Optimizing experiences with artificial intelligence.
Epson America combines smart analysis and machine learning for better customer experiences with Adobe Experience Cloud.
Results of initial tests created funding for entire first year of using Adobe Target
Objectives
Improve online experiences for a wide range of customers and sale cycles
Understand and solve online errors to improve conversions and site performance
Optimize campaigns and digital experiences with data-based testing
Results
Discovers patterns in customer behavior
Results of initial tests created funding for entire first year of using Adobe Target
Accelerates identification of anomaly detection with artificial intelligence
Ability to use real-time dashboards to share data
“With Adobe Sensei helping us unearth hidden patterns, we’re using Adobe Experience Cloud to create superior experiences with our customers that improve leads, conversions, and revenue.”
Scott Sturcke
Director, Online Marketing Management, Epson America
Precision products for all audiences
When people hear the name Epson, many think of reliable printers that power their homes or offices. But Epson is much more. Originating as a manufacturer of watch parts in 1942, the Seiko Epson Group has a long history of precision manufacturing used to develop efficient and advanced products. In addition to printers, Epson is the world’s leading projector vendor, as well as a developer and manufacturer of scanners, wearables, robots, and more for home, commercial, and industrial use.
With such a wide range of products, Epson America sees an equally wide range of customers visiting its website. Visitors might be individual consumers looking to quickly purchase an ink cartridge for their home printer, or they might be technology buyers for school districts looking to equip hundreds of classrooms with Epson projectors. While individual consumers will typically make their purchase right away, the latter type of corporate customers may operate in a long sales cycle where it could take months to make a decision.
Epson marketers, product managers, and other decision-makers need insight into how products and campaigns are performing with different types of customers to increase conversions and customer leads. That’s why the company has long relied upon Adobe Analytics, a solution within Adobe Analytics Cloud, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, to provide rich, real-time data. After replatforming its website to SAP Hybris, Epson expanded its use of Adobe Experience Cloud with a fresh reimplementation of Adobe Analytics and the addition of Adobe Target, a solution within Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Working together, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target provide the intelligence Epson needs to gain insights and optimize experiences for all of its diverse customers. Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, further extends the capabilities of Analytics and Target to accelerate tedious processes and discover anomalies with less effort than ever.
“With Adobe Sensei enabled capabilities helping us do even more with our Adobe Experience Cloud implementation, we’re shining light on any weaknesses so that we can build a strong digital experience for all of our diverse customers,” says Scott Sturcke, Director, Online Marketing Management at Epson America.
“Adobe Analytics allows us to follow the customer journey and provide more actionable feedback to marketers about whether the campaigns are finding true success through conversions or leads.”
Scott Sturcke
Director, Online Marketing Management, Epson America
Data-based decisions through intelligence
With Adobe Analytics, Epson is monitoring website performance, tracking campaigns, and diving deep into data to provide accurate KPI measurements. Adobe Analytics ingests data for marketing campaigns from across channels to provide marketers with a clear view of how campaigns are performing. Channels include not only website and mobile site data, but also display, email, and paid search.
“Often marketers would just be looking at how many clicks the campaign received, but that’s not actually a good measure of performance,” says Sturcke. “Adobe Analytics allows us to follow the customer journey and provide more actionable feedback to marketers about whether the campaigns are finding true success through conversions or leads.”
With Analysis Workspace, Epson uses complex real-time data and analysis on a flexible dashboard. Analysis Workspace allows the team to quickly flip between displays and share real-time data with stakeholders.
“The ability to load dashboards and monitor important online events in real time helps streamline and focus the team’s efforts on performance,” says Sturcke. “Whether it’s Black Friday or the launch of an updated website, Adobe Analytics helps us monitor performance and spot errors in real time.”
Using artificial intelligence for diagnostics
Real-time dashboards are not the only way that Epson is raising visibility into issues. With the Anomaly Detection capability within Adobe Analytics, powered by Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence learns to uncover unexpected website behaviors based on actions, errors, and conversion.
If the website deviates from expected behavior, automated alerts raise the alarm and Contribution Analysis, powered by Adobe Sensei helps developers pinpoint the problem. This can include issues such as sudden drops in traffic, rise of a specific error code, or customers bouncing at the same point on the website.
“Website errors can be hard to track down and even harder to replicate,” says Sturcke. “What Anomaly Detection does is help us pinpoint where and when issues are occurring, so that we can get in front of errors and minimize the impact on conversion or leads. By identifying and solving issues faster, we’re delivering a better customer experience while reducing the time that we spend tracking errors.”
When Epson transitioned its website to the new web platform, it used Anomaly Detection to help detect unexpected spikes or drops in traffic. Sudden changes in traffic could be an indicator of broken links, incorrect redirects, or marketing campaigns that were still using old links.
While Epson is currently using Anomaly Detection to keep ahead of errors, the company plans to leverage insights from machine learning of Adobe Sensei to detect positive results such as sudden spikes in sales, traffic, or leads after the launch of a new campaign.
“Adobe has long been a technology leader. Adobe Sensei allows us to harness the power of machine learning to work more intelligently and be more proactive in our digital approach,” says Sturcke. “We can concentrate on optimizing customer experiences that help us stay ahead of the competition.”
“With Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target working together, we can take a closer look at the data coming out of our tests and make smart decisions that will help us optimize online experiences for our customers.”
Scott Sturcke
Director, Online Marketing Management, Epson America
Optimizing experiences with Adobe Target
Epson is expanding on the rich data from Adobe Analytics to testing and optimizing its website with Adobe Target. “One of the reasons that we continue to enjoy working with Adobe Analytics is how well it works with other tools,” says Sturcke. “Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target obviously work well together, but the Adobe solutions work equally well with our tools from other platforms, including SAP Hybris for e-commerce, tag manager, content management and audience segmentation tools, and session replay tools. Adobe Experience Cloud gives us the freedom to choose the tools that work for us without sacrificing the benefits of seamless workflows.”
By using Adobe Analytics to look into the customer checkout journey, Epson discovered that a high number of customers were bouncing from the website on a page where they were asked to identify themselves as a guest or returning customer. The company theorized that customers were getting confused by the layout of the page, leading customers to fill out information in both guest and returning customer fields. This would prevent successful checkout, and customers would simply bounce from the website.
The company tested its theory using Adobe Target to build and test the existing layout against two variations that clearly separated fields for guests and returning customers. After just one week, Epson realized that the two new test versions were consistently and dramatically outperforming the old version of the web page. Epson quickly removed the old version of the web page from the test, and is continuing the test to determine whether customers respond more positively to guest checkout on the left or right side of the page.
“With the first test we ran, the information we learned boosted conversion high enough to pay for the entire first year of using the Adobe solution,” says Sturcke. “With Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target working together, we can take a closer look at the data coming out of our tests and make smart decisions that will help us optimize online experiences for our customers.”
Epson is continuing to expand its use of Adobe Experience Cloud. “With Adobe Target we can bridge the gap between testing and personalization to improve lead-generation and marketing campaigns by leveraging what we know about our visitors to deliver the right experiences,” says Sturcke. Adobe Sensei enabled capabilities will help Epson uncover potential pitfalls and build stronger experiences for its customers, whether their sales cycle is two minutes or two years.
Adobe Customer Solutions worked with Epson during reimplementation, and consultants continue to help Epson get the most from its testing program.
“Adobe Customer Solutions has been great, recommending best practices and advising us on how to improve our structure to get the data we need,” says Sturcke. “Our Adobe consultant has been an especially strong asset to our Adobe Target implementation by helping us understand the thresholds and data that we need to determine a winning test. She’s not just a technician, but a thoughtful partner who regularly comes to the table with new ideas and examples. With Adobe Sensei helping us unearth hidden patterns, we’re using Adobe Experience Cloud to create superior experiences with our customers that improve leads, conversions, and revenue.” ---
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