In today’s world, experience is at the forefront of brand identity from a consumer standpoint. The associations your customers make with your brand can either keep them coming back for more or turn them off from ever returning.
Understanding this, marketers and CX teams need every tool at their disposal to stay ahead of the competition and provide a world-class experience for customers. To get those tools, you need to be on the cutting edge of the tech that enables teams to create the type of brand experiences that drive customers to become brand ambassadors and evangelists. This is where your teams need to maximize value.
For marketing, this often means increasing the speed of pushing content out to provide excellent digital customer experiences, since CX defines your brand.
If you’re still using an older version of AEM, you’re losing out on the very features your competitors are taking advantage of in attempts to get ahead of you. AEM 6.5 enables teams to improve brand experiences across various digital channels with less stress and interdepartmental friction than ever before.
Not sure if you should upgrade to AEM 6.5? Here are four tips that will help you create a stellar experience using the latest features that Adobe Experience Manager has to offer. From there, the decision is all yours.
Tip 1: Keep Every Interaction on Target and Right on Time
You know your customers aren’t simply buying your products. They’re buying the complete brand experience that includes personalized content and seamless transitions to your sales process.
This fact is driven home by Oracle’s Customer Experience Impact Report, where they found that:
- Consumers would pay more for a better customer experience.
- Consumers began doing business with a competitor after a poor customer experience.
- Consumers shared complaints about online experiences when those complaints were ignored.
- Consumers gave a brand a week to respond to a question before going elsewhere.
- Sadly, 48% of B2B marketers believe their content was only somewhat effective or not effective at all.
- One of the most significant factors attributed to great content is: personalization.
- If you’re using an older version of AEM, consider moving up to version 6.5 to engage and retain your customers. Authoring is one of AEM’s strengths. It’s a platform for creating and delivering content too.
- One of its many features is its single-page application (SPA) that offers a compelling brand experience for website users. Your developers want to be able to build sites using SPA frameworks, and authors want to seamlessly edit content within AEM for a site built using this framework.
- The SPA Editor benefits your authors by:
- Providing them with a rich, marketer-friendly authoring experience
- Delivering dynamic content and media
- Providing rapid content creation
- Supplying Javascript SDK (for your developers) that automatically recognizes SPA content and allows authors to edit the content as they would with traditional content
Content storage
AEM’s built-in DAM allows users to store and manage their visual assets in the cloud. Doing so lets team members access project files no matter where they’re located. Central storage makes work more efficient because files are easily accessible from the cloud.
Cloud integration
This AEM 6.5 feature brings DAM and marketing together. Workflows are simplified, enabling high-quality content delivery that’s consistent with your branding and company identity.
Adobe stock integration
The new AEM 6.5 stock integration allows direct access to Adobe Stock imagery directly from the AEM Assets experience, enabling authors to create a seamless content discovery experience.
Adobe Asset Link strengthens collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process. Creatives can access content stored in Adobe Experience Manager Assets (AEM Assets) without leaving the apps that they are most familiar with. Creatives can seamlessly browse, search, copy, modify, and save content in the in-app panel in the Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign apps, as well as access, modify, and easily publish content that’s stored in AEM Assets.
360 Video support
Authors receive updated video support in Dynamic Media, including 360 Video and Custom Video Thumbnails. The Smart Crop feature provides the ability to eliminate the time-consuming and costly tasks of cropping content.
Tip 2: Make It Personal: Produce Cross-Channel Content
AEM is now made up of five modules—Sites, Assets, Mobile, Forms, and Communities—that help produce cross-channel content.
AEM Sites: AEM Sites helps authors create a great brand experience across every channel. They won’t have to start from scratch with every layout, saving valuable time.
AEM Mobile: The AEM Mobile module enables creation and content management for mobile apps.
AEM Forms: For those enterprises that have thousands of PDF forms, AEM’s Forms module enables the conversion of the PDFs, as well as those with traditional input fields to digital, mobile-responsive, and adaptive forms. Forms components also support your SPA in AME Sites. Overall, AEM 6.5 lets you use shorter forms to avoid user frustration, allows for pre-filling forms with existing customer data, and reduces the overall number of actions needed to check out.
AEM Communities: The AEM Communities module allows registered users to tag other registered members. The tagged members are notified with a deep link to the corresponding user generated content.
AEM Assets: This module within the AEM platform enables authors to manage their digital assets in a web-based repository. Assets works to ensure consistency in content management and high productivity for content authors.
Tip 3: Author and Design Your Customer Experiences Across Devices
Authors can create content once and deliver assets across every channel, website, mobile app, IoT, single-page application, and in-venue screen. The unified platform enables authors to create and design once and publish everywhere and anytime.
Customers, no matter where they are in their customer journey, will have a seamless experience, making it easy to be wherever your customers expect you to be.
For those with multiple devices, authors will have the capabilities to create forums, develop Q&As, and write blogs, as well as develop communities to share ideas and calendars to keep their users up to date.
Tip 4: Collaborate with Developers
The AEM 6.5 upgrade involves new features to better support digital marketers and developers, creating cohesion between departments. For developers, its cloud agility solidifies their work with backup so team members are prepared to spring into action if any issues arise.
AEM 6.5 also tracks all activity to minimize downtime, reduce risks, and ensure that no customer experience is hindered by technical difficulties. Marketing and developers can collaborate and simultaneously edit content so the user brand experience is faster and more meaningful.
Working as a Team
AEM 6.5 provides numerous ways to enable content authors and IT to work more efficiently together. You want your customers to easily find what they’re looking for and expecting from your brand. If you want a platform for creating and delivering content, then an upgrade to AEM 6.5 is the way to go.
Atypical Digital is an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Preferred Partner specializing in helping enterprise brands leverage Adobe’s AEM platform to enhance their customer experiences across various digital channels, speed up their digital marketing content publishing process, and drive more engagement.
To see how Atypical Digital can help your brand maximize its investment in AEM to truly enhance your customer experience, reach out to our team of AEM specialists today!