It’s Time to “Expand the Experience” Together
If you attended Magento Imagine 2019, you probably heard the phrase “Expand the Experience” mentioned once or twice (or dozens of times) throughout the premier global eCommerce conference.
But before the event started, the floodgates had already opened in regards to Adobe’s acquisition of Magento and how that would play into the company’s theme of “Expand the Experience”:
- How much investment will be made in Magento Community?
- How do tech and solution partners fit into the big picture?
- Will Magento abandon the mid-market to focus solely on enterprise sales?
- Are all Magento influencers now called Adobe influencers?
Okay, maybe the influencer question wasn’t brought up.
Thankfully, Imagine Master of Ceremonies Phillip Jackson didn’t leave us hanging too long and provided some answers from the get go during his Day 1 opening remarks.
“Magento now has an entire universe of opportunity at its fingertips,” said Jackson. “Right now, we’re on the edge of being able to expand our experience with this next phase with Adobe. We have an amazing opportunity to find ways for us to pick up the pieces that will help us complete our journey from one phase to the next.”
Our take on this: this Magento Imagine was a roll call to all partners (solutions and tech alike) to identify new ways to work together to meet the evolving needs of merchants and their customers.
Gary Spector, VP Commerce Sales & Customer Success Experience Business at Adobe, emphasized this point during the general sessions as well, “What will drive our future together as a community is our commitment to each other. Each of us must take ownership and push ourselves, expand our capabilities and sharpen our skills.”
So how was “Expand the Experience” demonstrated throughout Magento Imagine? By showcasing different businesses that are keeping customers at the core of everything they do.
Let’s take a look at a few examples presented during the conference.
California Symphony
One message that really hit home during this year’s Imagine is the importance of connecting with customers throughout their shopping journey.
No better example was exhibited of this message than when California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergaur took the stage. During Bergaur’s talk, she discussed how focusing on UX research, customer loyalty and diversity helped the California Symphony triple retention rates and quadruple their donor base.
“The music – the product – was not the problem,” said Bergaur. “Instead what we heard is ‘Wow, your website reads like inside baseball. There’s so much technical language and jargon on your website. I don’t know what to wear or when to applaud.’ The problem was everything tangential to the experience.”
With updates to their website, like ditching technical language, they saw a 12% lift of people moving on to the purchase path. And by creating clear next steps for every patron type, including annual subscribers, they saw subscription renewal rates of near 90% every year.
The organization also started putting out digital ads targeting spanish speakers as part of their diversity initiative, which is one factor that led to a 99% capacity increase overall.
Zumiez
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is so hot right now. And Imagine couldn’t escape this fact either.
During a product demonstration with Zumiez, Elizabeth Small, Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, showed off the power of visual search technology powered by Adobe Sensei, Magento Commerce’s new integration which provides merchants with new personalization capabilities.
Small illustrated this functionality by conducting a simple product search via the Zumiez website, but with one small catch: it all began by taking a photo. After snapping a picture of a hat from her phone, Small hit “submit” and showed the audience Zumiez is able to populate real-time results, which included the hat she picked out alongside other similar products.
“Experience driven customer journeys need to extend beyond mobile,” said Small. “You need to create interactive connections between content and commerce… and bring physical and digital experiences together.”
Rural King
You pretty much couldn’t walk around Imagine without hearing about Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. Which makes sense, as PWA is all about incorporating the best parts of web browsing and mobile usability to create one better online shopping experience.
During the Day 2 general session, John Stockton, Sr Director of Product for Magento, formally introduced the new PWA Studio and Page Builder, which includes a suite of tools for developers and UX designers that saves considerable time and money in launching or updating a PWA.
To illustrate the advantages of these new products, Stockton showed a video featuring Joshua Warren, CEO of the web design agency (and ShipperHQ partner) Creatuity, discussing their successful PWA build for Rural King.
Not only did the new build shrink their mobile conversion gap, it also provided a faster, more reliable website for Rural King’s customers, who often live in rural areas and may not have access to the best internet connection or latest mobile device.
The PWA Studio and Page Builder together created an almost out-of-the-box solution, allowing Creatuity to cut development costs and time to launch. The result? A superior buyer experience, and 4x better website performance.
Let’s Keep Marching Forward As a Community
“Expand the Experience” means keeping customers at the core of your business strategy. It means reaching out to new audiences, investing in innovation and adapting new technologies to make the end-to-end customer experience as seamless as possible.
Like the companies mentioned above, at ShipperHQ we are always striving to provide a rich customer experience, both for our merchants working with us, and their customers in turn.
Now, more than ever, it’s vital for us to remain a community dedicated to helping the customer throughout their shopping journey. We are a vibrant ecosystem of developers, agencies, tech partners and innovators, and if we hold each other up, and keep pushing forward, we can deliver on this promise together.
Read more about how ShipperHQ is driving innovation to Expand the Experience:
