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Originally Posted On: https://www.vaimo.com/what-is-adobe-experience-manager/

Adobe Experience Manager functions as a Content Management System (CMS), a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, a Cloud Service, and much more with extensive integrations across the Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is the solution to content complexity. As companies increase in size, they must control and optimise digital media across numerous sites and channels.

In an ever-changing world, companies in both B2B and B2C commerce need to keep their marketing materials relevant to produce an omnichannel and personalised experience. For example, a Harvard study found that 73% of shoppers engage with brands across multiple channels, and omnichannel shoppers spend 4% more than shoppers completing their purchasing journey through a single channel. AEM will help you overcome the challenges of creating an omnichannel experience.

WHAT IS ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER (AEM)?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise content management system that optimises the authoring, management, and delivery of content and digital media. AEM allows you to create unique digital experiences and manage fully context-specific messages that scale across products, services, organisations, and countries. According to Adobe, teams deliver new brand and country sites 66% faster and is 23% more productive after shifting to AEM. In short, it helps you give the right person a personalised message at the perfect moment.

Related Reading: Adobe Experience Cloud Guide

MAIN FUNCTIONS OF ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)

A Content Management System helps you align your content with your customer ensuring that their journey is personalised and goes above and beyond. This is something the Adobe Experience Manager excels at by allowing you to create and manage your digital commerce experience across all of your channels with tools that make it simple.

DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT (DAM)

A digital asset management tool helps you manage your product assets, such as videos, documents, logos, presentations, images, audio, etc. The benefit of digital asset management is that it expedites the process of accessing, retrieving, and using all of these digital files for your team. Adobe Experience Manager ensures that your team will spend more time making your digital experience better instead of searching for assets. Adobe Experience Manager Assets provides both smart tools and automation to rapidly access, retrieve, and use your assets across various audiences and channels.

CLOUD SERVICE

The Adobe Experience Manager functions as an enterprise-grade cloud service, which helps you stay one step ahead of your customers’ expectations. With AEM cloud service, you can rely on seamlessly integrated updates, so your team is always using the latest tools and Adobe functionality. This service also guarantees that your team is on the same page globally and is always secure.

PROJECT DASHBOARD

You can manage projects centrally through the Adobe Experience Manager’s project dashboard. Every project is part of a logical group of resources and is represented as a tile. The project dashboard functionality also gives other users the ability to add information to specific projects. This functionally is useful especially for websites and assets, while editors work with external links, project information, team information, and tasks in their projects.

DIGITAL ENROLMENT AND FORMS

Adobe Experience Managers Forms provides an end-to-end digital document solution that simplifies your ability to make responsive forms that your customers can easily fill out and sign securely online, making their digital consumer journey simple.

OUT-OF-THE-BOX TECHNOLOGY

If you know anything about Adobe, you know out-of-the-box is a phrase built into its mission and vision. What does out-of-the-box mean? Well, it means that many of the building blocks and components of Adobe Experience Manager will already be in place for your team, reducing development costs. In addition, you can trust that Adobe’s out-of-the-box mantra will continue, and the core components will carry on into new versions of AEM, ensuring that your team stays up-to-date.

Related Reading: What is Adobe Experience Cloud?

TOP BENEFITS OF ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER:

Flexibility & Scalability: makes the process easier of getting your content across many sites, hundreds of users, countless visitors, and dozens of languages
Best-in-class Tools: is repeatedly ranked as the leading CMS tool and also integrates with Adobe Experience Cloud, a leader in digital commerce
Easy-to-use CMS: offers inline editing and drag-and-drop functionality, among many other features to help your marketing team boost their productivity
Personalised & Content-driven Experiences: delivers a best-in-class B2C and B2B shopping experience, supported by integration with Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics to create an unparalleled marketing machine
Versatility: has an adaptable platform with a fast roll-out speed and is flexible to support various digital business models
Simple Add-on Functionality: allows you to use add-ons through third parties and Magento marketplace—it also has a large developer community, creating additional enhancements and models
Meet Customers Wherever They Are: Customer behaviour is always changing. With AEM, you can update your content from one location to keep up with your shoppers’ fluctuating needs and interests. New assets can be published across channels by one user.
Improve Speed to Market: AEM removes complexity from workflows. It simply makes the process of managing, creating, and distributing content easier. Built-in workflows connect Adobe’s Creative Cloud to Adobe Experience Manager. It allows users to move newly created items right into their campaign. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Making your teams’ lives easier: enables users to access data related to your assets, templates, pages, projects, and more.
Helping your team be glocal (target customers locally, manage globally): push campaigns from your global team to local sites with greater ease and control. AEM also facilitates easier localisation of documents through assessing documents and where human intervention might be necessary to add the right touch.

AEM’s demonstrated success in simplifying content management is why enterprises are choosing it over other competitors. AEM was named the Leader in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management research.

VAIMO CUSTOMER STORY: HELLY HANSEN AND ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER

In 2019, Helly Hansen moved from WordPress to Adobe Experience Manager. The switch to Adobe Experience Manager allowed them to begin scaling into new languages and publishing content in the right place at the right time. They now use an online design system that integrates with Adobe Experience Manager.

All of these changes have added up. Today, Helly Hansen has 55 stores on Adobe Commerce with 65,000 products per store and 10 different language options, payment methods, and shipping rules. Their target is to blend commerce and content by steadily moving their content to Adobe Experience Manager, by which they will infuse a top-notch customer experience into their commerce.

With the help of Adobe Experience Manager, Helly Hansen saw a large improvement in their key business metrics:

20% year on year increase in traffic
40% year on year increase in transactions
45% year on year increase in revenue

INTEGRATING ADOBE MARKETING CLOUD AND ADOBE EXPERIENCE CLOUD TOOLS

Companies are once again choosing suites over point solutions. While point solutions offer the best option to solve a specific problem, they require resources and patience to integrate them into your business. Marketers are starting to understand this issue. For example, research by Gartner indicates that 59% of marketers chose marketing suites compared to 36% who preferred a best-of-breed solution. With resources and patience in short supply, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, all-in-one suites—an integrated system of tools from a single vendor—are taking over.

AEM integrates with other core Adobe Cloud tools used by both mid-level and enterprise-class merchants. Here are some of the other Adobe tools:

Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of tools for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications.
Adobe Cloud Analytics helps you measure the experience your visitors have with your brand and optimise experiences based on what you see.
Adobe Target allows you to segment users for personalised website experiences.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system that optimises the authoring, management, and delivery of content and digital media.
AEM has consistently outperformed its competitors and bridges the gap between creating content and offering an omnichannel experience personalised to your customers’ needs.
The current trends of being digital-first and available across channels make AEM a critical addition to your tech stack.
The adoption of suites over point solutions indicates the market’s choice to take flexible and easy-to-use suites, such as Adobe Experience Cloud, over best-of-breed solutions.
The Adobe Experience Cloud increases the benefits of Adobe Experience Manager, offering more opportunities to sync data and resources across systems.

ABOUT VAIMO

Vaimo is one of the world’s most respected experts in digital commerce. As a full-service omnichannel agency, we deliver strategy, design, development and managed services to brands, retailers and manufacturers all over the world.

Our sharp focus, broad experience and deep expertise within B2B, B2C, PIM, Order Management and ERP integrations makes us a key partner for driving success in digital commerce. Our 10+ years track record of technical excellence coupled with our proven results in helping our clients succeed with business development, digital strategy and customer experience design is proudly manifested in our status as an Adobe Platinum Partner.

With local offices in 15+ markets across EMEA, APAC and North America and over 500 employees, we provide an international presence that allows us to cultivate close, long-term relationships with our clients.

ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER – WHAT IS IT?