Better Together: Adobe + AWS and the Digital Experience Journey

Co-authors: Kenny Rajan and Bridget Concannon — AWS Solutions Architects

6 min readAug 2, 2022

Today, tech-savvy customers reach brands through various means and touchpoints. To keep customers happy and engaged, businesses must seamlessly manage these cross-platform interactions. The key is consistent and accessible messaging that can be easily deployed across engagement channels. That’s why the first step in optimizing your users’ digital experience journey is to set up readily available content or commerce solutions. Adobe and AWS give you the tools to do this.

Customer expectations evolve rapidly. To keep pace, marketing and customer experience teams need unparalleled customer experience management tools to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Adobe and AWS let you tailor each moment of the customer journey, so you can provide unique experiences with relevant content, messaging, and product suggestions. Equally important are your team’s internal tools to activate mission-critical workflows on a highly available and protected infrastructure. Adobe and AWS applications integrate industry-leading security measures. So you can deliver faster, more dynamic customer experiences while prioritizing data privacy and security.

How exactly do Adobe and AWS work together to optimize the digital experience journey? Read on for examples and discover how you can use these integrations to turbocharge your business.

See it in action! Click here to watch our five-part Adobe and AWS on-demand video series.

Content and commerce

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a powerful content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms. AEM makes it easy to manage your marketing content and assets. Businesses can quickly get personalized, content-led experiences to market with AEM, which combines digital asset management with a powerful content management system.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud services and infrastructure leader that provides a cost-effective, flexible, and easy-to-use computing platform. Combining Adobe Experience Manager and Amazon Web Services effectively delivers digital experiences to your customers as part of a fast, secure, and unified experience. Next, we’ll show you how your team can deploy integrations to see immediate value-add.

Driving value with AEM and AWS integrations

Customers often use AEM as the foundation of their digital marketing strategy. AEM with AWS provides customers the benefit of easily integrating third-party solutions for auxiliary experiences, like blogs, and incorporates additional tools for mobile delivery, analytics, and big data management. Additionally, you can integrate the open and extensible AWS and AEM APIs to create custom workflows for your organization.

Here are just a few of the ways companies are using AEM with AWS to facilitate new business opportunities:

Integrating AWS services such as Amazon CloudSearch or Amazon Kendra to perform operations like indexing, stopwords, and synonyms
Increasing call center operational efficiencies by using Amazon Connect to prepopulate AEM forms
Completing the digital signature process using Adobe Sign without the participation of a call center representative (check out this demo use case to learn more about this integration)
Creating or augmenting headless commerce architectures using AEM

Powering your customers’ shopping experience with Adobe Commerce

In recent years, the rapid acceleration of e-commerce adoption has fueled innovation around streamlining shopping experiences. With Adobe Commerce, companies can integrate digital and physical shopping experiences with a portfolio of best-in-class cloud-based omnichannel solutions, including in-store, retail associate, and order management technologies. Additionally, Adobe Commerce increases the rate you can provision your e-commerce to scale globally. It also offers flexibility for B2C and B2B experiences built on a headless, extensible architecture.

Adobe Commerce’s extensibility platform and AWS services—such as Amazon Personalize, Amazon Connect, and Analytics on AWS — deliver omnichannel fulfillment and self-service.

Cross-channel campaign management

Now, businesses can use Amazon AppFlow with Marketo Engage to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications. In addition, the fully-managed integration enables customers to expand the features of Marketo Engage. For example, customers can select Leads and Activities Objects in Marketo and move them into AWS Services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Lookout for Metrics. Customers can also synchronize these objects with CRM, Snowflake, and Upsolver and create new Leads objects in Marketo based on this data.

Businesses that want to drive value with their data stored in AWS Analytics solutions can use Adobe Experience Platform. AEM allows you to structure, label, and enhance data from external locations, including Amazon. In addition, you can ingest data from various sources such as Adobe applications, cloud-based storage, databases, and many others.

Optimize marketing processes

Adobe Workfront and AWS can serve as the blueprints for all stages of a marketing project, from creative brief to campaign completion to process optimization.

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study, Adobe Workfront delivers a 285% return on investment (ROI) for enterprise customers. Adobe Workfront and AWS provide an enterprise-grade, cloud-based work management platform that enables marketers to plan, predict, collaborate, evolve, and deliver their best work. It does this by connecting people, processes, and platforms. Adobe Workfront combines Adobe solutions with the applications your teams already love, increasing visibility, efficiency, and compliance across the organization.

Adobe Workfront and AWS make it easier to ensure standardization, version control, and high-quality output — especially across distributed teams. This is increasingly important as the modern workforce shifts towards fully remote or hybrid environments.

Design teams can use Adobe with AWS to easily send creative assets for proofing to project leadership, who can then make changes and send them back to the creative team within a centralized platform. In addition, all necessary metadata is retained for real-time cataloging in Adobe Workfront, so campaign teams can streamline processes while maintaining visibility across all stages of the project development process. The result is greater transparency and superior work product: a win-win for managers and employees.

Automate workflows and processes with Workfront Fusion

Adobe Workfront Fusion is a powerful integration platform that quickly connects customers’ business-critical applications–including those built on AWS Cloud–by automating workflows and processes. This enables teams to work in a single application without requiring developers to build integrations or provide ongoing maintenance and engineering support. In addition, teams gain insight into the status of projects in other applications, so they can stay informed about work happening across the tools they love.

With Adobe Workfront Fusion, data and assets can flow freely across systems and teams in either direction to boost productivity. By connecting disjointed tools and groups, the most critical projects are surfaced. As a result, your team can focus on what matters and achieve measurable business outcomes.

Below are the steps to use Workfront Fusion for media post-production activities:

Once the content editing process is complete, the project status is updated in the Adobe Workfront
With Workfront Fusion, you can trigger a workflow to route the finished assets to relevant business applications, such as applications built on AWS cloud (Amazon S3, Lambda)
Amazon S3 events can trigger an AWS Lambda runtime to resize the image
The workflow then updates the finished content on the web, mobile, or tablet

Summary

This post describes how Adobe and AWS solutions work together to provide solutions to transform your business digitally. With Adobe and AWS, you can deliver holistic, personalized experiences at scale, tailoring each moment of your customer journey. Check out our five-part Adobe and AWS on-demand video series for more details.

Follow the Adobe Tech Blog for developer stories and resources, and check Adobe Developers on Twitter for the latest news and developer products.

Want to learn more? Here are additional resources about Adobe and AWS integrations:

Adobe Commerce’s extensibility platform and higher-level AWS services, such as Amazon Personalize, Amazon Connect, and Analytics on AWS, deliver omnichannel fulfillment and self-service, boosting conversion rates and average order values.

Adobe Tech Blog