Today’s customers are more connected – and have higher expectations – than ever before, and Adobe Systems Inc. wants to help retailers meet their demands.
On Tuesday the company unveiled a series of product partnerships and features for its various software platforms aimed at helping retailers deliver a more personalized, omnichannel experience.
“The way consumers discover and purchase goods continues to evolve and they expect their shopping experiences to be intuitive, convenient, authentic and available anytime – both online and in-store,” Michael Klein, Adobe’s director of industry strategy for Adobe Marketing Cloud, wrote in a Jan. 17 blog post. “Creating effective and memorable experiences for digitally sophisticated shoppers is not an easy feat. That’s where Adobe comes in.”
Among the new features:
- Fluid Experiences for Retail invites retailers to use Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to build, manage, and optimize the customer experience across multiple platforms, including in-store associate apps, social channels, physical signs, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and smart screens, by automatically editing and resizing both copy and images based on the platform. For example, a department store can use the same campaign content to promote a new fashion line with 140 characters or less on Twitter, post an eye-catching status on Facebook, or send past customers an email highlighting deals they find especially enticing. When shoppers actually visit the store, they’ll find digital signs, mobile apps, and point-of-sale platforms all in sync.
- The Adobe Sensei-powered Automated Personalization and Recommendations engine for Adobe Target allows retailers to use a customer’s browsing and purchase history to improve recommendations and optimize their experience across the board. (And for privacy-minded consumers who think that experience sounds more scary than helpful, it requires users opt in first.)
- The company has also integrated Adobe Campaign with its Dreamweaver HTML coding platform to produce Email Marketing Enhancements for Retail, intended as a central platform email marketers can use to code, personalize, and send emails by first creating messages in Dreamweaver, then automatically syncing them with Adobe Campaign.
Fluid Experiences for Retail and Email Marketing Enhancements for Retail are both currently in beta, with the latter currently being prepared for a February release.
Partnerships include smart mirrors, big-box retail platforms
In addition to revealing new features for its own software platforms, Adobe announced a series of partnerships this week designed to help clients improve their customers’ in-store retail experience by incorporating smart mirrors, multi-platform shopping support, and a specialty platform for big-box stores into AEM and Marketing Cloud.
The first, the Memomi Memory Mirror integration, allows shoppers to use interactive mirrors to, for example, record themselves for 12 seconds after trying on an item of clothing to see how they look from all sides. Retailers can then track whether the shopper purchased the item and offer complementary suggestions such as matching footwear.
The second, developed in collaboration with digital consulting and technology services firm Valtech, allows shoppers at grocery and big-box stores to use their smartphone or tablet cameras to shoot pictures of items in store flyers and assemble them into a digital shopping list.
Finally, the cloud-based Commercetools allows customers to make purchases on any screen capable of connecting to the platform.
