Shining a light on customer data.

Signify is a young company with a long history of bringing light to the world. Spun off from global conglomerate Philips, Signify represents a new stage in lighting technology with products ranging from street lamps, security lighting and greenhouse grow lamps to household names such as the Philips Hue line of products.

“Lighting has changed dramatically since Philips made its first incandescent lamp in 1891,” says Ralph Hulscher, Tribe Architect Digital Marketing at Signify. “Today people want lighting that lasts — even decades in the case of streetlights, building lights or lights in other hard-to-reach places. They want sustainable, digitally connected lights that are part of the Internet of Things. Signify has something for everyone and that’s why we are #1 in conventional, LED and connected lighting.”

As an independent company, Signify reevaluated its strategy around customer-centric experiences. In digital spaces, that would mean more personalisation and interactive customer experiences. Signify chose Adobe Experience Cloud to support these goals.

The company built flexible, modular websites using Adobe Experience Manager Sites and used Analytics and Target for customer insights and testing. Over the years, it expanded to support a direct-to-consumer business model, adding Adobe Campaign, Commerce, Experience Manager Assets, Marketo Engage, Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Journey Optimizer.

“With access to integrated solutions we accelerate time to value, achieve much faster results and support customer-centric experiences now and in the future,” says Manuel Diez Lopez, Global Product Owner eCRM and Personalisation B2C at Signify.

Bringing products to life

Signify again redesigned its website to support the new customer-centric digital strategy. The company built a flexible library of templates and components, which can be reuse and rearranged to create any type of website. The Philips Hue website served as the blueprint, allowing Signify to quickly roll out similar websites as needed. After acquiring Cooper Lighting, Signify only needed to slightly adjust the look of available components to create the branded website. The company also uses the Language Copy capabilities to streamline localisations and reach global consumers in more than 50 languages.

“Adobe Experience Manager Sites gives us a very flexible way of working,” says Hulscher. “We can apply policies to templates, which reduces errors and lets us expand content authoring to more people. Overall, we’re able to improve experiences with more frequent updates for our consumers.”

With consumers approaching Signify across channels, digital teams also use the headless CMS capabilities to reuse content on the website, in its app and in emails for more consistent journeys. The headless strategy supports initiatives such as Signify focusing on direct-to-consumer sales by bringing its Philips Hue ecommerce site in house.

While Signify did have an ecommerce site, third-party management limited sales insights and data. The new ecommerce site, powered by Commerce with headless content from Experience Manager supporting the front end, responds much faster, with 50% faster page load speeds over the past two years. The greater speeds and updated experiences contributed to a 55% higher net merchandised value and a 20% increase in average order value.

“With Adobe, we’re moving away from simple catalogues and bringing our Philips Hue line to life across channels,” says Hulscher. “We’re inspiring consumers, which leads to more interest and greater revenue for our brands.”

Cohesive customer journeys for millions of consumers

To tailor digital experiences for its millions of global consumers, Signify needed to create a single unified view of each consumer with information about how they interact with its websites and apps. A key part of this effort was eliminating silos to combine customer data from across all product lineups.

Working with partner Merkle, Signify implemented Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer across all markets in under five months. This dramatically reduces the time needed to deploy cross-market campaigns from months to days by giving all teams a central source of truth for everything known about global consumers.

“Adobe allows us to gather all of the data that we need to create a cohesive customer journey and activate it in real time,” says Diez Lopez. “One of the biggest benefits of working with both Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer is there are zero barriers between data and journey, so we know that we act on the most up to date customer insights.”

Signify has one of the world’s largest consumer databases. But storing and updating customer information in siloed locations led to discrepancies. By pulling customer data into unified customer profiles, the company can personalise customer experiences and communications across its channels, increasing email open rates by 20%. Signify currently uses Journey Optimizer for transactional journeys, such as, order confirmations, delivery notifications and invoices and is actively building out more complex customer-initiated journeys.

For example, Signify can orchestrate and deliver a re-engagement journey when customers leave the website, triggering a reminder email to consider Signify's best selling products. Additionally, Signify can craft an abandoned basket journey, which will automatically push an in-app message to qualifying customers who have abandoned their shopping baskets to convert them into paying customers.

“Having a wide range of Adobe products in our stack means we always have the best solution for any use case,” says Diez Lopez. “For example, while Journey Optimizer and Target are both good for delivering messages to specific audiences based on real-time data, Journey Optimizer excels at orchestrating overall journeys across the ecosystem, while Target is best at responding to specific events. While we could live with one product, having both allows us to get the best performance from the same customer information.”

Expanding its customer-centric focus

Signify plans to continue expanding its use of unified profiles to deliver tailored experiences and journeys across its brand portfolio. The company is starting to test generative AI capabilities in Journey Optimizer to reduce time spent creating briefs so teams can build and manage more campaigns.

“Changing technologies can be relatively easy, but an even bigger shift happens when people change how they think,” says Hulscher. “Adobe gives us so many possibilities that we’re starting to think more creatively about all of the things that we can do. There’s endless potential for how we can evolve our business with customers at the centre.”

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