Say it with flowers.
FTD improves customer journey with insights and informed decisions using Adobe Experience Cloud.
Successfully migrated
12 TB of image data on a tight deadline with NextRow Digital
Objectives
Roll out changes quickly to keep up with customer expectations in a competitive market
Simplify sharing of digital assets among brands and partners
Migrate to a new platform before the important Valentine’s Day deadline
Results
Spent less time troubleshooting and more time creating added features for websites
Successfully migrated 12 TB of image data on a tight deadline with NextRow Digital
Made more informed decisions based on insights and data from the website
Gifting the joy of flowers
Flowers have a rich history of being used as beautiful, colourful and meaningful gifts. The earliest known flower arrangements date back to ancient Egyptians, who created highly stlylised arrangements for funerals, processions or simply as decorations. The tradition remains strong today, with people now ordering flowers for recipients anywhere in the world.
FTD LLC is one of the leaders in floral and gift delivery. Through its well-known brands, including FTD and ProFlowers, the company delivers stunning arrangements to customers across the United States and Canada.
At its core, FTD is in the business of connecting people. Understanding customers and helping them to choose gifts that send just the right message are critical parts of how FTD approaches Customer Experience Management (CXM).
“Floral arrangements are visual by nature, so our customers generally make buying decisions based on what the arrangement looks like and how it makes them feel,” says Nick Manos, Senior Director, eCommerce Engineering at FTD. “Rich imagery and beautiful design are essential to our online business.”
FTD wanted to make sure that customers were always seeing fresh, seasonal arrangements on its websites. The company also wanted to make sure that it was always updating websites with helpful new features that customers are looking for, from a form that shows availability for last-minute gifts to a real-time chat function.\
“When you’re trying to meet an aggressive roll-out timeline, having the right partnership makes a huge difference. NextRow played a big part in helping us to migrate more than 12 terabytes of assets in time for our Valentine’s Day deadline.”
Nick Manos
Senior Director, eCommerce Engineering, FTD
After years of growth, including several acquisitions, FTD was hosting its websites across three web platforms. The lack of standardisation limited the flexibility and creativity FTD could bring to its websites. Features could only be rolled out to one platform at a time, with separate testing and deployment phases for each platform. With so many visual assets used across brands, finding the right image from the massive 12 terabyte asset library could be a challenge.
The first step was deploying a unified content management system (CMS). By working with a headless CMS architecture not tied to any platform or channel, FTC Companies aimed to boost agility and deliver new content and experiences for customers faster than ever. FTD chose Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, for content and asset management. When combined with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, FTD can deliver targeted and personalised experiences for its customers.
“We spent weeks evaluating content management systems and Adobe Experience Manager was the clear winner,” says Manos. “Adobe created a very mature, enterprise tool that is both easy to use and technically advanced enough to support the digital marketing needs of all of our brands.”
Common creative language across teams
By standardising all brands on Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Assets, FTD is bringing together digital, creative, marketing, merchandising, product and IT teams from across brands on one centralised platform to develop richer customer experiences even faster.
Adobe Experience Manager Assets provides a single digital asset management (DAM) platform for all assets, which simplifies approval and management by presenting all content and rights in one location. Dynamic media capabilities automatically resize assets, so the images look beautiful no matter whether a customer is browsing on their laptop or a smartphone.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites supports a headless content model that empowers teams to pull assets into any type of final content, including websites, mobile sites, email or the ProFlowers mobile app. By re-using assets across content, teams can connect customers with new deals, arrangements or inspiration across whatever channel customers prefer.
Not only can teams update content faster with Experience Manager Sites, but by consolidating multiple systems, IT teams can quickly roll out new customer experiences across all web properties at the same time. The team spends less time troubleshooting website issues and more time delivering new feature requests.\
“Using the powerful metadata features in Adobe Experience Manager Assets, brands can better understand how they’re using their assets.”
Brandon Parduhn
Strategic Account Executive, NextRow Digital
** Breaking Valentine’s Day records**
Valentine’s Day is the biggest retail day of the year for floral companies. So when it came time to migrate to Adobe Experience Manager, FTD wanted to complete migration for two of its biggest brands, FTD and ProFlowers, before Valentine’s Day season started. FTD enlisted the help of NextRow Digital to help with one of the biggest jobs of the migration: moving all assets into Adobe Experience Manager Assets.
“When you’re trying to meet an aggressive roll-out timeline, having the right partnership makes a huge difference,” says Manos. “NextRow played a big part in helping us to migrate more than 12 terabytes of assets in time for our Valentine’s Day deadline.”
In addition to storing all current image assets used across websites, marketing campaigns and even third-party partner websites, FTD archives several years of data so creative staff can look for inspiration in past arrangements. NextRow migrated the asset archive while solidifying governance that will help teams minimise duplication of assets in the systems.
“Using the powerful metadata features in Adobe Experience Manager Assets, brands can better understand how they’re using their assets,” says Brandon Parduhn, Strategic Account Executive at NextRow Digital. “This insight will empower teams to optimise workflows by helping them to determine where they can effectively re-use and share assets from across brands.”
FTD is looking at deploying Adobe Experience Platform Launch in the near future to add a new layer of dynamic tag management to Experience Manager Assets. Automated tagging and scalable tag management rules will make it even easier to understand and manage assets.\
“Adobe Analytics is essential for all of our teams when making decisions. It helps us to understand what our customers need and how we can improve the customer journey.”
Nick Manos
Senior Director, eCommerce Engineering, FTD
Making insightful, informed decisions
Adobe Analytics played a key role in minimising the effect that migration had on customers. By carefully monitoring the real-time metrics, the IT team used Analytics to keep an eye out for issues such as sudden drops in traffic or orders that may indicate problems with the migration.
“Adobe Analytics is essential for all of our teams when making decisions,” says Manos. “It helps us to understand what our customers need and how we can improve the customer journey.”
Marketing teams look at orders and attributions to understand how different types of advertisements are connecting with customers and influencing website revenue. Merchandising teams look at website traffic and sales to determine which products are the most popular and to prioritise which arrangements to display on the homepage.
Adobe Analytics also allows FTD to segment audiences and provide the foundation for personalisation through Adobe Target. Working with Adobe Target, brands deliver slightly different customer experiences depending on whether visitors come to the website through search or clicking a link in an email.
“Our customers come to our sites wanting to see gifts and arrangements that will give them an emotional response,” says Manos. “With Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, we’re helping to create a positive digital experience at every point in the sale.”