Customers.com Technologies

Adobe Recommendations Delivers Personalized Actionable Content

By Sue Aldrich

About a quarter of Adobe’s revenues ($1 billion out of $4 billion) come from its digital marketing solutions. Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite provides digital marketers with multi-channel, cross-lifecycle marketing and customer experience management tools. The chances are that if you’ve been on the Web or if you’ve used a mobile app today, you’ve already received one or more Adobe-based personalized recommendations.

Personalized cross-device marketing is strategic to Adobe. In November 2011, Adobe announced that it was re-focusing on digital media and digital marketing.

Adobe’s Digital Media Strategy
Adobe’s digital media strategy helps content creators develop and deliver rich content to run on any digital device. As part of that strategy, Adobe has shifted away from Flash and embraced HTML5 and launched the Adobe Creative Cloud for SaaS-provisioning of all the relevant tools that digital designers and developers need, as well as project rooms for sharing work in progress.

Adobe’s Digital Marketing Strategy
Adobe’s digital marketing strategy helps marketers maximize the impact of their digital experiences across devices and media types throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Key to that strategy are the rich tools that Adobe now has for tracking and monitoring customer experience across devices, and for delivery of personalized actionable content, e.g., recommendations to users when and where they will most value them.

This week, Sue Aldrich provides an in-depth review of two of Adobe’s strategic solutions for delivering personalized recommendations: Adobe Recommendations and AdobeTest&Target.

Recommendation Engines' Quarterly Update

Whether you are responsible for customer experience, online strategy, mobile strategy, marketing, or another customer-impacting part of your organization, you're no doubt aware of some of the ways in which recommendation technology is used to personalize content and offers. There are many suppliers of recommendation solutions to choose from. Susan Aldrich has written detailed reviews of many of these offerings. She follows the top North American and European players in this growing market.

The best way we've found to provide an overview of who’s doing what in a highly competitive marketspace is to provide periodic snapshots of all of the players in the form of a market recap. Who are the key players? What industries do they serve? Who are their customers? What capabilities do they offer? How are they doing? What strategic changes have them made recently? Here's our 2011 Recap covering eight of the top players in this space:

• Adobe
• Avail
• Baynote
• iGoDigital
• Locayta
• MyBuys
• PredictiveIntent
• Strands

What's particularly interesting about all of these players is that their software is typically sold as a service you can integrate into your systems relatively quickly. The results are usually quick, easy to see, and easy to measure, typically resulting in a triple-digit uplift in conversion rates within a few weeks.

Recommendation Solution Market Recap: 1Q2011
Mobile, UI, and Algorithm Enhancements Lead the Product News
By Susan E. Aldrich, Senior VP, and Charles R. Plaisted, Contributing Editor, August 4, 2011

Omniture Recommendations

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Recommendations have become the new key to improving the electronic customer experience. Recommendation technologies are used not only to suggest other products for shoppers to consider, and to personalize email content to make it more compelling by including images of recently viewed products. Recommendation technology is increasingly being used to personalize much of the online experience, including selecting different look-and-feel templates for different segments, varying the choice of images on certain pages, adjusting navigation options, and changing the rules for selecting and ranking search results.

We expect that use of recommendations will be widely adopted in ecommerce in the coming year. The technology is available as a service, meaning that you can deploy it quickly. The impact is swift, within three to five weeks. And the impact is significant, lifting revenue ten percent and more. As more retailers use recommendations, and use them across channels to improve email and call center interactions, customers’ expectations for engaging interaction will rise. Merchants who are being cautious about recommendations will be signing up for recommendations a year hence to win back their customers. B2B marketers will eventually catch on that recommendations enable them to deliver some of the personalization that their customers have been demanding for years: only show us the items appropriate for our industry or geography, prioritize what I usually buy, prioritize our negotiated items and prices, keep my purchasing agents in the correct categories, notify me when my items are being discontinued.

Marketers are finding recommendation technology from a variety of sources, from their ecommerce platform, their search engine, recommendation engine vendors, and, as with Omniture, with a marketing suite. In our January survey, we saw that 68 percent of respondents preferred to use recommendation technology that is embedded in something they already own.

Adobe’s Omniture Recommendations marries technology for recommendations with Omniture’s Web analytics, site search, and site testing and optimization technologies. This creates a unified platform for merchants, supported by a unified service team at Omniture committed to making each merchant successful. The integration of the technology and the services make the addition of Omniture Recommendations pretty seamless for merchants in terms of day-to-day tasks, and pretty swift in terms of delivering uplift.

Omniture Recommendations
Integration with Powerful Omniture Marketing Suite
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, April 1, 2010

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