How Esri Charts the Course for Digital Transformation & eCommerce Growth with AEM

Esri is a global supplier of GIS software (geographic information system) as well as geodatabase management apps. This basically translates as “they convert static maps into networks of information that are used in urban planning, climate change predictions, and much more.

Despite them not being the most well-known household name, if you’ve come across an interactive map then chances are that you have come across pieces of data that are linked with Esri.

Yet the more important line of work that Esri is currently undertaking has been to contribute to the effort in solving the Covid pandemic. In their role, the company is in charge of organizing the data, tech support, and apps for emergency GIS operations.

Current users of Esri technology include the World Health Organization as well as Johns Hopkins University, who are using it to detect trends and key insights in the fight against the pandemic.

Limitations

The issue for Esri was that its organizational structure was dotted with silos. It essentially created distance between their teams and their leaders. If this could be overcome first, then it could soon move forward in building better customer-centric approaches to marketing.

“It’s essential to start with change management to enable people to leverage new technology,” said Steve Schultz, head of marketing tech at Esri.

To carry their innovative tech into the world of marketing Esri decided to team up with a digital asset management (DAM). And there, they chose Adobe Experience Manager. Or more specifically, AEM Assets, which now helps the tech company speed up its workflows. There are almost 1 million assets floating about at Esri as well as across 88 distributors. To keep all this content organized and moving fast, Adobe Experience Manager was plugged in to solve such issues.

“Before, we didn’t have a formal way to ensure our partners were using, say, the right Esri logo file,” said Steve. “People would save old files to their hard drive and push those out.” Without managing their assets, problems like duplications were very common. This, in turn, mounted a bunch of unnecessary storage and made it complex to source the right assets. With Adobe Experience Manager Assets, that completely changed.

AEM Assets make brand consistency much easier, with greater control over assets. They could create and edit content faster — something that was vital for their move toward accelerating growth. “We are gaining more control over our assets and becoming more consistent,” said Steve. “It’s making an impact on our brand. We’ve started moving in a positive direction and seeing nice growth in the last few years after having our international distributors leverage our DAM.”

Launching the website

With Adobe Experience Manager Assets on full power, Esri decided to unlock the full potential of Adobe Experience Manager. It wanted to move its site onto AEM Sites, but it first had to make sure that it could stand up to some of its requirements.

These requirements include the need to provide a base for the overall digital transformation of Esri; the need to author and publish content without having to get the help from the technical team. And finally, the need to remain a key resource for its distributors, giving them access to the power of Esri.

“I did my research,” added Steve, “and we could actually pull it off with Adobe Experience Manager.” For example, Esri’s distributors can get access to its assets as well as its analytics. “They can actually see who’s engaging with them at a level they didn’t even know existed,” said Steve… It’s been a big coup for Esri and our success as we grow internationally.”

When it came to site performance, Adobe Experience Manager helped Esri, by streamlining assets and ensuring brand compliance across the websites both internally and of distributors. With AEM Sites features like Smart Imaging, Experience Fragments, and Dynamic Renditions, Esri can reduce the number of unique instances of content across their website.

This has a lightning effect on the website, freeing up once heavy weights that now elevates the site and runs faster. But not only that, it streamlines the internal processes with features like reusable components. After their move to AEM, Esri reduced their website from 20,000 pages to 1,500 – now that’s a big weight loss program!

“With features like Smart Imaging and Dynamic Renditions,” added Steve, “we improved both our page performance and overall site performance. I was skeptical at first when my team told me the results of using Adobe Experience Manager, but it’s true.”

Priority to personalization

“Before, we didn’t know what type of content our audience really cared about,” said Steve. “We were stumbling on that all the time.”

With Adobe Audience Manager, it helps Esri see more clearly who exactly their target audience is and what they care about. Integrated into their marketing strategy, AAM made it possible to deliver the right content for the right customers on the right channels.

With messaging and even images being personalized, it boosted customer engagement, giving Esri the ability to zoom in on what each customer is more inclined to want to buy.

Then unpacking Adobe Target, which gave Esri testing capabilities for its website, were able to build a better website experience. “We built out three landing pages for three different personas,” said Steve. “By simply delivering more relevant content, our conversion rates went up 25%. It’s just common sense to move forward with a product that can do that.”

In the past, the lack of a centralized platform meant that the company couldn’t link together very strongly the messaging to each customer, meaning that they would receive impersonal and possibly irrelevant experiences.

“I’m proud of the team,” exclaimed Steve. “What they’ve built out, and the insights we’re delivering”.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager dev teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.