The way that consumers interact with brands is always changing. With the mainstream appeal of high-quality video, responsive websites, and new formats like AR, VR, and 3D, digital customer experience trends will cause the customer experience (CX) to evolve at a rapid pace in 2020.
According to PwC, 73% of consumers feel that the experience a brand provides is important to their buying decisions, after price and product quality. It’s critical for modern enterprises to meet audiences where they are with personalized, highly engaging content if they want to stay competitive.
Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 comes with an advanced feature set to help enterprise marketers meet that challenge. Let’s go over three important digital customer experience trends and how AEM will help you keep up with them.
1. Ultra-Personalized Content
Are you providing a custom-tailored experience for every customer? This is where enterprise marketing is headed. Eighty-eight percent of marketers in the US report that personalizing brand content results in measurable improvements, and more than half have reported a lift greater than 10%.
When it comes to content, personalization should remain one of the highest priorities for enterprise marketers. AEM 6.5 makes new levels of personalization possible in a variety of ways.
Content Insight
AEM Sites, via Content Insight, allows you to get live data on how your content is performing. The Insights dashboard shows you web analytics that finely detail how visitors are reaching and interacting with your site. You can then leverage this intelligence to better understand your audience and create content that’s more personal.
Reports from Adobe SiteCatalyst detail page views, visitor counts, and sources, helping you make decisions on which web traffic channels and referrals are most effective and which web pages perform the best. This data is useful for testing content modifications and globally adjusting your content strategy.
Additionally, the SEO Recommendations Report has the Adobe BrightEdge analysis results in the form of a checklist. It shows what specific changes you can make to web pages in order to improve organic placement in search engines, while giving you the upper hand in reaching more of your audience with customized messaging.
Targeting Features
Beyond the data in Content Insight, AEM features targeting capabilities that will help you take personalization even further.
Whether you use AEM’s built-in targeting engine or integrate with Adobe Target, you can instantly create audience profiles based on responses to content. You can also define specific experiences for each “activity,” which are then preferentially pushed to the right audience segment.
With AEM’s rules-based targeting, you can define criteria for the version of content that your visitors are shown. These criteria can include where visitors come from, actions taken on your webpages, and demographic data, such as age and gender. Geo-targeting lets you show visitors variations of content based on their location.
Targeting Insights uses various reports—for example, A/B and multivariate test reports and those produced by Automated Personalization and Auto-Target—to show you content performance in terms of metrics like conversion rate, lift, and revenue per visit (RPV).
All this helps you make data-driven decisions on what kinds of creatives to use and when. You can also rely on the power of Automated Personalization to show each website visitor the exact content that’s most likely to convert them.
Personalization in AEM Forms
AEM Forms comes with powerful personalization capabilities as well. Through Forms, you can create custom communications for web visitors who interact with your site by filling out personal information. Examples include receipts and customized onboarding or “welcome” content. This process can be fully automated, leading to higher customer engagement and reducing strain on content authors.
You can also embed highly-targeted cross-sells and upsells into your documents and forms, which can result in increased ROI.
2. An Omnichannel Brand Presence
In 2020, providing the best digital experience to your customers wherever they are—on whatever device they happen to be using, in whatever mode they prefer to interact with your brand—will be vital in keeping your audience engaged.
In a survey by Zendesk, 87% of customers reported that they want brands to provide a more seamless experience across channels. You should have not only a brand presence in all the right places but also a consistently excellent one that meets and exceeds expectations. AEM 6.5 gives you the power to do just that, at scale.
Dynamic Media
As a key component of AEM Assets, Dynamic Media automatically generates content in many variations and lets you customize each piece perfectly for each device. This ensures an optimal experience for your audience, regardless of how they’re viewing the content.
For responsive websites, Dynamic Media seamlessly delivers a range of optimized images for the appropriate outlet. Dynamic Media in AEM 6.5 now supports the management of omnidirectional 360 Videos, letting you treat customers to a captivating visual display.
Through Smart Crop, images are automatically zoomed in and converted to the right resolution, so every visual asset is rendered in the highest quality possible for the end user’s display. AEM’s robust video support ensures that videos are streamed adaptively, cropped to the right point of interest, and resized properly, be it for mobile or desktop, kiosk, or IoT device.
With these features, your visual content will be equally compelling wherever it shows up, helping your brand stay in step with today’s digital customer experience trends.
Experience Fragments
AEM allows for the creation of highly engaging Experience Fragments, which can then be seamlessly optimized for each device.
With building blocks, a feature introduced in AEM 6.4+, authors can pull together components, such as a series of related images, that can be used and reused across any number of new content variations for different channels.
If you want to take a particular Experience Fragment and push it out to social media, AEM comes with built-in capability to publish Fragments to Facebook and Pinterest, enabling you to leverage high-performing Fragments for even more engagement and reach.
3. Immersive Experiences
Technologies such as AR and VR are on the rise. Forward-thinking brands with their eye on digital customer experience trends are capitalizing on this.
Eighty-eight percent of midsize companies are already using AR in some way, which means consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with new-era immersive content. AEM 6.5 allows you to deftly process, manage, and deploy AR/VR content, as well as 3D assets and other emerging file formats, through its DAM capabilities.
AEM Assets and Creative Cloud
AEM Assets natively integrates with Creative Cloud, which opens up new possibilities in delivering immersive experiences. Aside from facilitating quick integrations with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, AEM Assets 6.5 makes it possible for marketing and creative teams to collaborate over immersive content such as 3D and VR imagery.
For example, 3D content created in Adobe Dimensions can be imported directly and easily into Assets via Adobe Asset Link, a brand-new capability of AEM 6.5. From there, it can be managed and customized like any other content.
By using the Panoramic VR Viewer and Vertical Image Viewer through AEM Assets, you can preview immersive image content and control how the experience will render on practically any device.
This means being able to fine-tune the customer experience of real-world retail spaces and environments, as customers use next-gen technology to view your virtual reality content.
Can Your Brand Compete in the New Era of Customer Engagement?
Today’s customers expect more from the brands they interact with. Cutting-edge experiences are quickly becoming the norm. At a time when brands are leveraging the latest technologies to reach customers in more personal and more immersive ways, it’s important to judge whether your enterprise marketing efforts are up to the task.
If the answer is “Yes,” then make sure you have both the right tools and the right partners by your side. AEM 6.5 can help your brand keep up with the digital customer experience trends of today and tomorrow. With our experience in implementing AEM, Atypical Digital can help you get there.
We can introduce you to AEM’s power in facilitating the modern experiences that consumers want. Once you see the potential, we’ll bring our solution design, development, and testing expertise to help you get the most out of AEM.
We will deeply evaluate your current marketing processes and then identify specific AEM features that will help you meet critical marketing goals and bring the customer journey to the next level.
Contact us today at Atypical Digital to find out how to secure your brand’s place at the top through the better customer experiences that AEM will help you deliver.