Experience Delivers

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

We’ve updated Adobe Scene7, now part of Adobe Experience Manager, and are excited to share the latest features with you. Our newest release includes enhanced features and tighter integration with Adobe Experience Manager to streamline campaign management, improve customer experience, and increase conversion.  

Key features included in the release are:

A new universal video player that enables you to design once in HTML5 and deliver video optimally to every device.  With the universal video player, Scene7 can automatically detect each viewer’s browser type and network bandwidth, and serve up the best viewing and playback experience.

For more information on video strategies and best practices, download our latest guide: The Adobe 2013 Video Conversion playbook. You'll learn proven techniques for creating targeted and profitable videos.

Richer integration with Adobe Experience Manager enables automatic transcoding, drag-and-drop web page authoring, and dynamic personalization tools.

Product enhancements that enable you to convert fonts to outlines, maintain source image format and color space during FXG conversion, knock out opaque image backgrounds on ingestion, and much more.

The latest release is live in North America as of May 2, 2013, with data center deployments scheduled for Europe and Asia shortly thereafter.  Here are more release details.

Learn more about how Experience Manager dynamic media (powered by Scene7) can help you deliver dynamic rich media across devices.  

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!

As thousands of digital marketers from across Europe gather in London for the start of Adobe Summit today—and also coming hot on the heels of the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager 5.6 (which now includes all CQ capabilities)—we’re excited to announce Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect.

Webinars have become an increasingly important part of the digital marketing mix as organizations work to engage with prospects and customers and to cost-effectively drive leads.  However, to be successful, marketers need to be able to draw large audiences, effectively engage and communicate with participants, and measure the effectiveness of each webinar like they would a search campaign.  And, importantly, do so as part of their overall online presence. Often times, challenges associated with this process can result in marketers not getting the return they need from their online events, at the expense of driving interest, revenue and loyalty.

That’s where Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect, can help by providing marketers with a complete set of capabilities to conduct webinars and manage the process from within the Experience Manager environment.

First, the offering enables marketers to easily create targeted webinar landing pages that drive registration using pre-built tools that work seamlessly with Adobe Connect. And users can do so leveraging the familiar drag-and-drop interface, existing assets, page design templates, and additional components available in Experience Manager for landing page creation.

Next, the offering enables the delivery of immersive online events that help engage audiences to build brand and drive demand. Webinar environments supporting up to 1,500 attendees can be branded with corporate colors and logos, and deliver rich interactivity, including content and video streaming, live Twitter feeds, Q&A, and polls.  

Finally, post-event analytics, delivered via capabilities from Adobe Analytics, enable measurement of results. From identifying which promotional campaigns generated the best results to qualifying leads based on both demographic and behavioral dimensions and also reviewing engagement levels throughout the event to determine what messages resonated most with the audience, marketers can gain important insights needed to optimize their webinar programs.

The new offering will be provided as an add-on to Adobe Experience Manager, and is expected to be available in June. After licensing the add-on, a free integration package, available via Package Share, will enable the solution.

We’re thrilled to bring together these Adobe technologies to provide a strong answer to some key challenges our customers have expressed they face in running their webinar programs. We encourage you to stay in touch with us here and on Twitter; we’ll be sharing additional information as we approach availability. And for those in the community at Adobe Summit in London, you can learn more about this offering at the Adobe Experience Manager demo booth within the Community Pavilion.

Chris Nguyen

Product Marketing

@ChrisNguyen

Replication is a key feature of the AEM solution. As such it should be carefully monitored, and there are a couple of ways to achieve this:

• JMX: since version 5.5 AEM offers JMX MBeans to monitor a number of aspects on your instance, including the replication Agents, the complete list is available here: http://localhost:4502/system/console/jmx.
• Logs: replication APIs output a certain volume of logs, that can be used to monitor the various agents in real time.

Now option 2 is probably the simplest to use, but all of these logs are written in the main AEM log file: crx-quickstart/logs/error.log. This means that this file will grow fast on large infrastructures where a lot of replications are performed, and monitoring replication can become quite cumbersome.

To avoid this we can arrange for these logs to be written in different files, by creating a new Logger configuration.

Out of the box AEM creates a number of div tags in the HTML code, these are used by the editing system, but also to identify the various components in the DOM.

As a designer you want to make sure the HTML presented to the end user complies to what you originally put together, so these generated elements can often be seen as a nuisance.

However there are a few ways to work around this, one of them is to use the cq:htmlTag node as described in this post.

The next WEM Wednesday webinar, originally scheduled for April 17^th, has been rescheduled for May 1^st (following the Adobe Summit in London).  In this webinar, we will continue the exciting conversations around “mobile,” focusing on the ability to deliver relevant experiences across the multitude of mobile and tablet devices available today.

Our experts, Ray Pun, Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid) and Gabriel Walt will discuss the importance of investing in mobile personalization, and showcase how Adobe Experience Manager, with integration of Adobe Target, provides the capability to deliver personalized experiences through mobile channels.

Register for the live webinar here. We hope you’ll join us.

In just one week, we all will be turning to London for Europe’s biggest digital marketing event of the year: Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference. Following on last year’s success, we can again expect a great community of digital marketing leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs who are sure to deliver fascinating insights and best practices to solve marketers’ growing challenges.  No doubt that next week will spark new ideas and accelerate many others. Here’s a peak at what’s in store for Web Experience Management:

·         Curious about the true value of enabling marketers to self-publish in 40 languages and 72 countries to establish a digital presence that captures and sustains their audience’s attention?  Then join SAP’s Shawn Burns, Global VP of Digital Marketing and our Loni Stark in their session on “How to Stand Out: Survival of the Most Relevant.”

·         Interested in taking a closer look at how pharmaceutical reps’ sales presentations, delivered on a iPad, can be authored centrally with Adobe Experience Manager, Analytics and PhoneGap to return actionable leads and meeting notes? Don’t miss Miro Walker, CEO of Cognifide and Cédric Hüsler show how to “Build blockbuster mobile apps the easy way!”

·         Looking to have several of the most popular digital marketing myths debunked? Get great insights from Stevin Treurniet, Senior Marketing Consultant at DSM and Adobe’s Marcel Boucher on the do’s and don’ts of personalisation and brand engagement in their session, “The marketer's guide to solutions for building brands online.”

These are just three of the twelve sessions in the Web Experience Management track. There’s much more, including sessions focused on:

·         Digital Asset Management – how marketers are taking new approaches to creating, managing, and delivering digital assets for dynamic multichannel experiences

·         Experience-driven commerce: Turning passion into purchase

·         The 10 hottest new features in Adobe Experience Manager

Don’t miss it!  Choose your Web Experience Management session before they fill up.

All of this great content and networking comes on the heels of the newest release of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 5.6) which features a host of new capabilities in Digital Asset Management, Social and Mobile, as well as even deeper integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions and Adobe Creative Cloud.   

Adobe Summit is the premier opportunity to hear directly from Adobe, our customer and partners gathering in London why Adobe Experience Manager has been named THE leader Web Content Management for Digital Customer Experience in latest Forrester Wave report.

We look forward to seeing you in London!

Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid)

When you place a new component onto your page, then by default you have a context menu that allows you to edit/delete etc the component.

In this blogpost I will explain you how to add some custom text into the context menu in order to identify your custom component more easily.

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.