AEM 6.5: Enhancing Your Brand’s Digital Experience

Customer experience (CX) will surpass products and pricing as the main brand-differentiating factor. In fact, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better CX, and 51% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that deliver personalized digital experiences.

It’s imperative that marketing teams have access to the latest technologies to create a modern CX that can respond quickly to market trends and meet customer expectations.

If you’ve been using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and taking advantage of its many benefits (e.g., creative cloud integration, video management, intelligent search, content personalization, etc.), you know that it empowers your marketing team to create a stellar digital experience and stay ahead of the competition.

AEM puts content creation into the hands of authors from various departments and the external agencies they work with, so they don’t have to rely on IT for asset management. AEM 6.5 offers many features that allow you to deliver a world-class customer experience that will further increase conversion and customer retention.

AEM 6.5’s Latest Features Deliver an Even Better Digital Experience

Many features in AEM 6.5 are designed to deliver outstanding customer experiences, including connected DAM, extension or integration with existing Adobe products, automatic form conversion, smart crop, and more.

Many of these standard features would have required custom-built components in earlier iterations of AEM. Now, marketing teams can access them right out of the box to create a modern CX, take control of asset management, and respond to market trends swiftly.

Here’s how AEM 6.5 can help you deliver an outstanding digital experience:

• Connected digital asset management (DAM) provides a centralized location for organizing, storing, and retrieving rich media. This allows unified, easy-to-use access to all owned assets, so different business units can use them to deliver a cohesive brand experience.
• Improved integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Stock allows users to quickly find, preview, license, and save assets directly from the AEM Web UI. This helps marketing teams deliver a rich customer experience with engaging visual content.
• Automated Form Conversion using Adobe Sensei ensures that all forms are rendered correctly on all devices. Meanwhile, automated form-processing and data validation facilitate back-end data integration so you can better leverage information to deliver a personalized experience to each customer.
• Adaptive forms and interactive communications—which can be embedded in AEM Sites single-page applications (SPA)—supports dynamic rendering, dynamic routing, and more.
• Integration with Adobe Livefyre enhances content curation and audience engagement. You can access user-generated content and stream it in real time to various websites, digital billboards, apps, and in-store displays to deliver an engaging CX.
• Smart Crop—powered by Adobe Sensei—crops and resizes images or videos automatically to fit any screen size while preserving the points of interest. This allows you to deliver a satisfactory experience on any screen without having to resize every asset manually.

Keys to a Successful AEM 6.5 Upgrade

AEM 6.5 is essential to the success of any enterprise marketing team ready to take advantage of new features that help them deliver an outstanding and relevant customer experience.

Here are key steps to set the stage for a seamless upgrade and smooth transition:

1. Conduct an upgrade assessment to determine the level of effort required. For example, evaluate the operating system, hardware, content repository, customer application services, and customer application content to establish scope and requirements.
2. Create an upgrade roadmap that covers all departments and personnel involved, including systems, applications, and dev-ops. Also, determine the required changes to the architecture, infrastructure, and server environment.
3. Establish an upgrade team that will be responsible for steering the initiative. Include team members from the business unit and the tech team to ensure that the software is configured to help business users meet customer expectations and deliver an outstanding CX.
4. Define key roles and responsibilities for team members involved in the process so they can navigate the complexity of the upgrade while preventing key tasks from falling through the cracks.
5. Create a detailed upgrade timeline and project plan to make sure everyone is on the same page. Review the project plan with all stakeholders early on in the process to verify that all the tasks are accounted for and all the requirements are addressed.

Conclusion

AEM 6.5 enhances the reliability, stability, performance, and supportability of the existing system and is an invaluable tool for any enterprise marketing team.

However, many organizations are using outdated versions of AEM because of the many hurdles involved in an upgrade, the complexity of the process, and/or the need for more staff.

Upgrading to AEM 6.5 is often a complex project that involves many departments in your organization. As such, you should start with a thorough planning process and seek the assistance of an external team of experts when appropriate. Expert service can provide an upgrade assessment, gap analysis of your current state vs ideal state, staff augmentation to fill specific skill gaps, and end-to-end re-platforming to ensure a seamless transition.

Atypical Digital is an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Preferred Partner specializing in helping enterprise brands leverage Adobe’s AEM platform to enhance their customer experiences across various digital channels, speed up their digital marketing content publishing process, and drive more engagement.

To see how Atypical Digital can help your brand maximize its investment in AEM to truly enhance your customer experience, contact us for a free consultation today!