(credit image/Pixabay/Mark Mags)Ecommerce is expected to become the dominant retail behaviour. According to a forecast from Adobe Analytics, global eCommerce is expected to hit $4.2 trillion for 2021. The digital economy continues to grow, as the pandemic accelerated online spending. The equivalent to a 20% boost and future growth is expected to build from this gain.

Adobe has updated Adobe Experience Cloud to help brands across all industries, including retailers. The company says the solution enables merchants succeed in their first-party data strategies to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale. It effectively prepare for peak sales periods, including the festive shopping season.

Personalisation enhancements

Adobe Experience Cloud’s personalisation enhancements – including an AI-powered search capacity and a collaborative data sharing function. It will help brands deliver the tailored, contextually relevant experiences that consumers have come to expect.

Consumers’ online shopping habits, purchasing behaviours and expectations have all changed since the onset of the pandemic. Click and collect continues to gain traction as customers prioritise safety and convenience. Branded shopping days like Black Friday are now month-long spikes in promotions and revenue compared to just a single day.

(Credit image/LinkedIn/Amit Ahuja)
Amit Ahuja, Vice President, Experience Cloud Products and Strategy, Adobe.

“Digital commerce has reached new heights. So have customer expectations,” said Amit Ahuja, Vice President, Experience Cloud Products and Strategy, Adobe. “Scaling personalised experiences is the next big thing for marketers in any business to tackle. To succeed, brands must put quality first-party data at the centre of their customer acquisition and engagement strategy. This will help build trust and deliver brand experiences with only the information customers choose to share.” New Adobe Experience Cloud innovations include.

Adobe Experience Platform Segment Match

Adobe Experience Platform Segment Match is now integrated into Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP). Currently in beta, the solution lets brands collaborate to expand their own first-party data sets through partnerships. It allows brands to securely enrich their matching first-party profiles with segment metadata for better insights and improved personalisation. A retailer selling hair products and accessories may partner with a skincare brand to exchange non-sensitive segment data about customers. Attributes such as the type of hair accessories that a subset of their customers is buying. This will enable the skincare brand to recommend products for those groups.

Enhanced Adobe Experience Platform Insights

Adobe Experience Platform is now offering new capabilities that will streamline the data collection process and enable more actionable insights. Adobe says this will help retailers better understand their customers through first-party data. It will also create more personalised shopping experiences across customer touchpoints. Profile, Audience, Activation & License Usage Insights will be directly integrated into Adobe Real-time CDP. Companies can receive a daily delivery of key insights such as audience growth trends and customer growth analysis. This can help merchants determine which channels drive the most engagement.

Adobe Journey Optimizer with Adobe Experience Manager Assets essentials

Adobe has launched Adobe Journey Optimizer. A solution that helps companies design, orchestrate and intelligently deliver personalised messages and promotions based on real-time customer data. Multiple data types including behavioural and transactional are combined with AI and machine learning. As a result, retailers can proactively address customer needs in real-time.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials is a lightweight user interface of Experience Manager Assets. It serves as the default asset management experience for Journey Optimizer. The integration helps any digital business, provide a simplified user experience for marketing and creative professionals. Businesses can store, discover, and distribute digital assets across teams, all in a centralised, cloud-based workspace. The application also integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud applications to allow teams to work in their preferred environment. Finally, AI-supported workflows and search powered by Adobe Sensei allow for intuitive search and discovery of digital assets.

AI-powered Live Search for Adobe Commerce

When it comes to online shopping, buyers expect to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. In fact, shoppers who utilise the search function on a storefront are up to four times more likely to transact. This makes the site search capability a crucial element of a merchant’s customer experience strategy. With Live Search powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe Commerce merchants can now provide their shoppers with relevant and personalised search-as-you-type results. Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, it helps reduce tedious, manual merchant tasks. Delivering search results with speed and accuracy based on what the shopper is looking for.

Enterprise Times: What this means for business?

The competition for shopper attention increases rapidly particularly during busy shopping periods like the holidays. Retailers have to grab shoppers attention and maximise conversions. As a result, it’s critical to get the customer experience right at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Adobe says its new Adobe Experience Cloud features will help brands deliver more personalised customer experiences at scale. This is particularly useful during the peak sales periods. However, large organisations such as Adobe now face competition from nimbler eCommerce vendors offering low code, microservices and API offerings. Only Adobe customers and prospects can benefit from the various products enhancements announced. They are locked into the Adobe ecosystem. However, increasingly retailers and online merchants are looking for a different approach to business solutions. A software ecosystem that provides a flexible, truly open and future-proof architecture. it will be interesting to see how Adobe responds to this emerging trend.

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