Effective marketing involves drawing your audience into ongoing engagement with your brand. The brand that continually delivers an immersive, “human” experience wins. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers choose, recommend, or pay more for brands that personalize their messaging. That means you must deliver a digital customer experience that appeals to the senses and speaks to your audience’s deepest needs. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)—as a modern CMS geared toward the demands of enterprise marketing—will help you achieve that high standard in your brand communications.
But part of owning a solution like AEM is ensuring that you’re on a proper upgrade and maintenance schedule. It’s the only way to take full advantage of the features and functionality of the platform.
Version 6.5 is the latest edition of AEM and comes with many enhancements that will help you forge lasting customer relationships. Here is how each aspect of AEM has been improved in version 6.5 and what upgrading can mean for your marketing team.
AEM Sites
Adobe Experience Manager Sites is the central hub for dynamically creating digital content in seamless collaboration with your team. With the easy, centralized access that it provides and its sophisticated AI-powered layout optimization, Sites lets teams deploy digital collateral at higher volumes.
However, even more power awaits in AEM 6.5. New features simplify content authoring and management, helping you publish better digital media faster and in more places.
Headless CMS Capabilities
AEM provides marketers with all the functionality of a “headless CMS,” unifying content of diverse origins and facilitating delivery to mobile, IoT, kiosks, product information management (PIM) systems, and many other endpoints.
In AEM 6.5, the new HTTP API makes it even easier to deliver headless content to multiple endpoints in JSON format or to consumer-facing websites and Experience Fragments. The GraphQL API allows you to pull, manage, and create visualizations of product data from Magento Commerce.
This all helps you deliver optimized content that meets users where they are and enables you to build loyalty through better digital customer experiences.
Experience Fragments
The main advantage of Experience Fragments—initially introduced in AEM 6.3 as meaningful, self-contained “sets” of digital creative—has been the power to cut down on time and effort when repurposing redundant content. But they can be used to even greater effect in AEM 6.5.
Marketers can now port Experience Fragments to Adobe Target in the JSON format, allowing for split-testing and more personalized customer touchpoints.
AEM 6.5 also brings full-text search capabilities to Experience Fragments, allowing authors to quickly find and modify Experience Fragments that contain specific copy, instead of having to search entire webpages or sites.
Single-Page Application Editor
AEM 6.5 brings single-page application (SPA) editing to the forefront. With the SPA editor, single-page apps created with a framework like React or Angular can be fully edited within AEM, whether the author has coding expertise or not.
This puts much more power in the hands of authors, letting them keep all their work within AEM and freeing them from external tools. By making it easier on your team, you can leverage single-page apps to get personalized, dynamically updating, and high-performing content to your audience faster.
AEM Assets
To deliver best-in-class digital customer experiences, you have to work with formats that consumers reliably respond to.
One of the most valuable types of content is video. The importance of video will only continue to grow as consumer expectations evolve and users demand more engaging content.
AEM 6.5 brings key improvements to Assets that will sharpen your team’s ability to produce and collaborate on effective video collateral.
Smart Crop
The new smart crop feature in AEM 6.5 now supports video. This feature automatically focuses on the most compelling visual aspects of videos, delivering the most effective, value-driven edits to the content for various endpoints. That means responsive design for channels like mobile is effectively automated.
The smart crop feature uses Adobe Sensei’s AI-driven technology to dynamically process content with smart tagging, smart cropping, and context-aware renditions, among other features that can be leveraged to enliven digital consumer experiences.
Video Support Enhancements
Video support enhancements in AEM 6.5 ensure that all videos automatically render in the correct formats, aspect ratios, file sizes, etc. for every channel.
AEM 6.5 provides built-in optimization for social media outlets as diverse as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, with brand-new support for 360-degree video experiences and the ability to either manually select video thumbnails or leverage machine-learning algorithms for this purpose.
AEM Forms
The upgrades in the document- and form-handling capabilities of AEM 6.5 will allow more agile management of user information while providing additional performance improvements.
New Chart Types
The new chart types in AEM 6.5 give teams more options to create a visually-engaging digital customer experience. Quadrant charts and charts with multiple series are now possible, allowing for especially rich, clear representations of data.
Usability Enhancements for Interactive Communications and Workflows
AEM 6.5 simplifies operations with interactive documents and a streamlined process of creating personalized, mobile-optimized, multi-channel forms and data visualizations, such as charts and graphs.
In addition to usability enhancements that enhance form element configuration capabilities, authors now have more control over how elements and variables are displayed and how they function.
The visual workflow editor in AEM 6.5 makes workflow deployment more straightforward than in the past. For instance, AEM 6.5 now supports the usage of variables, which streamlines and automates many aspects of data storage. This ultimately spares the time of producing custom code for form-processing tasks.
Transaction Reports
The latest version of AEM lets you create transaction reports, providing better visibility into user interactions, and facilitating better decisions on which asset types to use more often and which to move away from.
Adaptive Forms
Adaptive forms can now be integrated seamlessly within single-page apps, encouraging users to stay on your website and remain engaged. Adaptive forms can also now be signed with cloud-based digital signatures that meet the latest standards for secure authentication.
AEM 6.5—A Worthwhile Upgrade for Next-Level Enterprise Marketing
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 84% of marketers either don’t have the right tools for managing their brand content or aren’t using them to their full potential.
Upgrading to the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager will solve these problems for users of the platform. Not only will AEM 6.5 help you forge higher-quality connections with customers, but it will also help your brand stay ahead of the curve.
As a digital consulting firm with deep expertise in AEM, Atypical Digital helps our valued clients make the most out of the platform and produce more effective digital customer experiences. We can help by:
- Analyzing your exact needs and use cases to customize a solution that will help you meet key marketing goals
- Standing by to help you smoothly upgrade to AEM 6.5 from older versions in order to create a better digital customer experience
- Guiding you through the implementation of the latest features of AEM in a way that works for your team and helps you serve your customers to the highest degree
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, feel free to contact our knowledgeable Adobe AEM team toda