Many retailers are tuning and testing their commerce platforms to make sure that their commerce sites are secure, free of vulnerabilities and can scale for the biggest shopping days of the year — Black Friday + Cyber Monday. I recently spoke with a senior commerce project manager on our team, Chris Durfee who talked about the work he was doing to help retailers get ready for this critical part of holiday season.  He has compiled a list of tips to follow to ensure your commerce platform is humming and ready for the busy online shopping season.
Perform a Health Check –  it’s designed to help  ID vulnerabilities in your platform, 3^rd party hosting sites, etc. This is a service that Perficient Digital offers, but you can perform this on your own. If you do, be sure to add these three items to your check list:

• Perform Site testing (CPU utilization / page load) and or traffic analysis if anticipated traffic volumes will spike
• Check for security vulnerabilities and make sure patches are in place
• Confirm site SSL certificates expiration dates and extend your certificate in advance so that it will not expire on or near the busy holiday shopping season.

Establish a Comprehensive Catalog & Cart Testing Process– make sure that you thoroughly test catalog and cart promotions that are set-up for any items on ‘special’ during Black Friday and Cyber Monday including:

• Item configuration: inventory, warehousing, special workflows, special shipping
• Customer Configuration: do you need to set up any special customer groups or reporting in order to track sales and site activity?
• Site Promotions / Customer Communications:  will you be creating any special landing pages, sending out email blasts, PPC campaigns with click thru tracking, retargeting, or other?

Lock Down Dates for Your Code Freeze — you can minimize the risk of introducing any unplanned dependencies or possible outages.  We recommend setting up a go/no-go threshold leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday by deploying changes well before Cyber Monday or wait until after your holiday shopping is complete to minimize risk.
Run a holiday season “Dry Run” – perform a cyber-monday dry run on your staging or demo environment to test all of your planned online activities including:

• Configure your catalog
• Set up your promotions
• Send a broadcast email to an email seed list
• Have the seed list promotion recipients respond to the email
• Track the seed list reponse through the cart to checkout process and verify sales activity through admin/back end reporting tools

Perficient also runs through our own testing in advance of the holidays and we have resources on standby should you have issues with your site. To learn more about our commerce holiday preparation activities, contact sales@perficient.com

There was a buzz in the air at Shop.org in Dallas this week with the announcement that Magento and Adobe are working to transform content and commerce. The two companies announced a joint collaboration that allows merchants to deliver a seamless, personalized customer experience across all channels to stay ahead of consumer expectations.
Perficient is one of a dozen hand-selected by Adobe and Magento, that have extensive knowledge and deep technology expertise focused on Magento and Adobe Solutions.  This union will help our clients engage with their customers across the digital spectrum and tie together messaging, promotions and content to conversion, shopping carts and checkout. The framework/connector provides components and APIs that can be extended, providing a complete shopping experience.  Clients will leverage AEMs robust capabilities to manage user experience while Magento 2 drives the commerce functionality. Our team at Perficient Digital will be focused on evaluating and creating the implementation plans for this pre-built integration framework when it is available later this year.
Rupesh Agrawal, general manager said, “With the growth of Magento, we see this strategic partnership accelerating the marriage between content and commerce. We expect that this will empower our customers to create and manage richer experiences, provide more personalization and real-time optimization based on analytics and insights and enable our customers to bring integrated fulfillment and customer engagement across all channels.”
Join the weekly blog digest below to receive updates on the progress of this solution offering.

 
 
Yesterday, we proudly announced winning two prestigious 2016 WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association, one of which, Veritas.com, was built on the Adobe Marketing Cloud solution.
Veritas, a newly independent company as a result of a spin-off from Symantec, needed to establish a market presence, and fast. At the time, we were engaged with their parent company, Symantec, to replatform their existing web content management system with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).  Vertitas worked with Perficient Digital because we understood not only the intricacies of design and how it needed to convey their new brand but also do the heavy lifting the implementation required with our delivery teams expertise on AEM.  Their primary objectives for the site launch were:

• Provide a customer focused website for lead generation
• Position Veritas as a thought leader and showcase customer successes
• Enable growth for their already-strong partner relationships

Keeping these goals in mind, we rolled up our sleeves, dove-in and helped Veritas understand how the Adobe platform could support our agencies design and how to systematically approach the required integrations. Veritas had quite a few integration requirements to support their goals such as several customer-related data sources and an interface to their marketing automation platform, Oracle Eloqua, to drive lead generation. The launch of the website was a huge milestone for Veritas and their marketing team.
In a quick conversation with Robert Sumner, principal consultant and leader of the Adobe practice at Perficient Digital he said, “Our hats are off to our team and we are beaming with pride over the launch of this site and the award. We focused on an iterative and agile development process which combined resources from our on-shore, near-shore and off-shore delivery centers. Adding to the mix was our creative agency talent that helped to not just meet but exceed our client’s expectations.  I’m proud of the team, how we worked together and the outcome.”
At the end of the day, Veritas has a new dynamic website that allows their marketers to execute campaigns, manage content and digital assets and update and translate content into multiple languages to support their organization and clients across the globe.

Online shopping is one click away for consumers, but what about companies that sell to other businesses? Well to put it mildly, it gets complex. On a consumer focused site, the consumer searches for their product(s), researches and compares two or more options via product descriptions and/or feature lists, adds their desired item to the cart, and begins the checkout process with a handful of payment options (credit card, PayPal, gift card, etc.). That’s all fairly routine and standard for today’s B2C buyer.
In contrast, the B2B buyer has levels of complexity that surpasses the consumer buyers journey. The B2B buyer may be dealing with multiple pre-sales engineers to configure a product, a purchasing agent, accounts payable clerk, and complex approval and shipping instructions to make one purchase. How does this translate to an online experience? What are the best practices? What should you look for in a B2B commerce platform? How do you build a solid business case? These questions and more are ones that we field on a regular basis from our B2B commerce clients.
A recent Forrester report forecasts that by 2020, B2B commerce will be a $1.13 trillion market – indicating that a company who is not assessing how to provide a robust B2C-like experience for their B2B customers may be sitting on the sidelines becoming “digital prey,” as we discussed in our digital transformation webinar last summer.
This research report pointed to three areas they believe successful B2B companies need to be competitive in today’s world of online commerce: 1) companies need to deliver a B2C-like experiences, 2) resolve the direct sales vs. online commerce channel conflict 3) secure the right commerce talent.   I would like to add a 4^th to their list:  choose the right commerce platform.
Knowing that the evaluation, the buyers journey and ultimate conversion point for a B2B buyer is completely different than the consumer journey, we compiled a list of tips for what to look for in a B2B commerce platform.
Top 12 Unique Requirements for B2B Commerce that your platform needs to manage and mange well:

1. Ability to handle large multi-national customers with customized processes
2. Accept many payment options such as: credit card, wire transfer, account billing, purchase orders etc.
3. Host and manage complex product catalogs with hundreds of attributes per product
4. Create complex decision engines to ensure the right product is built and/or the right part(s) are ordered
5. Ensure products are compatible with other products and/or industry regulations
6. Include detailed diagrams, specifications and user guides or manuals
7. Capacity to manage multi-step approvals and corresponding workflows
8. Support complex pricing engines
9. Manage negotiated contracts and/or pricing & frequent reorders
10. Identify and manage multiple shipping locations and instructions per order
11. Create quotes that can directly convert to orders
12. Reduce workflow and costs associated with serving your existing customers

For more information on how to build the business case for commerce, please take a look at our latest guide/whitepaper on the topic.

Google announced yesterday that they entered a definitive agreement to acquire Apigee, a company with an innovative API platform, that is a leader in the industry, and is highly regarded by many analyst firms.
An application programming interface (API) is a piece of software that helps move information back and forth, serving as a connector between one application and another – and a critical component for all commerce solutions.
Think about the last time you made an online purchase from your mobile device. You browsed and found what you were looking for, added it to your shopping cart, did the checkout transaction, and began tracking the shipment from the shipper — likely all using APIs to connect from your mobile device to the inventory system, to the ordering/checkout system to the shippers tracking service, etc.
Apigee’s client base is a who’s who of large big-box retailers, including Walgreens, AT&T, Burberry, First Data and Live Nation as noted in a blog by Diane Greene, SVP at Google. She continues by saying, “The addition of Apigee’s API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high quality digital interactions. Apigee will make it much easier for the requisite APIs to be implemented and published with excellence.” With new tools like Apigee’s recent release of the Apigee Commerce APIx platform, retailers are given the ability to more easily sell products online and create digital experiences for their customers.
This acquisition is a good move for Google, because they see that digital strategy and cloud strategy are converging, and you can’t have one without the other.
To read more about this acquisition from our API experts, please read the post by my colleague, Alexandra Haefele on our Integrate blog.

Life Fitness initiated a redesign of its B2C digital commerce experience and asked us to assist based on our deep experience with Insite platform implementations.
Life Fitness a manufacturer for a wide range of cardio, strength, and group training fitness solutions, sells to consumers and commercial facilities. Together with Insite, Perficient helped Life Fitness not only identify the right partner but also worked diligently on to help check off each of their goals to:

• Generate incremental revenue by providing a responsive site that caters to customers visiting from various devices
• Enhance the customer experience with improved communication around order fulfillment
• Deliver an up-to-date digital experience that aligns to the Life Fitness brand
• Implement a platform that could scale to other areas of the business (i.e., use redesign of B2C site as a roadmap for building its B2B eCommerce site)

Click here to read the remainder of Life Fitness Success Story
 

Last night I talked to my best friend at home in Pittsburgh and told her that I’d see her over Thanksgiving weekend — before I had even begun to look at flights.  While I was excited in anticipation of seeing friends for the holiday weekend, I’ve had connection woes over this very weekend several years in a row. The one thing I’ve learned is to “fly early and non-stop” when you’re insane enough to travel on the heaviest air-travel weekend in the country.
Right after our call ended, I went to my go-to airline website and a direct, two-hour flight from Dallas to Pittsburgh that usually costs around $350 was double. If I used miles it would have cost me 100K frequent flyer miles. This was not even close to what I wanted to pay…in cash or miles. I decided to do nothing.
What does this story have to do with personalization? Everything. This morning as I checked email, I had a message from my go-to airline. They not only found a slightly more cost effective flight, but also suggested alternative dates close to Thanksgiving weekend that were even more reasonable. This one email pulled at my heart strings to find some way to get home! Kudos to the airline for their marketing efforts!
What impressed me is not that my go-to airline has the ability to comb though data, recognize that “Beth Martin” searched for, but did not book, flights over the Thanksgiving weekend and sent me an email. It was the fact that this email was customized to me, my destination, and sent so that it arrived the next morning. The personalization consisted of three key pieces:

1. A custom subject line with my destination (which got me to open the email)
2. A featured image of the Pittsburgh city skyline with the words “Pittsburgh is calling” (which made me smile)
3. The body copy was very easy to scan and had two important pieces of information to help facilitate the conversion —  a) they knew I searched but did not purchase and b) they found alternative dates and prices for me to consider. (which made me convert)

 
When a company, like my go-to airline gets it right, they get it right. They know the importance of reaching their customer and invested in tools to manage personalization across the customer journey. The tools are not limited to a robust analytics solution, but also a nimble personalization and targeting platform that enables the marketing teams to pinpoint actions that can generate revenue and achieve higher customer retention rates.
Today, 60% of marketers find it challenging to personalize content yet 77% of them believe real-time personalization is critical.  Most marketers are planning for real-time technologies that can help improve personalization efforts with more relevant data, according to the Real-Time Marketing Insights Study (sponsored by Adobe and the DMA). I know many of our customers are on this journey.
Understanding customer insights and tailoring content in near real-time is critical not just for B2C but also for B2B. Creating personalized experiences  may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. We have guided clients through the personalization spectrum, so they can start small and grow their personalization strategies over time. Our guide to personalization explains this spectrum in more detail; however, you can also view more content from our Adobe experts here.

I recently read an article on the differences between generations and how they purchase technology. It was an eye opener for me! As someone who has marketed technology and software solutions for many years, I am very interested in understanding what works at what stage in the buying process.
We often talk about the buyer journey; however, for B2B buyers it may not be as linear or as easy to measure as a consumer buyer journey. An in-depth understanding of how your B2B customers consume content helps companies to target and personalize content at the right time, to the right people — which is the “holy grail” for the marketer today.
The article states that these three groups Boomers, GenXers and Millennials search for, evaluate and ultimately decide upon technology solutions in very different ways. A sampling of the differences is below:
Top of Funnel
At the top of the funnel for a B2B technology purchase, each generation highlighted industry analysts as most influential at the earliest stage of the purchase process.
41% of Boomers rely on analysts, 31% of GenXers and 29% of Millennials
Middle of Funnel
Once in the evaluation process and the field narrowed to several vendors (generally considered middle of funnel), you will see a generational split.

• Boomers will evaluate vendors using vendor websites online communities/forums (36%), seek out live demos, web searches, and continue the path with industry analysts (34%).
• GenXers trust in-person meetings (33%), consume vendor website content (33%) and rely on analyst information.
• Millennials will turn to their peers and colleagues to help evaluate vendors (26%) and while still important, vendor website content is relied upon less than GenX or Boomers at an average rate of only 21%.

Bottom of Funnel
Once the three generations get to the bottom of the funnel, there is more agreement in how they create the short list. Tech buyers all use information from meetings and demos the most to help them make their final decision with a few interesting notes:

• Boomers weight live or in-person demos at 39%, Vendor Website at 35% and face to face meetings at 38%
• GenXers weigh case studies or testimonials and vendor face to face meetings at 27% and internal colleagues at 26%
• Millennials state vendor face to face meetings at 24%, internal colleagues at 23% and live or in-person demos are 21% influential to the buy cycle.

 Where does this leave the B2B marketer on content strategy?
Content marketing is a strategy that the most successful marketers employ, and if done correctly (think high quality and relevant content), it crosses traditional and digital marketing channels. After all, you need to not only pull prospects into the sales funnel but also through the sales funnel.
One of the biggest challenges I have seen in organizations is a singular focus on one area of the content mix and not on the bigger picture. All of the pieces and parts of your marketing lead gen engine, such as social media marketing, PPC, SEO, public relations, inbound marketing efforts, in-person events, and loyalty programs, need to be working together in concert. And, based on the research above, different kinds of content need to be generated and available to prospects and customers to nurture them through the marketing and sales funnel.
For example, if you create a heavy-hitting white paper, then you should think about how to promote that content with infographics, video, online demos, and then align those pieces to your distribution channels– and the type of buyer: Boomers, GenXers and Millennials!
Three Tips to Improve Your Content Marketing Efforts
Understand Hidden Buy Cycle
Many buyers spend on average two-thirds of their time getting to know you online and through your blogs, white papers, webinars and other gated and ungated content before even contacting you. One way to work though whether your content is on the right path for tech buyers is to create a robust mix of content that can be consumed by your tech buyers as they go through the hidden buy cycle.
Analyze Your Content
It’s often a good idea to analyze content by establishing a post-mortem on your recent wins. This can help you understand what content was read and engaged with and for how long. Then you can begin to map out what your content goals are for future pieces. (i.e, Brand awareness, Lead Nurturing, conversion rate Customer Service & Support marketing, Retention & Loyalty rewards marketing, Upselling/cross selling)
Knowing what works and what doesn’t across your wins can help you replicate successful content marketing plans and distribution options.
Engage Your Sales Team
The sales team will often not fully understand or engage with the materials that marketing creates. I have found that working with the sales team to understand the questions that the buyers are asking throughout the sales cycle helps marketing understand the challenges and can address those issues in the content marketing plan. Of course, you will also need to educate sales and pre-sales support teams on how to use content and ensure that they understand the intent and are maximizing the use of your content, but that topic is a different nut to crack!

Recently, my colleague Shannon Sumner, a senior technical consultant with our Adobe practice, wrote a quick tutorial on how to use Grunt and Grunt plugins to compile Sass into CSS, minify the CSS, add CSS source maps, merge JavaScript files, minify the JS, and add JavaScript source maps. These terms can send any marketer over the edge!

Image Courtesy of Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons

One of the things I enjoy most at Perficient is having the opportunity to hear first-hand our customers before and after implementation stories. When I was at Magento Imagine a few weeks ago, I was able to meet Ashley Gensler, the spirited and driven founder and CEO of Loom Decor.
Perficient has been helping her start-up home décor company for a few years, from building the initial Magento eCommerce site, and following through to the transition to the new Magento 2 release. As a business owner, she came from the design side of the house and has developed a keen depth of understanding the technology that supports her business.
The complexity of not only offering direct to consumer commerce, but also a B2B model for interior designers is possible with Magento and the Perficient Digital solution. This upgrade extended and improved upon the initial build because of new features and performance enhancements.
Feature/Benefits of Magento 2.0

• Optimized for mobile using the integrated responsive design reference theme
• Reduced overall page weight to enable to the visuals load on the page faster using minifying bundling code and image compression
• Improved page load times with caching capabilities and performance improvements which is expected to impact conversion rates when the new site goes live in a few weeks
• Enhanced configuration capabilities for the catalog of more than 8,000 design inspirations
• Developed custom code to allow users to share their custom designs via social media using a URL that is specific to their unique product configuration

She was recently interviewed for a story in B2B Commerce World about the work she’s done, and the goals of her new commerce site. To read more about the Perficient and Loom Décor experience, click here.
For more information on the trends driving change in commerce, download the guide.

The marketer’s tool box is big and growing even larger each year. We have all heard the Capital One  “What’s in your Wallet?” commercial.  The implication is that this credit card is the one and only card you need.  During a presentation, it was mentioned that, on average, a marketer uses at least seven marketing platforms or tools –  and I was asked what’s in my marketing wallet? If I quickly list off the ones I use, from email marketing and the basic design tools to web content, CRM and analytics tools, I listed up to 15 or 20 tools that we use regularly.

2016 Marketing Technology Landscape courtesy of chiefmartec.com

• We need to be the strategists, creatives, writers, technologists and data scientists to be at the forefront of customer engagement.
• We need to be savvy and understand how our infrastructure works with the backbone platforms.
• We need to understand and be able to analyze the vast amount of data and reporting that comes from these systems.
• We need to show customer engagement and ROI metrics and feed what we learn back into our marketing plans and programs to drive sales.
• And, finally we need to report this back to the leaders at our companies.

That’s a lot of things we need to be…and, it’s supported by more than one tool in your marketing wallet. It requires a transformation that involves realigning technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers throughout the customer experience life-cycle. To do that, a well-integrated set of scalable tools are essential for meeting your digital transformation goals. These tools not only touch every point in the life-cycle, but also assist in driving a company forward. Whether you use an Adobe, Sitecore or an open-source marketing platform, the message is the same — know your technology and how it can support your business.
The recent introduction of Perficient Digital allows us to offer full-service capabilities designed to adapt to your digital transformation and CX challenges. With the strategic imagination of an agency, unleashed by the deep technical know-how of a consultancy, we are the ideal partner to lead your organization on its digital transformation journey. For proof of this conviction, look no further than our six core disciplines:

• Strategy and Planning
• Experience Design
• Content Studio
• Digital Marketing
• Mobile and Emerging Technologies
• Experience Platforms

You can read more about the marketing technology landscape, architecture, integration tips and strategies by downloading the guide:

In keeping with the promise for more functionality and a rapid development cycle, Magento announced version 2.1 today (4-13-16) in the opening session at Magento Imagine. This release is going to focus on 5 areas of improvement:

• Staging and preview enhancements for admins– the new and enhanced staging process makes it faster, easier and less expensive to create, schedule and preview future site updates and campaigns without involving IT. It also provides greater visibility into all planned updates because you can see them in one place, on one dashboard, giving peace of mind to merchants that updates will occur at the right time and provides an optimum customer experience.
• Support for Elasticsearch –Elasticsearch, an open source tool, provides the ability to easily handle large catalogs and scale up search functionality as traffic increases, providing a better search experience for customers by providing timely and accurate results.
• Check out experience update – the PayPal enhancements announced today suggest that users will be able to complete the purchase process with leaving a merchants site, offering a seamless experience. Additional enhancements will enable faster checkouts for repeat purchases by saving credit card information for customers with PayPal in a secure manner. Magneto indicated a 50% faster guest check out and 36% faster check out for registered users.
• PCI Compliance – hosted Fields enable merchants to qualify for easier PCI compliance while still retaining complete control over their checkout design and layout. Magento has seen a 27% increase in conversion rates with this new feature.
• Better business tools – A number of admin user interface improvements will help business users to more efficiently manage site operations.

Other enhancements include:

• New B2B module – includes account management with permissions, custom catalogs, custom pricing, quoting engine, repeat ordering

• New Innovation module – includes enhanced content management, new promotion types and expanded reporting and analytics

• We also learned that Magento is enhancing their upgrade training, providing best practices and updating code migration tools to ensure existing Magento merchants have the support and confidence they need to migrate to the next generation platform starting now.