M+E Connections

Many organizations trying to sell products or services online – whether they’re media and entertainment companies, retailers, or any other type of business – are finding it harder to increase their online conversion rates, according to Jennifer Small, senior solutions consultant at Adobe.

However, “leveraging commerce applications, specifically Adobe Commerce,” can significantly help overcome the challenges companies are facing, she said Sept. 29, during the Adobe Experience Makers webinar “Turn your B2C or B2B commerce website into a Conversion Machine.”

Adobe can help overcome the challenges through personalization, data and delivery, she noted.

What we are seeing is a “conversion conundrum,” she said, asking rhetorically: “Why is conversion more of a challenge now than it has been” in the past?

Conversion Then and Now

“When we think about conversion, back in the day it used to be a little bit of a ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of mentality, and you could touch customers maybe with some word of mouth or with some print advertisement,” Small recalled.

“But nowadays really that shopping life cycle has grown exponentially, and the number of places that you have the ability to either enhance or detract from your conversion rates… is pretty high because when it comes to this idea of conversion, you can gain and you can lose customers at a number of different touch points in their shopping journey,” she explained. “And it’s not just that idea of awareness and discovery. It is both before and after they become aware of your organization.”

“Not only have we kind of created this ecosystem of high touch in terms of conversion but we’re also troubled with a number of other aspects, such as seasonality,” she noted.

When we think of seasonality, we tend to think of factors such as the holiday season, when there is typically a higher volume of spending than much of the rest of the year, she pointed out.

“The unfortunate truth is seasonality is actually a lot more complicated than that,” she said. “So, regardless of industry; regardless of direct-to-consumer or B2B. There are really high peaks and valleys in terms of the seasonality,” she noted.

“I’m sure every single one of you has your own bouts of seasonality that you’re looking to compete with in terms of being able to create better conversion rates in those peak times and taking advantage of some of the slower times to create more personalized experiences for your customers to really be able to entrench some of those conversion rates even when you’re not necessarily riding the wave of seasonality,” she said.

“Customers are more complicated…. If we think about all of those touch points. If you think about the more complicated consumer patterns that people are utilizing today, it’s because customers expect more than ever,” she explained.

“We’ve kind of been conditioned to this point that, as consumers, we are always looking for what is readily available and you better not disappoint or we’re gone. And the point of that is you really need to be able to go through and create these intuitive experiences for your customers that are relevant, that are easy and that really give your organization a leg up on the competition because, when it comes to customer experience from a UI and a UX standpoint, once they leave your website or once they leave your shopping experience, they’re probably going straight to a competitor,” she warned. “The need is still there but you’ve lost their attention.”

The Friction Challenge

So “customers have these high expectations that you’re expected to meet at every touch point [and] the number of places that you can interact with customers, just [from] a technical standpoint, is going through the roof,” Small said. “When you’re talking about all of these increasing touch points, even from a technology standpoint, it’s increasing all of that awareness for customers and what it causes as an issue for many companies that I work with is [a] disconnect of back-end systems.”

All these touch points are “causing a lot of friction internally,” she pointed out. Although we have to always think about customers, “we also need to think about our internal teams and the amount of effort that they’re putting into building all of these experiences,” she cautioned.

Therefore, when we are creating touch points, “we need to be wary not to create these deeper fragments of technology within our own internal systems,” she warned.

She went on to say: “Something that a lot of people are up against as they go through this conversion conundrum is how do I connect my user experience internally with all of my business users, marketers, IT people, digital data analysts?…. How can I streamline their initiatives and make them more impactful so that they can truly be focused on creating that unique and wonderful customer experience across all of those channels and touch points?”

The “addressable market has shifted in terms of understanding that direct-to-consumer or B2C [and] B2B” customer, and “what I’m seeing most commonly in the industry nowadays is the idea of hybrid commerce [being] something that we’re really entrenched with,” she said.

“One of the benefits of Adobe Commerce… is that we marry together the direct-to-consumer and the B2B experience,” she told viewers. “Everything that you would expect from a direct-to-consumer experience – high-touch UI, personalization, product recommendations… are all part of the digital experience expectations of B2B customers…. B2B organizations expect company-level personalization – the ability to access their own unique product pricing and product catalogs to have access to a sales representative if that’s part of your business cycle.”

Many companies are opting to focus on the direct-to-consumer and the B2B markets separately. But Adobe uses them as “kind of a unique addressable market in a single form,” she explained. “So being able to access both B2C and B2B functions in a single Adobe Commerce application is going to streamline some of those internal touch points that you have, allow for your direct-to-consumer customers to experience the same type of high-touch UI that they’re used to and allow you to marry some of those… behavior patterns that we’re all inherited because of the digital age that we live in as well as some of those more… B2B-specific features in a single application.”

While addressing the conversion conundrum is a challenge, “the first step is understanding what we’re up against,” she said.

How Sensei AI Helps

Adobe sees three areas of importance, Small told viewers: “The ability to create experience with personalization, with data-driven decision-making and then with optimized delivery.”

Adobe Live Search is an Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence-driven search  that enables users to “go through and leverage product awareness in a really engaging way,” she said.

Sensei provides “everything you would expect from type ahead, product suggestions and all of this is going to be… based off of the AI algorithm,” she explained. “So, as consumers interact with your site, it will actually get smarter and start suggesting better search results. So you’re able to go through and really leverage the power of Adobe Sensei to enhance that customer awareness and increase personalization really just from a search functionality standpoint.”

All AI applications, however, are only included in the paid license version of Adobe Commerce and not in the open source code, she said.