Adobe Unveils Experience Cloud Enhancements at NRF

Adobe unveiled a series of innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud at last week's National Retail Federation 2020 conference in New York. The new capabilities will help retailers and their suppliers leverage the right combination of data, insights, and digital content to deliver impactful shopping experiences across both physical and digital store fronts.

Among the innovations, Adobe is now making Experience Manager available as a cloud-native product.

The move helps companies deliver engaging content and ensures that they always have the latest features and can launch new experiences faster, according to Michael Klein, head of industry strategy for retail, travel, and CPG at Adobe.

"Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe's AI and machine learning technology, it offers mid-sized and enterprise companies a new level of global performance and agility for their digital transformations," Klein wrote in a blog post yesterday.

Adobe also introduced a number of new features in its Magento 2.3.4 release, which Klein says provides significant enhancements to improve the development process and quality of online stores.

Among them is Adobe Stock's integration with Magento Commerce and Open Source, which Klein says will enable merchants to add high-quality media assets to their websites without leaving the Magento admin.

Adobe also bundled dotdigital's Engagement Cloud live web-chat functionality into the Magento core as a vendor-bundled extension. With this update, all Magento 2 merchants will have access to one free chat agent seat to engage with their customers in real time, according to Klein.

In addition, he said that Page Builder enhancements give merchants more control over product merchandising, compatibility with Venia reference storefront extends Page Builder capabilities to PWA Studio-built storefronts, and GraphQL coverage is expanded for search, layered navigation and cart functionality.

Additions to Customer Journey Analytics for retailers allow companies to stitch together disjointed data through Adobe Experience Platform and get a more accurate view of the overall shopper journey. "A set of analytics tools, inspired by Photoshop, will empower retailers to be more creative in how they pull out actionable insights. For instance, teams can begin to see the types of online behaviors that drive people back into physical stores and optimize those paths accordingly. They could also get a better sense of where shoppers hit roadblocks and remove barriers to conversion, such as a clunky mobile checkout experience. And with Sensei, we can help automate cumbersome analysis tasks and catch insights the human eye may miss," Klein wrote.

The new Journey Orchestration combines intelligence, precision and a standard data model powered by Adobe Experience Cloud to allow email or mobile push notifications to be automatically triggered in real-time.

And finally, Adobe Target';s new user based Recommended for You algorithm allows companies to deliver highly-personalized ecommerce experiences based on individual customer behaviors.

"These recommendations go beyond traditional approaches like 'last viewed brand' or 'people who viewed this, also viewed,' and instead, use the totality of a custome's behavior to infer their underlying preferences" Klein explains. "For example, a consumer shopping for purple gloves on a retailer's website in the winter may receive a recommendation for a scarf in the same color. When that shopper returns to the same website in the spring and browses running shoes, the shopper will receive new recommendations during their online session to reflect the new interest by displaying a tank top, but will retain knowledge of the user's preference for purple."