When Magento was acquired by Adobe earlier this year, a lot of questions were raised about the future of the eCommerce platform. Sure, the partnership helped Adobe fill in some gaps in their product offering, but what would Adobe bring to Magento? At Magento’s annual conference last month, we got our first update on how Adobe is improving the Magento experience.
Magento announced the first set of integrations between Adobe and Magento, which will bring the analytics and personalization features of Adobe’s Experience Cloud to Magento.
As Adobe’s SVP of Strategic Marketing Aseem Chandra told TechCrunch, the focus at Adobe has been the same from day one: how do they deliver better experiences across any channel in which customers interact with their brand?
“If you think about the way that customers interact today, every experience is valuable and important. […] It’s no longer just about the product, it’s more about the experience that we deliver around that product that really counts.”
This new set of integrations drives that point home as Magento Commerce Cloud users will get access to an integration with Adobe Target, their machine learning-based tool for personalizing shopping experiences. Magento users will also have access to predictive analytics from Adobe Analytics, allowing users to analyze customer data and predict future behavior.
Exceptional customer experience has been named as a competitive pressure driving eCommerce, and one of the best ways to improve customer experience is through personalization. These days, customers expect sites to remember who they are, what they like and dislike, and even anticipate their needs and wants. Gathering information by tracking customer behavior, past purchases, and conversion rates can help create an eCommerce experience that is specific to each customer.
You can use that information to provide targeted related products and cross-sells, which can help earn more sales. Additionally, actions like abandoned cart or even abandoned browser emails will prove to your customers that you’re paying attention to their shopping experience.
If you have a more in-depth understanding of your individual customers’ needs and desires, you can target them even more precisely. Customers are more likely to stick around and browse your site if they see something they like, and those who see personalized recommendations on a page convert 65% more than someone who sees a generic page.
Magento has previously provided tools for customer personalization, like the aforementioned related product and cross-sell suggestions. But by incorporating the personalization features found in Adobe’s Experience Cloud, Magento is able to take that functionality to the next level.
Magento has been considering how to improve their AI/ML capabilities since before the merger with Adobe, but the access to Adobe’s technology is what made the push happen. Mark Lavelle, former Magento CEO and new Adobe SVP for Commerce, told TechCrunch that the goal is to provide all Magento clients with large scale functionality, even if that client is a small- or medium-sized business.
“Where the world’s going for Magento clients — and really for all of Adobe’s clients — is you can’t do this yourself,” he said. “you need to be associated with a platform that has not just technology and feature functionality, but actually has this living and breathing data environment that that learns and delivers intelligence back into the product so that your job is easier. That’s what Amazon and Google and all of the big companies that we’re all increasingly competing against or cooperating with have. They have that type of scale.”
But, don’t be too concerned about Adobe creeping into Magento’s brand. As Errol Denger, director of commerce program and strategy at Adobe Enterprise Commerce, told Digital Commerce 360, “We’ve integrated product management teams and our services and delivery teams. But, we’re maintaining the Magento brand because it’s such a powerful brand.”
In addition to personalization features of Adobe Target and predictive analytics through Adobe Analytics, this set of integrations also includes Adobe Experience Manager. Experience Manager is Adobe’s content management tool that integrates AI technologies for building personalized mobile and web content and shopping experiences.
As Aseem Chandra said in the TechCrunch article, “The goal here is really in unifying that profile, where we have a lot of behavioral information about our consumers. And what Magento allows us to do is bring in the transactional information and put those together so we get a much richer view of who the consumers are and how we personalize that experience with the next interaction that they have with a Magento-based commerce site.”
Outside of the Adobe integrations, Magento is also launching other new Commerce Cloud features, including:
All that to say that Magento Commerce 2.3 holds a lot of exciting updates.
Do you want to leverage the new technology found in Magento Commerce 2.3? Contact our experienced team to discuss implementing or updating your Magento environment.
No Comments Yet
Let us know what you think