Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), the enterprise content management solution within Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, aims to be “the content backbone of your organisation”. So what are the benefits and opportunities for a financial business using AEM? Adobe customer solutions and strategy specialist, Tom Braybrook answers some key questions.
How does Adobe Experience Manager help? The interest rate example
The best way to explain how AEM works, Tom Braybrook says, is with a real example, for instance when the Reserve Bank changes the interest rate. A marketer is then charged with reflecting these rate changes across all branding and communications channels as quickly as possible.
“One of the key challenges we’ve observed is that making a seemingly simple but widespread content change can be slow and cumbersome for the marketer – we refer to this as a ‘content velocity’ challenge,” Braybrook says.
AEM addresses this challenge in two parts, he says, firstly by better connecting designers and marketers. The connected workflows between Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager allow staff to create, review, and approve the updated assets from one location — saving “a vast amount of time and effort”.
AEM’s publishing workflow then allows organisations to publish an updated experience across all digital assets instantly, so that web, mobile app, partner sites and digital signage in physical branch locations are all updated from a single place.
On top of that, AEM does three things, Braybook says:
1. Simplifies the application process with a digital forms capability that helps you make form and document processes paperless, efficient, and automated, transforming digital enrolment, onboarding, and ongoing correspondence.
2. AEM integrates social content through Livefyre, so you can tap into everything shared on the web to create a constant flow of UGC on your own sites.
3. Enables the creation of digital communities including forums, user groups, learning resources, and other social features that are valuable to customers, employees, and your brand.
Which all sounds fantastic, but what about ROI (that old chestnut)?
3 ROI goals AEM can help you reach, with client case studies
The first, Braybrook says, is allowing businesses to be more agile and reduce costs, illustrated by the example of National Australia Bank. Using AEM, the bank’s content teams are now able to manage 400% more content changes. “We also have other enterprise customers who have managed to decrease their overall web management costs by 20% by leveraging AEM,” he says. “In addition, MasterCard’s marketing team only have to manage a tenth of the pages that they previously had to, making it easier to keep their diverse audiences informed.”
Second is more conversions and digital sales. Simplifying the digital experience (e.g. making content more readily available, optimising forms for mobile) leads to high conversion and lower cost of sale, according to Braybrook. “Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK have boosted loan application completion from mobile channels by 20%. Similarly, National Australia Bank is able to continually optimise their experiences and are boosting conversion rates by up to 45%.”
AEM also helps deliver personalised experiences. “Our leading FSI customers are now coupling content with data to drive personalised experiences across sales and service,” says Braybrook. “’Next Best Conversations’ and ‘Customer Lifecycle Targeting’ are all a core focus for our FSI businesses to drive increased relevance with their customers.”
We also have other enterprise customers who have managed to decrease their overall web management costs by 20% by leveraging AEM.
How do your consumers benefit?
Your company’s website or mobile app is effectively your largest branch or storefront, and consumers expect to find information and perform tasks instantly and easily across any device. “Simplicity, convenience, and relevance have become table stakes for brands rather than competitive differentiators,” Braybrook says. And he believes AEM technology makes this a reality for financial organisations.
“Royal Bank of Scotland are a powerful example of this,” says Braybrook. “By using Adobe’s Experience Cloud and Document Cloud technologies, they have drastically simplified the application process for a bank account so that a customer can perform the process digitally – on any device – without the need to visit a branch. As well as conversion rates increasing, they have also reduced the processing time for the application from days to hours.”
3 key areas where finance brands, specifically, could benefit from AEM
1. Your website is not an island
Braybrook believes a lot of companies are still struggling to understand the role of digital experiences within the broader customer journey. What influence does your editorial blog content play in driving new accounts? Does digital self-service improve your Net Promoter Score? How long after a product interaction should you follow up with an outbound marketing message? Many organisations still struggle to answer these kinds of questions, Braybrook says.
He believes that holistic measurement of digital and physical channels is the key here. “However, being able to act on those insights is even more critical,” he says.
2. How to integrate the voice of the customer
Braybrook recommends that FSI businesses consider using social content and positive consumer feedback to add credibility to corporate messaging.
“Our most innovative customers are starting to capture social content and positive customer reviews at scale, then integrating this into their digital experiences. Better still, when you have this social content available in AEM, you can start to personalise and target it towards similar customer personas.”
3. Personalisation at scale
Aside from the large retail banks, an alarmingly large number of companies are still only “dipping their toe in the water” when it comes to personalisation, Braybrook says. “Our most successful FSI customers are delivering personalisation programmes that are coordinated, well-resourced and powered by customer intelligence. If you don’t have a personalisation function in the organisation today then start small, iterate and remember to invest the revenue uplifts back into the project to help you scale.”
