Adobe® Marketing Cloud Success Story
American Eagle Outfitters
Breaking new ground
Trendsetting clothing retailer maximizes marketing returns across
brands and channels using Adobe Marketing Cloud
American Eagle Outfitters
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
www.ae.com
Results
• Improved program execution and
reduced marketing costs
• Delivered single, integrated
platform for managing digital
initiatives across channels
• Achieved cohesive view of
customer interactions to optimize
remarketing and customer
engagement
• Improved customer experience by
equipping marketers with more
intuitive, actionable insights
• Streamlined image production,
management, and photo transfer
processes
Marketing in today’s fast-paced retail landscape has become more complex than ever.
Channels are proliferating and customers engage with brands through many different
avenues, from search marketing to mobile devices, email, brick-and-mortar stores,
catalogs, and social networks. Adding to the array of challenges for marketers,
initiatives are sometimes separate from one another and managed by a variety of
vendors, making it more difficult to obtain a single view of each customer. At the same
time, many retailers face shrinking marketing budgets and the need for smarter ways
to maximize returns.
At trendsetting clothing designer and retailer American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) and its associated
brands—Aerie and 77kids by American Eagle—the ability to analyze and act on data among channels
and brands through the use of a comprehensive digital marketing solution has transformed the
company’s marketing efforts. AEO now has the ability to obtain a comprehensive view of the customer,
simplify interactive multi-brand marketing, integrate with partner marketing activities, and deliver
innovative online experiences. The results are evident in better monetization of digital marketing
spend, improved customer experiences, and a stronger contribution from marketing to achieving
key business goals.
“To maximize the effectiveness of our marketing budget we have to allocate resources to the channels
that are performing best,” explains Brian Collery, eCommerce analytics manager for American Eagle
Outfitters. “We view customer behavior across channels to see how, when, and if they convert—but we
also have to balance the goal of conversions with the need to acquire new customers through brandingoriented campaigns. Our day-to-day challenge is to piece together the right information across channels
and act on it wisely.”
Real-time insight, real-time responsiveness
Over the past few years, AEO has adopted Adobe Marketing Cloud to enhance its online operations.
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive portfolio of optimization applications for visitor acquisition,
conversion, and online and channel analytics, as well as a powerful, cross-media platform for managing
and delivering rich content across channels.
Collery notes that one of the chief benefits of moving to Adobe Marketing Cloud is the ability to
drive marketing, site design, and other decisions based on real-time insights. For instance, AEO can
quickly and constantly test varying creative, offers, and more—solving challenging questions and
seeing what works based on solid information. The company then uses Adobe solutions to gauge
customer behaviors on each of the varied page versions in order to gain reliable insights into factors
driving conversions.
Adobe optimization applications have also enabled AEO to launch geo-targeted versions of its landing
page for visitors in areas where the company is introducing new stores. For instance, the marketing
team can offer coupons on the website within specific metropolitan areas, redeemable within the
new stores and specifically targeted to attract new customers for the company’s youth brands. In
addition, the company has established a mobile-optimized website, and can track sales and orders
coming from mobile devices—adjusting investments and improving the mobile version of the site
based on data from the Adobe solutions.
Using Adobe Marketing Cloud, American Eagle Outfitters transformed its online strategies to
further integrate with partner marketing activities and deliver innovative online experiences
with improved insights into customer wants and needs.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud gives
us actionable, real-time metrics
to optimize promotions and
page content and maximize the
mix between established and
emerging channels.”
Ethan Holland
Director of online marketing,
American Eagle Outfitters
Challenge
• Maximize marketing returns
• Standardize on a single web analytics
and optimization platform
• Empower marketing to initiate and
monitor campaigns without IT
• Enable a single view of the
customer across channels
Solution
Use Adobe Marketing Cloud to
improve customer engagement and
boost returns from digital campaigns
across channels
Systems at a glance
Adobe Marketing Cloud, including
Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience
Manager, and Adobe Target solutions.
Capabilities used include:
• Marketing reports & analytics
• Ad-hoc analysis
• Data connectors
• Data archive
• Dynamic media
• A/B/N and multivariate testing
• Rules based targeting
• Geotargeting
Adobe Consulting
“Adobe Marketing Cloud gives us actionable, real-time metrics to optimize promotions and page
content and maximize the mix between established and emerging channels,” says Ethan Holland,
director of online marketing at American Eagle Outfitters. For instance, the company can personalize
content and establish creative continuity around discounts delivered via email, in-store coupons,
loyalty programs, or social media sites such as Facebook. With the Adobe solutions, AEO can integrate
data from multiple sources to achieve more automated, personalized customer interactions across
multiple touch points.
AEO has made several invaluable discoveries through the use of Adobe Marketing Cloud. In one
instance, the team targeted visitors who clicked from an exclusive email offer and reinforced that
same offer during checkout within the cart banner, contributing to a 20% lift in order conversion.
Empowering marketers with data, delivered intuitively
Another prime goal in working with Adobe was to enable marketing staff to execute and test the
effectiveness of promotions and campaigns without the need for IT intervention. Working with
Adobe Consulting, AEO created a customized web interface that allows marketers to initiate their
own campaigns and set up tagging parameters to gauge success across multiple channels such as
the company’s e-commerce site, email campaigns, and social media venues. Each week, teams receive
a spreadsheet via email with the results of their cross-channel campaigns, culled from the Adobe
optimization solutions.
With more direct engagement in their campaigns, marketing and merchandising managers have
gained a better understanding of what’s needed to develop and deliver more effective campaigns and
promotions. The availability of customized, intuitive solutions has made critical data available for
analysis—helping AEO discover new opportunities to design even more successful marketing initiatives.
“One of the main benefits of Adobe Marketing Cloud is its ease of implementation and the ability to
deliver customized reporting,” says Collery. “We can gather information across channels and deliver it
in ways that are easy to understand, even for non-analytics experts.”
The power of brand segmentation
Adobe solutions have helped the company nurture each of its brands by using brand segmentation
on www.ae.com, where customers can purchase items from AEO, Aerie, and 77kids. Segmentation has
proven effective in increasing conversions and building the newer brands. For instance, the company
launched Aerie as a standalone brand, AEO decided to break out the brand and present its wares
under an individual tab on the website. Adobe optimization solutions enabled the company to gauge
the impact of this decision through traffic flows, path reports, and other sophisticated customer
behavior analysis.
American Eagle Outfitters uses Adobe Marketing Cloud to increase customer engagement with the company’s
brands and optimize revenue opportunities through enhanced shopping experiences, targeted banners, and
more relevant offers.
The company determined how many people were entering Aerie directly through the new tab on the
site, and how many were coming from American Eagle Outfitters or from specific marketing campaigns
initiated through other channels. “It was no surprise that we saw a dip in traffic referred from American
Eagle Outfitters,” says Collery. “But then we started placing complementary products across brands
within our category pages, and saw a significant lift in visits. Those are the kinds of actionable insights
that we appreciate since moving to Adobe Marketing Cloud.”
As a result of this cross-brand strategy, AEO provides a wider variety of relevant product offerings
to its customers and creates additional revenue opportunities. For example, when the company began
placing Aerie offers on key American Eagle Outfitters Women’s pages, it found that customers who
clicked the offer were two times more likely to make an Aerie purchase than visitors who only browsed
AEO Women’s category.
Integration with third-party solutions pays off
To give marketers a more cohesive view across channels and initiatives, Adobe Consulting has
integrated several partner applications with the Adobe solution. For instance, information from AEO’s
email marketing service provider now flows seamlessly into Adobe Marketing Cloud. The company
wields this information to initiate various timely email campaigns targeted at people browsing on the
site, customers who have abandoned their carts, and others who might respond to specific offers based
on their product interests. The results, says Holland, are impressive. “We’re now able to better leverage
customer data across touch points to drive key business objectives and overall marketing ROI,” he says.
Information flowing into the Adobe solution from the company’s online survey vendor has opened
avenues for improved customer engagement. Metrics obtained through surveys about checkout,
browsing, cart abandonment, and other portions of the customer experience inform the company
where user satisfaction is strong or weak throughout the site.
Using Adobe optimization solutions, AEO can work more easily with marketing partners across channels.
The company’s finance team can pull a very granular level of detail from the Adobe platform for a
detailed analysis of partner performance. “The Adobe solutions help us drive new revenue and
strengthen our partner relationships,” says Roberto Croce, vice president of merchandising and
operations, at American Eagle Outfitters.
Delivering compelling, dynamic digital experiences
To streamline digital image production and management and further enhance customer engagement
with rich, relevant content, American Eagle Outfitters leverages capabilities within Adobe Experience
Manager in Adobe Marketing Cloud. The enhanced capabilities and features, such as a fly-out image
viewer to see products in more detail, offer customers the ability to manipulate desired products
and view items from several angles, mirroring how they might look at items in stores.
“We shoot a single high-res photo and leave it to Adobe Marketing
Cloud to help resize the image—it just makes our team that much
stronger and enables us to provide customers with richer, higherimpact experiences across devices.”
Matt McGrath
Director of eCommerce, project management, web production, and interactive
development,
American Eagle Outfitters
Additionally, Adobe solutions enable AEO to use a single high-resolution image that can be dynamically
resized for optimal displays on PCs and mobile devices—greatly simplifying processes for AEO web
teams and eliminating the need to shoot multiple photos of a product and to build individual scripts for
image resizing.
“We shoot a single high-res photo and leave it to Adobe Marketing Cloud to help resize the image,”
says Matt McGrath, director of eCommerce, project management, web production, and interactive
development. “Adobe solutions make file transfers more efficient and deliver superior results—it
just makes our team that much stronger and enables us to provide customers with richer, higherimpact experiences across devices.”
When data is king, integrity is everything
As part of a team responsible for a dynamic site that is constantly changing and adding brands, removing
site sections and adding new ones, Collery appreciates Adobe solutions for their ability to help ensure
data integrity. Analysts can detect and quickly resolve missing or incorrectly configured tags and broken
links, helping to ensure an optimized customer experience and improved SEO rankings.
For AEO, Adobe has provided superb support, easy implementation and customization, and foresight
that are unequalled in the industry for taming the complex interactive marketing landscape. “Adobe
has been integral in helping us translate our creative ideas and innovation into success on our online
properties,” says Brian Franks, vice president of creative and marketing for the company’s popular
77kids brand. “With each new iteration of Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, everything works better
together, integrates more smoothly, and becomes more powerful so that we can take full
advantage of marketing in a multichannel world.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/
digital-marketing.html
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
USA
www.adobe.com
© 2013 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All
other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
91085363 7/13