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SALT LAKE CITY – Borrowing from its PhoneGap platform and other places, Adobe announced a series of new tools that help companies create, manage and deliver highly personalized mobile app experiences to their customers in real-time and without the need for app development skills.
The new capabilities, announced at the Adobe Summit 2014 here, build on Adobe’s position in the mobile space. They support all manner of mobile marketing including developing dynamic mobile apps, managing and marketing content for apps across all major app stores, measuring mobile marketing campaigns, and engaging users of apps near Apple iBeacons. iBeacons notify iOS devices of their presence.
“Developers can now create and deliver mobile apps while marketers manage, measure and monetize the content, all from within Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the Digital Marketing Business at Adobe, in a statement. “Adobe Marketing Cloud is the industry’s most complete, integrated solution for marketers, and today’s announcement further cements our leadership in mobile app marketing.”
Adobe Marketing Cloud enables deep analysis of user engagement with mobile experiences across devices as well as optimization tools for delivering location-based content in real time. Marketers can now significantly grow the return on their investment (ROI) by effectively acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers who use mobile apps and websites. Easy-to-use and integrated workflows across Adobe Marketing Cloud reduce the complexity of managing, analyzing, and optimizing experiences across app stores.
“This area is a huge focus for us at Adobe,” Kevin Lindsay, director of Conversion Product Marketing at Adobe, told eWEEK in an interview. “Our strategy is to build an end-to-end marketing environment for mobile. Mobile is going to come back into the core digital strategy for companies – it had been siloed for a time.”
Adobes’ new mobile capabilities include the ability to simplify app development by using Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe PhoneGap Enterprise to transform mobile app development by empowering both marketers and developers. Developers can build apps across platforms, meet time-to-market demands, and support third party integrations. Marketers can easily update app content, optimize the app post launch and manage app reviews and variations without the need for app development skills. The system’s drag and drop functionality ensures that marketers can easily change and preview app content including images, videos, interactive and text based content. Updates appear instantly across platforms including iOS and Android.
Adobe also offers content management across mobile apps. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) already integrates with Adobe Experience Manager’s web experience management capabilities to drive consistent visitor experiences across content-centric apps. Now, mobile apps built with PhoneGap Enterprise can be natively integrated with Adobe Experience Manager to ensure consistent content management across any app, mobile site or website. Marketers can manage content across hybrid and native apps without having to worry about multiple app stores, fragmented operating systems, and different device sizes, the company said.
Meanwhile, with Mobile Services 2.0, marketers can measure which campaigns are driving mobile app downloads across the leading marketplaces including the Apple App Store and Google Play. Marketers can also measure a broad set of user behaviors after the app is downloaded including launch events, user engagement, content sharing across social, and product purchases, giving them deep insights into the lifetime value of users. By tracking the effectiveness of paid, owned, and earned marketing campaigns for mobile apps, companies can now accurately track ROI and fully optimize their spend.
In addition, Adobe measures and responds to user engagement in mobile apps connected to Apple iBeacons in sports stadiums, retail stories and other external venues. Adobe Mobile Services 2.0 enables companies to analyze and act on the users’ location near iBeacons including dwell time, entering or exiting an iBeacon area, navigation of mobile users around iBeacons and more. Marketers can also easily deliver local notifications and promotions based on the proximity to an iBeacon. In addition, companies are able to tie app interactions to all other app engagement data in Adobe Analytics.
And with the integration of Adobe Campaign and Adobe Mobile Services 2.0, marketers can re-engage loyal customers with push notifications across mobile applications. Using the Adobe Campaign UI, companies can deliver promotions, breaking news, items-on-sale info, credit balance details, flight departure details and more in an instant and consistently across devices.
Additional mobile capabilities that were introduced across other Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions today include Adobe Target Premium, which offers A/B testing capabilities of in-app content and targeted experiences based on the users’ location and lifecycle data to make app experiences more impactful.