Deck The Site: How to Approach and Market Holiday Shopping
Despite a troubling job market and looming election, according to a report from Deloitte, sales this season in the US are expected to grow between 1% and 1.5%1.This push is expected to be driven by increased spending from high-income households with fewer avenues for consumption, now that experiential spending on dining and travel have been curtailed2. Wealthy households are expected to have an impact of between 2.5% and 3% growth on sales.
It’s less about the 4Ps of marketing – product, price, place and promotion – when targeting online shoppers. One analyst called the new strategies “prepare, perceive and then pursue”3. During the course of this year, it has been proven that retailers that already had invested in omnichannel capabilities were better equipped to pivot to the change in customer shopping habits. This meant providing full omnichannel capabilities, like curbside delivery to accommodate the current conditions. However, there are a few things to keep in mind about approaching and marketing this season in particular.
A Longer Season
Getting into the holiday spirit early is going to be the mantra of most people. Analysts expected that the holiday season would be extended this year and start early October4. Amazon’s Prime Shopping Day that took place October 13-14 – pushed back from its usual July dates – kicked off the season, though other retail brands such as Target, Walmart and Best Buy were offering deals in advance of that. Amazon said its independent third-party sellers alone clocked up US$3.5 billion worth of sales, an increase of 60% from last year’s Prime Day5. Retailers and logistics partners are also pushing for shoppers to start their shopping early to avoid last minute delivery issues, while many shops are closed on Thanksgiving Day, making Black Friday less of a landmark date than it has been previously.
Logistics, Last-Mile and Fulfillment
With an increase in online shopping comes added strain on the logistics industry. Salesforce believes that shipping surcharges will be imposed between November 15 and January 15 globally6. Retailers are beefing up their call centers and warehouses with more workers, investing in additional warehouse space to accommodate extra stock or converting brick and mortar locations to serve as delivery centers. Others such as Target, Staples and Walmart have partnered with solutions like Shipt, Instacart and Postmates to offer same day delivery. Others are preparing to be able to handle an influx of orders7. Logistics companies are recommending that shipping cut-offs for a delivery by Christmas Eve be brought forward to an earlier date. Keeping the last-minute rush in mind, retailers such as Macy’s are talking about keeping in-store and curbside pickups and returns to bolster online shopping in case of shipping bottlenecks8.
Gift Ideas
The nature of gift-giving is also expected to change with more people gathering online or virtually. Even if they meet in person, the groups are expected to be smaller than usual. The nature of gifts exchanged are expected to change with fewer people gifting experiences and more practical and useful gifts, especially those that support the stay-at-home lifestyle such as consumer technology. Always popular, gift cards are expected to be featured prominently on shopping lists this year as well.
Clear Communications and Engagement Strategies
Morning Consult’s research has revealed that Americans are more likely to buy from brands whose ads are realistic or optimistic and explain how they’re keeping shoppers safe or provide gift ideas9. Even in stores, not just the adoption of Covid-19 health precautions to keep customers and employees safe but good signposting about them is key to allay customer fears.
Managing customer expectations through clear communications about delivery options, status and timelines are crucial to retaining customers and building loyalty10. Aside from contactless mobile wallet transactions to allow for reduced contact between employees and customers, SMS texting and push notifications from retail apps at various touch points in the customer journey are key to building customer relationships11. Bloomreach advises retailers to ensure that product discovery and personalization are used to help customers find fun and interesting gifts, while making product availability clear to view while searching and browsing12.
Advertising
Retailers can leverage online advertising to reach their customers and direct them either to their online or brick and mortar stores. Data from Zenreach shows that click-through rates for online advertising are at 2-3%, about 20-30 times pre-COVID13.
There’s one caveat though, the increased numbers of shoppers online is bringing with it online shopping scams, thereby shining a light on site security.
Even if dogged by uncertainty, the shopping season has gotten off to a great start this year, and these tips above can help retailers deploy ‘prepare, perceive and pursue’ strategies so that they and their customers both have a happy holiday.
Cloud Content Unleashed: Exploring Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service
Excellent customer experience (CX) is the holy grail of marketing. It’s critical to enable brands to reach their customers across every touchpoint. Brands are offering more immersive and engaging, physically and digitally enabled CX across all channels, and for good reason – a recent stuudy from Gartner says that a whopping 89% of companies expect to compete against its competitors mostly on the basis of customer experience in the next 3-5 years1.
The events of 2020 have forced more customers to complete their purchases online. ‘As more people work remotely and interact digitally, there are all sorts of digital customers that weren’t there before this year,’ says Justin Stayrook, Principal, Customer Experience at BORN Group. ‘You might be selling cars, you might be selling widgets, you might be selling movies…it doesn’t matter, the customer experience is what is going to differentiate you, much more so than price or availability of the product.’
At BORN Group, Customer Experience is at the heart of everything we do: we’re all about creative content that drives online commerce to engage customers across borders in a connected world. We’ve tried to simplify what customer experience really means in what we call our ‘CX equation’, where CX = Brand Experience + Behavioral Experience + a Book of Record Experience. Our Stella framework sees each of these aspects layered to ultimately make up the customer experience. Simply put, your brand expression is delivered through different channels and behavior is recorded to further improve the brand experience.
As we deliver technology evaluations or look at building stacks – solutions and infrastructure – to take care of our clients’ needs, we know how integral content management is to all of these aspects. In the image below, you’ll find where these pieces come together – think of experience management as a result of delivering commerce, content, and creative.
The Consumption of Content is Only Accelerating
The content management world has seen a lot of ebbs and flows over the last two decades. Developments with AEM as a cloud service are not just intriguing but important to consider as you scale your business.
Key disruption in the content management world revolves around the consumption of content and the acceleration of that consumption. Billions of pieces of content are being produced and consumed every day. To compete in such a saturated world, brand messaging must be highly effective to be able to target individuals with that content. Where content management systems (CMS) such as AEM have come in hand is to be able to create and manage content and amplify it through various channels. There have been a few notable hurdles, however. ‘As technology evolves, it’s important to be able to stay on top of that but also have best-in-class systems that can grow at a low cost,’ says Stayrook. ‘To make it a place where you can feed your customers out of a central repository through this exponential curve of technology performance that grows each and every day, [is absolutely critical].’
What is the Real Impact of Experience-Driven Content?
Channels for Content Delivery
If you talk to anybody in the business of content be it a creative producer right up to the CMO, business is booming. It’s not hard to see why;
Incredibly cost-effective: Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing costs 62% less and generates three times as many leads2.
Offers amazing ROI: On average, conversion rates are six times higher for companies and brands using content marketing (2.9%) than those that aren’t (0.5%)3.
CMOs are investing in content: In 2014, roughly 740 million euros were being spent in Europe on content marketing. That figure is predicted to increase to 2.12 billion euros in 20204.
The ability to target customers has improved exponentially in recent years but the weak link is getting that content to market. It’s important to identify individual groups of customers based on their behaviors to understand how they interact with your brand, so you can follow up with them with pertinent emails or offers. However, if you don’t have content to maintain this communication, those messages will fall on deaf ears. Worse, that messaging will fall into the quagmire of content that people are inundated with every day.
True Personalization Requires Integrated Services and Tech Across Multiple Platforms
Personalization allows you to communicate with customers more effectively through content. For true personalization, you need to have tech and services integrated across a variety of functional areas. These range from customer data platforms that are used to differentiate audiences, segments, and track behaviors to traditional content such as websites and eCommerce sites. Personalization or optimization allows you to converse with individuals based on their preferences or interests.
Every brand is working in these functional areas to varying degrees depending on how they want to progress your maturity model in those areas. CMS systems like AEM can help you build your technology stacks in these areas because it touches all of these areas. Please see below for an example of how AEM sits at the center of your digital stack.
The Full Adobe Stack
Personalization Factories
Our goal at BORN is to deliver what we call personalization factories or data-driven customer engagement that is fully personalized to your brand. We create strategic flywheels with the following aspects;
Customer experience vision: A clear vision and strategy of the role experience play in customer value.
Data & decisions: Real-time data and the ability to optimize experience through insights.
Technology: Integrated technology stack that delivers content and creative across all channels.
Content & creative: Content and creative factory with the ability to scale and deliver variations to new audiences.
If you go back 10-15 years, personalization was a creative and content strategy based on primary research of what you thought your customers would want, what they wanted to hear. Quite often, because it was a creative exercise it missed the mark when it went to market. We would see companies that would implement an eCommerce site, and they would have a dip in conversion. Or, in other circumstances, they would have a new brand, and they would see a dip in engagement. This was because we didn’t have data and insights or the technology and the ability to adapt in real-time. A CMS is vital for those personalization factories as they serve as the container or repository for your global content. They also end up producing content – lots of websites still produce pages that are directly pulled from CMS systems.
However, there are a few challenges of getting content to market quickly to support personalization.
Why AEM for Content Management?
The Key to ‘Customer Delight’
Adobe does a tremendous job of focusing on all these digital channels when it comes to content. Not only have they been around for a long time, they rate highly in almost every category when it comes to digital experience and campaign management. If you look at how they’ve progressed customer roadmaps, they’ve exceled by acquiring many technologies over the years such as AEM, Magento for eCommerce and Marketo among others. The integration of these platforms were not simple – one had to hire expensive solutions and cross-platform architects.
Any time you want to produce content for various channels, the experience manager is going to play a role in that.
The Experience Manager has so far been the outlier in the Experience cloud because there have been so many ‘on-prem’ – previously called cloud – installations. There was a real limitation on how you could integrate all these platforms to deliver real-time personalized content.
Total Cost of Ownership: Industry Average vs. AEM as a Cloud Service
The above model is useful for organizations who have AEM installed or those who are looking to move to a more modern platform like AEM away from an existing platform. On the left is the typical cost of ownership profile for a CMS system. In year 1, you have a large implementation cost. The costs go down in year 2, but in year 3, you get a surprise because there was a product upgrade. In year 5, you get another surprise. AEM as a cloud service really flattens that TCO curve. Of all the reasons for moving to AEM as a Cloud Service, flattening TCO curves are one of the most important ones. The implementation costs do not change much but everything you do to improve the functionality of your site through customizations, optimizations, or adding new functionalities, among other things, does not increase cost and does save revenue.
Anybody that’s gone through CMS upgrades or different types of hosting arrangements over the years knows that this can be difficult as you cannot stop marketing or take your website offline during those transitions. AEM as a Cloud takes away that pain. You can put your dollars towards improvement and less so on maintenance and upgrades.
Having AEM in the cloud reduces those aforementioned costs. One is able to do continuous integration and delivery, automatic and scheduled deployments, all through the Adobe Cloud infrastructure. Anyone who has spent time optimizing from a traditional AEM standpoint knows how cost-effective and efficient this is to offload it into the Adobe Cloud which provides user controls and test results as needed.
Shorten Test Cycles and Ensure the Highest Code Quality Through Continuous Testing in Cloud Manager
Some core rules in ensuring the highest code quality include:
Code implementation based on engineering best practices.
100+ rules combining generic Java rules and AEM-specific rules built into test automation processes.
Non-production pipelines available to conduct additional code testing.
One can perform automated testing that can be managed through cloud environments – reliance on third party experts is not necessary. Once this is set up, you can have ongoing performance improvement by being able to get this into the market and pre-production. There are a lot of clients who use the old methods of development and operations on AEM and it becomes a day-to-day conversation on how to be able to manage them. To be able to do so effectively is a tremendous savings to your total cost of ownership.
Scalable and Global
From a global standpoint, brands want content in one place and for that content to be easily accessible. Historically, that has always been a challenge. However, AEM as a Cloud Service can help scale up content quickly in a centralized way.
Auto scaling: Automatically detects the need for increased capacity and scales dramatically.
Vertical scaling: Adds additional memory or processing to current systems.
Horizontal scaling: Adds compute capacity or nodes as needed during high performance.
Cloud Service: Asset Processing Through Microscaling Architected on a Global Scale
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) has always been a topic of discussion and scaling it through microservices is an effective and popular way to run a global operation for content services.
Using a built-in CDN allows you to manage content, while also allowing you to use it globally without having redundant DevOps systems and the varying deployment costs that go with them. All of the headaches of scaling content contributors globally and deliberating on partners for DevOps tend to go away when you migrate to AEM as a Cloud Service.
Backup and Recovery Strategy
Any book of record system requires frequent backups, fast recovery and encrypted storage. This can be very costly and difficult to manage at a global level. AEM offers:
Highly frequent data backups: Daily snapshots stored up to 7 days.
Fast and in time recovery: System restored to any point in the last 24 hours.
Encrypted storage: Data in transit and at rest encrypted.
As you dig into the total cost of ownership spreadsheets that we have developed at BORN in conjunction with Adobe, we focus on these individual levers such as the savings from being able to decrease the amount of your backups and restores.
Many of our clients work in multi-vendor environments where one works with several agencies in the same instance of AEM. Such a scenario is difficult to manage and AEM developments will help all clients as they migrate to the cloud servers
Timelines
Implementation times on a typical AEM as a Cloud implementation do not change significantly from a design, development and build standpoint. You have to look at the total cost of implementation over five years. AEM implementations can span anywhere from 6 weeks to 18 months depending on how creative you want to be with the user experience, how well integrated you want your channels to be, how you want your site to evolve over time, and how global your branding is.
Key Takeaways of AEM as a Cloud Service
All in all, AEM is a powerful resource in delivering the most cutting-edge cloud services, with four main pillars to sum up its strengths:
Always current: New capabilities are seamlessly validated and live instantly so that teams can focus on innovating instead of planning for version upgrades. You never have to worry about costly upgrades and releases, which usually gets consumed in your first year so you can enjoy the benefits in years 3-5.
Modular, scalable and global: Optimal performance for customers and employees based on autoscaling and microservices architecture. Lots of the scaling issues that used to be in play if you operate different countries have gone away.
Performance resiliency: Redundancy and monitoring to provide mission-critical service level availability.
Secure by default: All environments are pre-configured to Adobe-backed security rules based on enterprise-tested best practices and security frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC-2.
When considering how to distribute and manage your content moving forward, consider AEM for its excellence in content management, security, and delivery and reach out to Mackenzie Johnson, [email protected] for more information around our Adobe practice.
Understanding Headless Solutions as a Tool for Your Business
In the early 2000s, enterprises were implementing monolithic architectures as their eCommerce solution as it fulfilled their business requirements within a single location. As times have changed and technology developed, brands looked for more flexible solutions that would meet the needs of the consumer along with ever-changing market demands. While a monolithic architecture may work for some, it can oftentimes be challenging to scale these types of solutions as well as make updates. Thus, the microservices or ‘headless’ architecture was born.
Since its inception, headless has gone beyond a trend to become a route for online retailers looking to create a future-proof platform that can adjust with their business. According to a recent study by Gartner, 56% of enterprise organizations have adopted microservices architecture solutions or have planned or budgeted to deploy API-based or headless commerce architectures in the future. Nonetheless, headless commerce is here to stay.
What is Headless?
For a headless approach, the front end of your eCommerce shop and the back end are independent from one another or ‘decoupled.’ Thus, the content and experience management system is separated from the business logic and functional layer (existing eCommerce stack, integration and commerce management). This architecture paves the way for ‘Experience Driven Commerce’ applications that are heavily focused on the use of customer data to optimize and personalize the customer experience and rapidly increase conversions without compromising the integrity of your eCommerce build.
With a headless approach, businesses have the ability to commerce-enable any system, application, or IoT device, and seamlessly integrate with other content management systems. In addition, this type of structure gives businesses the opportunity to remain nimble as they’re able to pick and choose what features and functionality they need to run their business. Additional benefits of this structure include:
Speed: With a headless architecture you’re able to make rapid changes to the back or front of your build without disrupting the entire system. Design changes, testing and optimization can be done without impacting the stability of your eCommerce solution. In addition, in a headless scenario you’re free of operating constraints, making it easier for front-end developers to work efficiently (this means lower operating costs + accelerated site updates).
Flexibility & Adaptability: Parts of the system can be delivered without impacting the core commerce functionality since they’re decoupled, making it easier to make developments and updates over time as needed.
Personalization & Customization: With a traditional or side-by-side structure the ability to customize or personalize a UX on the fly is nearly impossible. Integrating a personalization solution allowing marketers to offer relevant promotions and offers to customers across each touchpoint. In addition, a headless solution empowers the marketing team as it enables constant content updates that support marketing campaigns without IT restrictions.
Omnichannel: In today’s day and age, it’s critical to offer users a complete omnichannel shopping experience, from in-store to online to over the phone. The ability to identify users across many devices and using consistent ID’s for online and offline behavior allows for a seamless experience, and is critical in retaining and attracting customers.
Elements of a Headless eCommerce Environment
To ensure adaptability and flexibility, it’s critical to have the ability to innovate swiftly. In order to do this, brands must have a ‘swappable’ architecture which is only possible in a headless environment, where your applications are decoupled. Below you can see how headless comes into action, as each piece acts as a swappable lego.
While a headless solution is a great option for many retailers, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. There are some additional factors that you should consider:
Retailers looking to get online fast at a low price point may not be the best fit for a headless implementation. You’d have to consider multiple additions including an eCommerce solution, Search and CMS as opposed to a one-stop stack that fulfills all of these needs under a single umbrella.
In addition, a headless implementation can require additional team members and developers to manage and execute, also affecting your total cost of ownership.
Retailers would lack the technical support from a single software vendor.
While headless solutions have been available to the market for some time now, the ecosystem of partners is still maturing. Retailers must be cautious in selecting third-party plug ins as they may not be suited for a headless environment.
Scaling your Headless Return via ROX (Return of Experience)
Finally, understanding return of experience, or ROX, is key to gauging how successful a headless opportunity could be for a potential brand, and how best to scale the opportunity. ROX is the metric with which we measure the purchase experience of consumers. While Return of Investment (ROI) measures the amount of return on one’s investment, ROX goes beyond to assess multiple facets of a business to determine correlations that have decisive influence on customer experience, and ultimately affects your company’s bottom line. It’s our perspective that most organizations need to invest beyond customer experience (CX). Understanding how changes to customer experience impact your customers (in a positive or negative way), is critical in making informed choices in the development of your digital solution.
With a headless implementation, businesses have the ability to build their ‘perfect’ solution in a lego-like, plug and play format. Choosing what pieces are most valuable to drive your business and what you can live without. Understanding and achieving a high ROX is an important key to understanding what you should invest in, and how to review your potential headless solutions.
For more information on BORN’s headless solutions, please contact Mackenzie Johnson, [email protected].
