Attention spans may be shorter, but they’re no less valuable.
In today’s digital marketplace, it’s essential for the experience you give to your users to be not just functional, but also compelling. Dynamic. Personal. Engaging.
Slight adjustments in speed and quality can have enormous benefits to the bottom line. Consider this stat from Vodafone, which found that a 31% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) led to a 15% boost in lead-to-visits, an 11% boost to cart-to-visits, and 8% more sales.
[For a full run down on terms like LCP and what speed means for your websites, check out The PTP Report article: The Need for Speed.]
That’s fine and well, but it’s not enough. More and more users are on mobile and expect your digital offerings to load as fast or even faster there, despite reduced technological capacity.
At the same time, they are also savvier, more connected, and less willing to waste their time searching to get what they need.
In other words, the model of a company’s digital experience being standard—one-size-fits-all—is fading fast and will soon be gone entirely.
In its place is personalization. Epsilon’s 2024 report The Push and Pull of Personalization finds that 60% of respondents engage with a marketing message because they are “familiar with and like the brand,” versus just 37% who say it’s driven by their need for a goods or service. They expect personalization, with 76% viewing brands negatively that don’t know them.
The need is to deliver the right experience to the right person, and in a highly timely fashion.
About Adobe Experience Manager
Enter Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).
[For an introduction on AEM, check out this edition of The PTP Report.]
A part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, AEM offers businesses the scalable, comprehensive system they need to create, manage, and deliver personalized digital content, as well as to meet, understand, and serve each specific user.
AEM enables this and superior management across channels. It helps you establish systems for rapid update and standardization, as well as direct automation. We’ve seen it help businesses automate and optimize their message, building entire content strategies that once seemed out-of-scope.
AEM is built around a content management system at its heart, but it’s gone well past that, now an entire digital experience platform, assisting you in crafting websites, mobile apps, and forms alongside the standardization and superior access to content and assets.
It runs in Adobe Experience Cloud, an entire set of applications and services built to give customers personalized experiences at scale.
With the Experience Cloud, you can centralize and standardize your customer data and all content in a single place, enabling machine learning to make it work in overdrive.
Adobe’s streamlined CMS lets both your marketers and content creators collaborate, giving version control, workflows, and approvals, while ensuring that content is brand-consistent and up-to-date.
In something that’s highly unique among the offerings out there, the Adobe Experience Platform also exposes its functionality for developers, allowing it to be more easily integrated into your enterprise solutions—giving you the flexibility to fuse your own technologies and approaches.
With ever more devices carrying your message, AEM enables you craft and wield a consistent brand.
And whether it’s websites, mobile, or social media, the system can automatically optimize for each, providing responsiveness to give your user a seamless experience.
The modular approach of Adobe solutions lets you work across silos, scaling your operations as you need, without having to break down your structure to remove or replace whole components.
As you grow, new modules can be easily added, and with extensive support for customization through APIs, you can easily tailor it for your specific requirements.
AI + AEM
AI is also transforming what AEM can do, from the highest to lowest levels as fits your needs. Generative AI integrations with AEM further improve quality and workflows, simplify and automate, and can automatically incorporate personalization.
At the highest levels, AEM provides ready AI prompt templates, allowing you to specify goals, audiences, tone, and more (with provided text for you to edit), to instantly update or create any needed variations on copy in minutes. Through Adobe Express, visual content can also be easily created and transformed, with all of it readily tested and easily published.
With Content Tagging, AI is also incorporated to help you learn what content is working now, providing you the insights you need to drive up your own KPIs. It can extract metadata and intelligent features, organize, associate with assets, identify customer preferences and actions, and update customer profiles. With this insight, you can optimize their experience directly in session, or on return visits.
Machine learning algorithms help you get clarity from user behavior to better anticipate their needs and preferences. This automation frees up time for content creators and marketers, so they can focus on brand strategy and bringing their unique, creative voices to bear.
With Adobe Target and AEM combined, Automated Personalization leverages these machine learning algorithms to target content to the appropriate audiences automatically. The possibilities are vast, such as: providing scaled membership data to those at the appropriate level, offering deals to those qualified and interested, regionalizing your content, or even modifying it, based entirely on their habits.
This integration is already incredibly powerful, but it doesn’t stop there: with AEM you can build custom AI integrations, such as in this example, which walks you through a use case of automating SEO activities using ChatGPT.
Direct Results
For businesses across sectors, the results speak for themselves.
In ecommerce, businesses have used AEM to completely overhaul the online shopping experience. By tracking user behavior, it became possible to identify sticky or problematic places where they were losing engagement and adjust them.
With automated personalization and content tagging, they’ve radically transformed their workflows, cutting the time it takes to add new content and update pages in half. And this is just the beginning.
A financial services provider leveraged AEM’s dynamic forms to radically improve their challenging customer onboarding process. These forms make real-time changes, pre-populate data, and greatly improve validation to boot.
In addition, AEM’s revolutionary CMS streamlined their content, boosted load times, and removed bottlenecks in flow.
And by completely reimagining the digital experience they were providing users, a technological services company leveraged extensive data analysis, establishing a content creation flow that allowed their content owners to make direct updates themselves—without having to wait for a web designer or content team to publish. This not only greatly accelerated their content creation system, but it also accelerated the entire system.
Their total digital experience redesign—data-driven, AI-assisted, and enabled by AEM—doubled the time users spend on their sites and radically boosted overall views.
Conclusion
Technology is improving fast, and customer expectations are rising right alongside it. Your users expect your sites to be even faster on mobile, for their progress to be saved among sessions, and for the content to personal and highly relevant to them. They want to waste less time and energy while having more meaningful experiences.
AEM can give you the digital transformation to enable all of this and more. By not only meeting your user expectations, but exceeding them, you can improve their engagement and loyalty alike.
The integration of AI in AEM is still comparatively new but already striking in its power and continually progressing, with the scalability and flexibility to allow you to create your own custom integrations, adding whatever best of breed solution you may need for a specific task.
Explore what Adobe Experience Manager can do for you, and consider PTP to help you get started. With our 120+ certified Adobe experts and more than 26 years of experience, we have helped numerous businesses transform their digital experiences for the users of tomorrow.
The future of automation and personalization is ready today; you need only to seize on it.
