into planning and start locking down their sites for this coming year, we featured con­tent around commerce best practices and how to opti­mize the customer experience across the growing number of devices and channels.

Experts from the Adobe Experience Manager prod­uct mar­ket­ing team shared “Quick Tips” for leveraging channels and content to create optimized commerce experiences that help drive ROI. We also curated related arti­cles and blog posts from across the web and shared many of them via our @AdobeWEM Twit­ter account.  We’ve com­piled the great content here in one blog post for easy ref­er­ence.

Let us know what other types of monthly con­tent you would like to see in the future.

Adobe Quick Tips for Omnichannel Commerce:

Tip One:  “Beware password fatigue! We all want to move beyond guest checkout to know our customer better and amplify our relationship going forward, but requiring everyone to create yet another user account with yet another complicated password to remember isn't the answer. The answer? Use social sign-in and allow your customer to sign-in with their Facebook account or similar. More than 75% of carts are abandoned and this final step of sign-in is a key component. There are additional benefits of allowing social sign-in as well such as being able to know your customers likes and interests and use this information to further personalize their shopping experience with targeted content to make their visit more relevant.”

Tatiana Mejia is a senior product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager with a focus on the Social Communities capabilities. Tatiana’s extensive experience in SaaS, collaboration and productivity applications, and social marketing helps marketers build communities and integrate social into their digital properties.

Tip Two:  “All too often we spend a great deal of creative energy designing the checkout experience and then push it out to the general public to find we still have high abandonment rates. As e-commerce practitioners we have to shift to a testing mentality rather than the big annual redesign workshop. The returns can be astounding. Last fall I read a blog entry saying colored header bars across the page created a psychological barrier for the customer to move from one form area to the next (e.g., from shipping Address to billing address to payment details). At first, knowing that my own checkout page included a solid background color in the form header titles, I scoffed at the insight. Then I decided to test the idea and remove the color bars that divided the page from one section to the next. The results were a 16% lift in conversion!”

Darin Archer (@darinarcher) is a senior product marketing manager at Adobe and is responsible for the company’s "experience-driven commerce" initiative as part of the Adobe Experience Manager team.  He leverages his expertise in eCommerce, CRM experiences and technology to help customers meet business needs and deliver a single immersive experience that enables commerce at every point of content consumption. 

Tip Three:  “As the customer journey increasingly passes from home to work to in-store and everywhere in between, serving the same content on a product detail page minimizes the opportunity. We have an opportunity to consider the customer journey, where they might be, what device they're accessing our page from and what type of bandwidth they may have to dynamically assemble a different experience in context of these things. On the mobile side we need to consider the different styles of the tablet vs. the mobile phone such that in the tablet case we may want to have huge beautiful imagery that creates a catalogue like experiences to flip through on a couch. Whereas if the customer is accessing that same product detail page on their smartphone they may be in our stores or competitors store trying to determine where it might be in stock or whether or not it's in inventory at the store they're in. With these different cases, taking the customer journey into consideration will drive a different experience for your pages. Take advantage of the insights you have with device detection.”

Gunnar Klauberg (@aeroid) is the product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager with a focus on all things mobile. Gunnar has more than a decade of experience in content management and enjoys helping customers drive their business through a coherent and agile web experience.

Tip Four:  “We now hold displays in our hands on the couch that have incredible resolution, fidelity and interactivity that far surpasses any print catalogue ever created. Yet, too many websites still showcase the products in multiple tiny columns and rows of product shots. Tip: Create product category pages and special merchandising pages with the product imagery as the focus point. Use large images and a swipe design element to make it fun and visually stunning to look at your products. Include the ability to zoom in further or turn the product around to see it from different angles, and seamlessly bring product sku information forward such as price or ratings at the touch of a finger. Creating a more catalogue like shopping experience will increase engagement and maximize the opportunity for conversion.”

Elliot Sedegah (@esedegah) is a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager, where he brings to this role a breadth of experience in both public and private sector software engineering, product management and IT consulting. His focus and interest is helping organizations take full advantage of online, mobile and social channels to increase customer engagement and provide compelling online experiences.

Tip Five:  “Companies today make some of the most beautiful products, yet they're often relegated to a simple product shot with a white background. It's as if the dinner plate only exists on its own with no purpose. Tip: Rather than showcase that dinner plate next to many others in columns and rows of plates, put it back in its natural setting on an a similarly beautiful dining table in a decorated room bringing the joys of a dinner party to life further accentuating the dinner plates contribution. In our stores and our catalogues we know that our products sell better when we can merchandise them in their natural setting with other similar products, yet we miss this opportunity in our e-commerce stores. Showcase your products and inspire not only the sale of that plate, but the entire dining room of products.”

Vebeka Guess is a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager solution. Vebeka focuses on helping businesses deliver rich, engaging and customized digital experiences by leveraging the dynamic media, personalized media and video capabilities available as part of the Experience Manager Digital Asset Management offering.

Tip Six:  “Site becomes the store: Many consumer goods manufacturers and some retailers have a "brand site" and an e-commerce "store". The marketing investments are divided and often favored to the "brand site" where showcasing the product in its best light is the focus rather than e-commerce. Alternatively, the e-commerce team then drives a store experience that has the same product information although sometimes less engaging. Tip: Let the site become the store. All of the rich compelling marketing pages showcasing the latest collection, hot trends or new version need not ask the customer to go "shop the collection" when they're interested in buying. Rather, take advantage of that moment and let them add to cart and purchase right there vs. requiring them to go find the product of interest in the ‘store’.”

Darin Archer (@darinarcher) is a senior product marketing manager at Adobe and is responsible for the company’s "experience-driven commerce" initiative as part of the Adobe Experience Manager team.  He leverages his expertise in eCommerce, CRM experiences and technology to help customers meet business needs and deliver a single immersive experience that enables commerce at every point of content consumption. 

Articles and blog posts from around the Web:

Crate & Barrel: A Company that Began with a Dream

Tablet traffic surpasses smartphone traffic for the first time

How mobile-optimised sites drive conversion rates and AOVs

Mobile Shopping Catches on with Affluent Consumers

Forrester: U.S. Online Retail Sales to Hit $370 Billion by 2017

Everyone loves a deal, but U.S. web shoppers love it most of all

The Ultra-Modern Store That Gives E-Commerce A Whole New Dimension

Each Channel Has A Unique Merchandise Profile

Report: 70% of Consumers Trust Brand Recommendations From Friends

Consumers Favor Trad Online Vs. Social Media For Shopping Info

The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail

Understanding the Stages of Retail

Hope you enjoyed the com­pi­la­tion! In April, Adobe Digital Marketing experts will share targeting tips, so keep check­ing the Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Face­book page for new tips.

What other top­ics would you like to see us cover? Let us know your thoughts.

By eliminating a hodgepodge of web publishing tools scattered among 3,000 users in 60 departments across nine campuses, the City College of San Francisco wanted to project the school’s organization, quality, and professionalism through a clean, consistent web experience.

Since its last redesign ten years earlier, the website had become an unmanageable collection of more than 20,000 static HTML pages, many of which were being maintained by student volunteers using whatever tools they had at their disposal. Consequently, visitors had difficulty performing basic activities, such as registering for classes, finding grades, and applying for admission.

“We’re the largest community college in California, and we’re in the center of where many of today’s technology innovations start,” says Beth Cataldo, web project lead and coordinator of CCSF’s Multimedia Studies Program. “As an institution offering degrees across many technology disciplines, we needed a state-of-the-art website that presented CCSF in the most polished, professional way possible.”

After evaluating multiple options, CCSF standardized on the Adobe Experience Manager solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud. The Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management capabilities within Adobe Experience Manager provide an easy-to-use, web-based environment built on Java for creating, managing, and delivering personalized online content.

Adobe Experience Manager has helped solve a number of problems. Intuitive, standardized templates for web pages and streamlined, standardized processes allow users to create and update their own content. Content creators can also maintain a consistent appearance, structure, and navigation for the site. Training and policies also help ensure compliance with accessibility requirements, such as those by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the U.S. Federal Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508. Finally, transforming the website has also eliminated printing expenses and making digital content easier to find.

Learn more about how CCSF used Adobe Experience Manager to create and maintain a sleek, professional, easy-to-navigate website by clicking here.