Customers Report 3x Return on Investment with Adobe Experience Manager

Consumers have taken control of their experiences. As a result, brands need to surprise and delight them at every turn in order to earn their business and loyalty. In order to meet increasing customer expectations, companies need powerful tools to uncover, create, personalize, and deliver the most compelling content possible. We at Adobe understand this need and are constantly focused on innovating the powerful content management tools in Adobe Experience Manager to help brands succeed.

Over the years, Experience Manager has evolved into the leading solution for marketers to design, anticipate and deliver amazing experiences across any end-point in the customer journey. We have internal data showing that customers are generating a lot of value from our solutions, but we wanted to get these insights validated by a third-party.

We recently asked research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) to study the return on investment (ROI) of customers using Adobe’s digital asset management and web content management solutions, Experience Manager Assets and Sites. To come up with the assessment, IDC interviewed seven organizations in the fall of 2017 about their use of Experience Manager Assets and another six organizations about their use of Experience Manager Sites. These were large enterprises, with over 60,000 employees and an average revenue of $23.5 billion per year for Experience Manager Assets, and almost 60,000 employees and average revenue of more than $5 billion per year for Experience Manager Sites.

Overall, participants reported substantial gains in both team productivity and customer engagement — resulting in quantifiably better business results. Let’s take a deeper look.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets

The number of assets required to support the breadth of digital experiences marketers need to deliver today is growing incredibly fast. Brands can no longer manage this volume without a superior digital asset management solution. Experience Manager Assets is the answer. It serves as the center of gravity for an organization’s digital operation – giving brands the ability to ingest, organize, tag, and distribute assets across their organization. Experience Manager Assets also enables companies to manage the scale and workflow of asset development and automate time-consuming tasks, while simultaneously improving the access and use of assets across every point in the customer journey — from building brand awareness to enhancing post-purchase experience.

In IDC’s study of organizations using Experience Manager Assets, participants reported an average three-year ROI of 366 percent. In addition, customers reported high gains in efficiency and productivity, including:

• 47 percent faster creation of new assets
• 19 percent higher productivity for digital experience teams
• 27 percent faster content delivery
• 84 percent faster rendering of existing assets.

Customers had several reasons for why Experience Manager Assets made their teams so much more productive, including:

• Content reuse. Customers report reducing the number of assets they’re creating because they were able to easily see existing assets and repurpose accordingly for their efforts.
• Reduction in duplicative work. One customer noted, “Experience Manager Assets saves us time on duplicative work. I would say it’s a 20 percent time savings for eight people, which we’ve done by reducing duplicative creative work by about 30 percent.”
• Faster asset uploads and downloads. Some customers report shaving as much as 30 minutes off the asset ingestion process using Experience Manager Assets.
• Higher performing digital asset repository. Another customer said, “I think that Experience Manager Assets just makes our jobs a lot easier in that it’s quick to respond to any of our actions that we take. For example, like with merging with Excel and importing/exporting information, it’s really quick.”

Adobe Experience Manager Sites

We know from our recent Adobe Consumer Content Survey that consumers require stellar experiences at all times, regardless of the device or channel they are using. In fact, two-thirds say they won’t make a purchase if they receive a poor experience from a brand.

Brands can’t take the risk. They must deliver personalized, contextually relevant experiences to customers at all times, across all end points. This is where Experience Manager Sites excels. It’s a modern digital experience delivery solution that enables marketers to create experiences independent of delivery channel or screen. Fifty-five percent of the Fortune 50 are powered by Experience Manager Sites, running 50 percent more domains than its closest competitor.

The IDC study found that Experience Manager Sites customers who participated in the study garnered an average 348 percent ROI over three years and generated $2.2 million in incremental revenue per year over a three-year term. These customers also saw:

• 23 percent higher productivity for digital experience teams
• 64 percent decrease in time needed to make minor editorial changes
• 66 percent faster delivery of new brand or country websites
• 10 percent increase in website visits per month.

According to the IDC study, Experience Manager Sites customers credit this uplift to three core benefits, including:

• Accelerating time to market for new experiences by making the creation and delivery of experiences more consistent and streamlined.
• Empowering and increasing the productivity of employees responsible for digital experiences.
• Improving the quality of customer experiences, thereby increasing engagement levels and generating additional business.

One Experience Manager Sites customer noted, “Everything has a ripple effect, so when you’re putting out better content that’s faster and more personalized, you’re creating a better customer experience, which leads to an uptick in both new and return users. With Experience Manager Sites, our customer engagement has increased by around 10-15 percent … And we’ve increased our conversion rate from around 2 percent to 7 percent.”

At Adobe, we’re acutely focused on ensuring our customers have the tools they need to reimagine how they want to create, manage and deliver digital experiences at scale. We just released the latest version of Experience Manager, incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence across Experience Manager Assets, Sites and more. These innovations empower marketers to deliver the dazzling experiences their customers have come to expect, more quickly efficiently than ever before.

We’re just scratching the surface on what’s possible for marketers in experience management and delivery. Keep following along here for the latest advancements, but in the meantime, check out the full papers – IDC White Paper, The Business Value of Adobe Experience Manager Sites, sponsored by Adobe, February 2018, here.