By Lisa Walker
It’s my pleasure to announce our new flagship ecommerce suite – Elastic Path Edition for Adobe Experience Manager. This breakthrough product represents a radically new way to engineer an ecommerce platform, and is the very first enterprise commerce product built exclusively for use with Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Through our partnership with Adobe, we’re now able to provide best-of-breed capabilities under one unifying platform to empower marketers to deliver a powerful mix of content and transactions to every experience touchpoint, create the ubiquitous shopping experience that consumers expect and make the commerce experience the ultimate brand experience.
For the first time ever, marketers working in Adobe Experience Manager have live, real-time access to sophisticated ecommerce at their fingertips. New products can be sold consistently across every touchpoint, or limited to just one exclusive experience.
Dynamic pricing can be created that simultaneously responds to segments, channels, and devices. Offers and campaigns that reflect live merchandising, inventory, and customer history can be constructed. Elastic Path Edition for Adobe Experience Manager is more than just an ecommerce platform. It’s a way to get maximum value from your investment in Adobe Experience Manager.
Experience is Everything
In this new digital economy, brands that can leverage digital experiences to generate revenue and win over new customers are going to be the most successful. In this new paradigm, marketers will increasingly rely on an integrated brand and commerce strategy to boost conversions, loyalty and sales.
For instance:
- With iBeacons, advanced sensors, geo-location and other technologies measuring fine-grained details of our lives, the context in which we interact with a brand, its products and services is giving rise to powerful sales opportunities. Marketers will need to take into consideration the context in which customers interact with their brand in order to deliver the right promotion or price point at the right time.
- The strategy of gamification – teasing and tempting customers into increasing levels of interaction with your brand through cross-sells, up-sells and bundles – will rise to the fore. Rather than placing the “Buy” button at the end of the funnel, marketers will require data to seamlessly flow between their commerce and content systems to generate the necessary cadence of promotions, bundles and purchase points along touchpoints as a campaign unfolds.
- The ability to react and respond to events in “true” real time will be essential. Consider this scenario: It’s Oscar night and the winning actor runs up on stage to get his statue and the camera pans across the label on his jeans. It’s your brand, shown to 40 million viewers across the world. Seizing this opportunity, a marketer with integrated commerce capabilities can instantly reduce the price on the jeans, create a promotion and announce it via mobile app, web, twitter and Facebook. The resulting spike in sales will now be calculable in terms of dollars and true ROI, not just in impressions and tweets.
Better Components Create Better Experiences
To create relevant and spectacular commerce experiences across target segments and channels, the use of components comes into play.
Components can best be thought of as tools that contain discrete functionality such as the ability to place a carousel or build a bundle on a page. The more components a marketer has to play with the greater their power to craft the customer experience. Qualities that are essential for experience-driven commerce include:
- Components that can be developed efficiently. When new systems or data points are added on the backend, can their functionality or data be surfaced into the marketer’s authoring environment?
- Commerce Components that are granular. The checkout process is often lengthy and complex and poses hurdles to the completion of the sale. Subtle design elements, such as the placement of a horizontal line in the wrong place can impede a sale. Are your components granular enough to create customized flows for specific interfaces – such as a one screen “click and buy” experience for iPad or smartwatch? Are they granular enough to A/B test in detail?
- Components that require a site refresh are to be avoided. Site refreshes cause time delays as data that is entered has to be sent to backend systems before the form is resurfaced. Site performance is key when it comes to the checkout so refreshes should be avoided at all cost.
- Components that can surface to all available touchpoints, current and future.
- Components that allow for real-time data to be updated in commerce from the web experience management interface. This gives a marketer full capabilities to affect product price and details (given the right permissions) without involving IT.
The Elastic Path Edition for Adobe Experience Manger Solution
Opportunities to engage customers and drive revenue from digital experiences have never been greater. However, creating this seamless customer journey has proven to be both enticing and elusive to enterprises as they struggle with legacy technology, the emergence of the API economy, big data, the proliferation of touchpoints and ever-changing business models.
To bring commerce and the product into the realm of the marketer, the Elastic Path solution provides marketers with the tools they require to create ubiquitous, branded shopping experiences, personalized pricing and promotions and monetized campaigns all from within the familiar AEM authoring environment.
Our solution includes a set of powerful capabilities so brands can create their own environments and experiences and quickly respond to new and emerging scenarios. Dozens of enterprise-grade transactional components – including catalog management, merchandising, pricing, and promotions – are included giving you unparalleled control over the layout, testing, and administration of commerce-enabled customer flows.
Elastic Path at Adobe Summit
It is our goal at Elastic Path to help marketers deliver the perfect blend of commerce and content to every touchpoint and build an experience-driven commerce platform that amplifies customer engagement.
We will be presenting at Adobe Summit March 24-28th in Salt Lake City and would love for you to drop by our booth to learn more about our solution and its potential benefit to your brand.
