At the National Retail Federations “Big Show” at New York’s Javits Center this week, Adobe will announce new marketing cloud features designed to help retailers interact with customers more effectively, both online and in physical retail locations.
Vebeka Guess is Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Experience Manager–one of the key elements of its successful marketing suite–gave me a preview of the developments, and an overall look at Adobe’s progress. With a record $1.36 billion of marketing cloud revenue in 2015, 31 trillion transactions a day, and two thirds of the Fortune 500 as clients across a range of verticals, Guess’s outlook was understandably positive. What’s more, Gartner just reaffirmed Adobe’s pole position among digital marketing hubs, rating it alongside Oracle for “ability to execute” but ahead in “completeness of vision.”
The retail-focused announcements, said Guess, would help customers “efficiently shop at the top level” (and Adobe lists eight of the ten largest US retail concerns among its clients, including household names like John Lewis, Safeway, and Home Depot. Here are this week’s main shopping experience innovations:
- Data-driven re-marketing;
- Personalized push notifications;
- Shoppable media experiences; and
- Digital-meets-physical experiences.
An integration between Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign will use shopper’s online behavior to trigger re-marketing efforts–“in real time and at the right time,” said Guess. The integration will also take into account contextual information like the weather, and where nearby stores are located. Re-triggering adapts to email, push, or any other appropriate channel. “That’s the power of this for marketers,” said Guess, “to pull together all this intelligence and data.”
This strategy connects up with both personalized push notifications, and shoppable media experiences. Re-marketing can be triggered by customers behavior while watching videos, said Guess. I asked if this included clicking on product-related hotspots within videos. “We’ve done a lot of user experience testing,” Guess told me, “and the interesting thing we’ve found is that it’s really difficult to click on a hotspot while the video is still moving. Also, it disrupts the experience of the video.” Instead, Adobe is tying products to videos by displaying hotspots on an easily visible side-bar. “This is also much less complex for a marketer to create at scale,” said Guess.
But this functionality isn’t restricted to personal devices. Bringing the digital to the physical, Adobe Experience Manager screens will make interactive shoppable experiences available on large in-store displays as well as on phones, tablets and PCs.
Personalized push notifications are available now; the other enhancements will be available in Q2 2016.
