What Is Adobe AEM, and How Could This CMS Help Your Company Thrive in the Digital Age?

Over the years, technology has taken customer-brand interactions to a whole new level. So, not surprisingly, what your clients expected from you as a company when you put up your first website fifteen or even ten years ago is no longer relevant. The proof is in the numbers:

• 66% of customers expect brands to understand their needs and expectations [source: Salesforce]
• 56% of consumers consider the ability to obtain information about products and services in their language more important than the price [source: WEGLOT]
• 73% of shoppers make purchases through multiple channels [source: Harvard Business Review]

These and many other factors have prompted companies to rethink the way they create and distribute content and, following an in-depth audit, adopt more flexible and effective content management tools.

One such MarTech solution is Adobe Experience Manager — a sleek content management system (CMS) that has dominated Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms for five consecutive years.

In this article, the Exadel AEM development and consulting team provides a detailed look at AEM, zooms in on its features and capabilities, and investigates how this particular content management system helps companies reach more clients and increase revenue.

Let’s dive right in!

What Is AEM Exactly — And What Is It Capable Of?

AEM Overview

Formerly known as Adobe CQ5, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a Java-based website content management system. It can be deployed as a traditional, headless, or hybrid CMS solution depending on how it’s used and your unique business needs. W3Tech estimates that Adobe Experience Manager powers 0.1% of all websites, which is pretty incredible when you consider the number of sites on the Internet.

Industry-wise, banking and financial services (19.2%), communications (11.5%), and healthcare and life science companies (11.5% respectively) most often choose Adobe AEM over other content management systems.

AEM best suits medium-sized and large companies that run multiple websites and applications, often in different languages and markets.

Unlike WordPress, Drupal, and other mainstream CMS solutions, Adobe AEM has a steeper learning curve — particularly for developers.

But what is it that makes AEM stand out from its counterparts, and what makes it more popular?

Once fully mastered and set up, it can:

• Allow AEM developers to create and reuse web components across different projects, reducing development time and cost
• Empower UI/UX specialists to design memorable user experiences on different target platforms, catering to omnichannel customers’ needs
• Simplify the content authoring experience for end users, such as marketers, copywriters, and website content editors, allowing brands to generate more content in a shorter time frame

Let’s investigate what AEM features give it these superpowers.

AEM Features and Capabilities

Under the hood, the AEM feature set includes three major blocks:

• A content management system, which serves as a single place for creating and managing content across all of your websites, mobile applications, social media, and other digital platforms
• A digital asset management (DAM) system, which helps your marketing teams locate, retrieve, and use your brand content — logos, images, documents, videos, and audio files
• An enterprise-grade cloud service, which enables companies to update their websites hassle-free, making the content instantly accessible to their teams in other departments and locations

AEM supports these components by default, and you can add even more features from the Adobe Experience Cloud suite:

• Adobe Analytics for tracking visitors, segmenting them into audiences, and visualizing digital customer journeys
• Adobe Audience Manager for developing customer audiences and fine-tuning marketing campaigns
• Adobe Target for displaying the right content to the right user at the right time
• Adobe Campaign for setting up one-to-one marketing campaigns based on users’ browsing history and interests
• Adobe Advertising Cloud for managing multi-channel marketing campaigns and evaluating their performance

Content Authoring with Adobe AEM

In principle, content authoring in AEM doesn’t differ much from the content management process in other CMS solutions. Still, there are several AEM features and capabilities that help elevate the content creation experience to well above average:

• Components. AEM components define what a particular content section (think embedded videos, quotes, or CTA elements) will look like. What differentiates this component from other content editors is that a developer can pre-configure any parameter that needs to be set up, whether that’s by automatically translating quotes into different languages or by adding a video summary if the original video lacks a transcript.
• Fragments. Content and experience fragments help authors create platform- and medium-agnostic content. For example, if your website page includes quotes in the footer section, a content editor could copy-paste the quote into an article or add a social share button to the footer, allowing users to repost the content to their Facebook or Twitter feeds.
• Page templates. In AEM, page templates comprise a set of lower-level components. While the essential page components like headers, article body, and logos can have a fixed position, Adobe AEM allows content managers to rearrange elements within editable fields.
• Permissions and workflows. These AEM features are crucial to producing content in larger, often distributed teams. By setting up user roles and permissions and defining content publishing workflows, you can prevent employees from editing critical templates and validate that no content will go live without getting the green light from the chief editor.
• Editing modes. In AEM, you can edit content in three modes: Edit, Layout, and Preview. In these modes, you can arrange components, change their content, and see how they look on a published page. Website editors can easily toggle between the Edit, Layout, and Preview pages from the same console. Integrating your website with Adobe Experience Cloud services allows you to define your target audience at the content authoring stage, creating different layouts and sections for A/B testing.
• Visual single-page editor. Adobe has married the convenience of visual website editors with single-page applications (SPAs), which update their content on the fly without reloading the page. This has led to a content authoring environment where any changes you make to the AEM components become immediately visible — and that’s what we call a superior content management experience.

AEM Benefits

Our AEM overview wouldn’t be complete without a quick summary of AEM’s advantages:

• Flexibility. With AEM, you can create and manage your content, including edits, so you can visualize how the changes will look when it goes live.
• Scalability. The AEM platform allows you to start with a single website operating locally and add more features and websites as you expand to new audiences and areas, all with minimal effort for your development team.
• Broader reach. By choosing Adobe Experience Manager, your company can get your content across many sites, hundreds of thousands of users, and dozens of languages, bridging the gap in omnichannel marketing strategies.
• Increased productivity. Thanks to drag-and-droppable components and visual editing, Adobe AEM takes away the pain of the content management process, allowing your marketing teams to increase their content production efforts by an average of 78%.
• Powerful integration options. Thanks to a framework-agnostic foundation, AEM solutions can integrate with any software systems within your IT infrastructure and third-party services.
• Personalization. With Adobe Experience Cloud, you can tap into advanced customer analytics, create context-optimized messages for different audiences, and optimize your campaigns.
• Extendibility. Adobe AEM boasts a cloud back end, a large ecosystem of add-ons, and an active developer community. Should you decide to enhance the functionality of your website, you can do that faster and at a lower cost.

Why Your Company Should Consider Switching to AEM

As companies grow and explore new markets, they’re bound to increase their content production volumes. Unfortunately, that’s when their existing content management tech stack hits its limits, preventing brands from delivering consistent customer experience across multiple sites and platforms.

In this section, you’ll find several Adobe AEM implementation case studies from major companies that once took the risk of migrating their websites and applications to AEM — and won big.

Zebra Technologies Turns to Adobe AEM to Grow Traffic and Time on Site by 13%

Zebra Technologies, one of the world’s leading providers of IoT-enabling solutions for retail, supply chain management, and healthcare companies, partnered with Adobe to deliver comprehensive product information to their global customer base.

By switching to AEM, Zebra created a centralized repository for their content — a whopping 130,000 assets — including downloadable software components, user guides, and specifications.

They also unified their branding, streamlined the web page creation process, and eliminated the need to create multiple websites for different regions. Additionally, Zebra Technologies tapped into Adobe Analytics to monitor how clients interact with their content and optimize the digital buyer journey for each location.

As a result, the company increased global traffic and time on site by 13% while keeping website update costs down.

Data Storage Company Achieves a 25% YOY Sales Growth by Switching to AEM

A US company specializing in all-flash data storage, hardware, and software development reached out to Exadel to improve the performance of their multilingual, multi-regional website. Our customer was particularly interested in boosting their rankings on search engines, achieving branding consistency, translating the website content into 17 languages, optimizing content for different devices, and tapping into advanced customer analytics.

Having suggested Adobe Experience Manager as the optimum tech stack, the Exadel team took over the solution architecture design, software engineering, and quality assurance.

The AEM functionality we implemented in this project spans bulk content updates, streamlined translation supported by batch reports and prioritization mechanisms, simplified registration forms, and content reusability driven by AEM Experience Fragments.

We also integrated the website with several services from the Adobe Marketing Suite, including Target and Analytics, to help our client gather relevant data and create personalized customer experiences.

Last but not least, our solution architects provisioned for effortless migrations from AEM 6.2 to AEM 6.3 and from AEM 6.3 to AEM 6.5 should our client decide to enhance their website functionality in the future.

These improvements resulted in a 40% year-over-year (YoY) website traffic growth, a 50% increase in page rendering speed, and a 25% YoY boost in sales.

Adobe AEM Helps Helly Hansen Grow Revenue by 45%

Helly Hansen, a major Norwegian sportswear and outdoor fashion brand, switched from WordPress to Adobe AEM to enter new markets and cater to their customers’ evolving needs. The company considered better content localization and a superior shopping experience on mobile devices as the primary objectives for the website migration project.

Helly Hansen leveraged AEM’s powerful features and capabilities to set up 55 regional websites with an average of 35,000 products per catalog. In addition, the company translated its content into seven languages and enabled unique payment and delivery methods for local stores.

By switching to AEM, Helly Hansen adopted a mobile-first approach to content creation and publishing, optimizing website speed and improving the user experience for smaller screens. Plus, AEM-Adobe XD synergy helped the fashion brand speed up visual content design and distribution.

According to Chris Hammond, the company’s former Chief Digital Officer, the timely shift to AEM allowed Helly Hansen to triple its business while growing overall eCommerce revenue by 40%. Traffic-wise, the brand registered a 20% increase in the number of website visitors, with mobile traffic growing by 37%.

On a Final Note

The success stories from the previous section should give you some incentive to embark on an AEM implementation project. As MarTech and software product engineering experts, however, we discourage blindly jumping on the AEM bandwagon.

Regardless of content management system, website migration projects should be preceded by a thorough evaluation of your marketing workflows, content creation needs, and business objectives. Additionally, you need to review your existing IT infrastructure and assess the development efforts and budget for carrying out the project.

The Exadel team will help you with that! Our consultants will map out a risk-free AEM migration path for your company, and the development team will handle the technical side, making sure your website maintains and improves its SEO rankings and delivers value from day one.

Contact us to get the ball rolling!