According to Gartner, 89% of companies expect to compete on customer experience in 2016. And in just four years, it’s estimated that 85% of a customer’s relationship with a brand won’t include face-to-face interactions. (Got your attention?)

Personalization is key not only for customer acquisition but also for customer retention. In the 2016 Annual Digital Trends Survey, companies that want to meet (or exceed) customer expectations need to deliver experiences that are: 

• Personalized and relevant (25%)
• Valuable (25%)
• Easy to understand (17%)

To create personalized experiences, marketing organizations need a solid digital marketing platform that supports their well-defined personalization strategies.

Many marketing departments choose to standardize on a single platform, easing the support and integration required for disparate, existing tools. Adobe Experience Manager, the content management pillar within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, is one such example.

Updates included in the recent release of Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 include features that make it easier for marketers to:

• Personalize and target offers
• Understand which assets are performing well (or not so well)
• Create connected experiences across mobile apps, forms, and in-person (or in-store)

Want to learn more about exceeding customer expectations and solving other common digital marketing challenges? Download our latest guide below.

In the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe has simplified authoring personalized content. In addition to some exciting new features, this release includes a new integration with Adobe Target. The new integration allows authors to edit personalized content directly within AEM.

Given the strong ROI of personalization, the improved AEM / Target integration will be a big win for Adobe customers.

Authoring Personalized Experiences with AEM & Target

While at Adobe Summit, I attended the lab “Integrating Experience Manager with Adobe Analytics, Target and DTM”, which showcased the new AEM / Target integration. In only one hour, we were able to set up the integration and personalize content.

In this post, I’ll show the process for authoring personalized content in AEM with Adobe Target. For more information on setting up the integration, please see the Summit Session documents. The images below are credits the authors of the lab.

1. Configure an Activity in AEM

The first step to using Adobe Target in AEM is to configure your Activity. An activity is an instance of targeting on a page. Each activity gets a name and you can configure which targeting engine, configuration and targeting type to use.

To create a new Activity, first, select the Brand (which is a container of activities for a particular brand or site) and then click the + button. If you wanted to modify an existing activity, you would select the name of activity from the drop-down.

2. Define Targets

Next, define the components to be targeted. You can define any number of components to be targeted on the page. To do so, simply select the Targeting icon on the component’s edit bar while in targeting mode.

When you target a component, AEM replaces the existing component with a targeting container and makes the existing content the default.

3. Create Experiences

Once you have your components selected for the Activity, you need to create the experiences. Experiences are content variants shown to a particular audience or are groups of users based on criteria. By default, only the DEFAULT experience will be displayed when the Activity is first created.

To add an experience, select “+ Add Experience Targeting”. This will allow you to choose from among the pre-defined audiences or create a new audience to target.

You can create any number of audiences and order them in order in which they will be selected by Target.

4. Create the Experience Content

Once you’ve defined the experiences, select each one and update the content in the targeted components. You can change content, images or anything else you can edit within an AEM component.

You can quickly switch between experiences in authoring mode by selecting the experience name on the right. This allows you to see how the content appears in each experience.

5. Finish and Publish

Once you have created the content for the experiences, review and finish the setup of the Activity.

From this screen, you can define how reporting will be tracked for the Activity as well as the goals for the Activity. This will allow marketers to see reports on the success of the personalization activity.

Once you have verified and finished the Activity, publish the page to push the changes to the live website. AEM will publish all the content to the live site simultaneously to ensure website consistency.

Bonus: Testing Experiences

To ensure your targeting is working correctly, AEM includes the ability to view and modify the Client Context. The Client Context stores data on the current user and can / should be used for configuring segments inside AEM and Target. To view the Client Context, switch to Preview mode in AEM and then select the Client Context Hub icon. This will allow you to modify the variables in the client context and switch between segments to see the different experiences.

Personalization Unleashed

With AEM and Target, brands can delight their customers by providing rich, personalized experiences. At the same time, the new integration means authors have less overhead maintaining content.

Brands understand the need of personalization and the new AEM / Target integration allows them to make it happen.

Need help with understanding personalization with AEM & Target? Leave a comment below and I’d be happy to help!

I recently attended a webinar on the new translation features coming as a part of the AEM 6.2 beta program and am very excited for the following four features:

Search for Translation Content

In the initial version of the Translation API, available in AEM 6.1, adding translated content was a very broad activity. Essentially, the process was adding an entire content tree to be translated then if you wanted to limit the content being translated removing it item by item.

Now in AEM 6.2, you can leverage the powerful search features available in AEM to find content to be translated by last modification, page metadata or analytics information. This allows you to quickly refine down to the most important or most recently edited content and send it to translation.

Do Not Translate Configurations

Sometimes you want to be able to exclude certain portions of a website from being translated. To handle this in AEM 6.2, Adobe added the ability to create Do Not Translate configurations. These can then be associated with content by overriding the Cloud Configurations for a portion of a website. When the translation feature encounters a Do Not Translate configuration it will exclude that page and subpages from the translation process.

This allows authors to easily exclude website content from translation without having to involve developers or modifying the translation rules.

Override Source Language Warning

When I implemented the AEM – Lingotek translation integration, one of the biggest complaints we had was that the warning for when you were going to override the source language copy was not obvious enough. This dialog would appear if you say attempted to translate the English copy of a website to French. In AEM 6.1 this opened a fairly bland dialog, where as in AEM 6.2 this opens a clear warning and now allows you to create a Language Copy directly from the warning dialog.

i18n Translation

One of the big misses in the original translation feature in AEM 6.1 was translating i18n dictionaries. Now in AEM 6.2, the translation feature will automatically queue i18n dictionaries into the translation job when you translate a page.

Bonus (Existing) Feature: Translation Rules

If you were wondering how to manage component or attribute translation rules, AEM includes a Translation Rules configuration. This offers you very fine grained control over what is sent to translation, but unfortunately there is currently no UI for managing the rules. This is expected in either a 6.2 feature pack or 6.3.

To update the Translation Rules, edit the file stored in AEM at /etc/workflow/models/translation/translation_rules.xml