If you’re ready to move from marketer to experience maker, you’ve come to the right place. Here you can dive into a curated collection of study materials, organised into seven lessons. And learn to create a consistent brand experience that’s everywhere your customers are.
Claire is helping Virgin Atlantic re-invent the travel experience. From emails asking if you want your favourite window seat to in-flight augmented reality apps to flight manifestos that help their staff provide personalised service, the airline is taking customer experience far above a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
It’s more than a mix of data, content and technologies. Virgin Atlantic has added marketing automation into the mix — so personal, relevant and compelling customer experiences fly through the right channel and automatically land in just the right location. And right on time.
“When we’re looking at how we improve the flight experience, we look at that whole journey—from before they even get to the airport and also when they leave at the other end.”
— Claire Cronin, Senior Vice President Marketing and CMO, Virgin Atlantic
We've organised customer experience study materials into seven lessons. Apply what you learn to your current situation, then dive deeper into the next lesson.
Your customers are on a lot of channels, but don’t have a lot of patience. That means you have to connect with them anywhere, at any time, while maintaining a consistent brand experience.
One of the most important things Virgin Atlantic does is help travellers make decisions in advance of their flights — through emails, texts, their app and their website. By the time travellers get to the airport, they’ve had a seamless, cross-channel experience and can focus on enjoying the flight.
Delivering this kind of experience throughout the customer journey requires the right organisational structure, good data, measurement tools and agility. Succeed and you’ll create unforgettable moments with your customers that build loyalty and generate more revenue. Fumble and you risk losing your audience’s attention for good.
Explore best practices in creating cross-channel campaigns and content.
Connecting with People Across Their Every Dimension
Read the report (7-10 min.)
You can have all the tools of the trade, including a comprehensive campaign management solution, but if you don’t have the right foundation of skills to deploy them, you may never achieve your campaign goals.
Eliminating siloed teams, getting top-level buy-in and deciding which channels you want to focus on are all critical aspects of realising the potential of a campaign management tool. But most important is an organisation-wide commitment to the customer experience. Cronin knows this well. “Everyone in the company is incredibly focused on customer experience,” she says. “It’s within the fabric of everything we do.”
By implementing organisational design best practices before you make changes to your processes and tools, you’ll be more assured of creating a culture that can truly engage and delight audiences.
Customers don’t care what you have planned or where you want them to be — they only care that you show up where they are with the experience they want. And more often than not, that’s on mobile.
To master campaign orchestration, you can’t neglect mobile. In a recent Adobe study of smartphone users, 89 per cent of respondents said they needed a device while on-the-go and one-fifth said they could not live without their mobile device. So you absolutely have to be on mobile. And be there with deeply relevant experiences.
When you become skilled at using texting, push notifications, location services and more, you’ll be better able to reach your customers wherever they are with the offers they want. With the right technology to help you, it’s not as hard as it may seem.
Gain insights into how data integration will help you better execute and measure your mobile experiences.
Mobile for the Win
Read the report (5-7 min.)
19% of smartphone users who say the offers they receive on mobile were right for them.
If you’re like most marketers, you aspire to grow your audience. With marketing automation, you can. Keep in mind that to succeed at automation, you need more than software. You also need to focus on having the right strategy, content and people in place.
One of the opportunities Virgin Atlantic identified to enhance their customer experience was through pre-flight communications. They’ve been working closely with Adobe automating and personalising their communications for travellers’ specific destinations. “Say I’m taking a flight to Shanghai tomorrow,” explains Cronin. “I’ll be sent a personalised email about that specific flight or destination that says: ‘Claire, would you like Seat 7G again?’ That’s really important to customers.”
Learn the three keys to making marketing automation work. And how to get started while building them out.
Marketing Automation is More Than Software
Read guide (3-5 min.)
Customer experiences don’t begin and end in a single interaction. They’re complete cross-channel journeys, with many different aspects. When you focus on just one or two channels, you miss out on achieving optimal ROI. And, you’ll be stuck with point solutions that create inefficiencies for you and a fragmented experience for your customers — one that may not be true to your brand.
To achieve true cross-channel campaign success, you have to look at your bigger performance goals. Then, find a comprehensive management that will help you to meet them.
Evaluate how a campaign management solution can meet your future needs, integrate into your tech stack and provide customer insights.
How to Select the Right Campaign Management Solution
Read buyer’s guide (7-10 min.)
“When we’re looking at how we improve the flight experience, we look at that whole journey before they’ve even got to the airport and also when they leave at the other end.”
— Claire Cronin, Senior Vice President Marketing and CMO, Virgin Atlantic
The best way to grow your cross-channel capabilities is to find others who are already excelling. Learn what these experts are doing to deliver cross-channel experiences, including the challenges they faced and how they overcame them with processes and technology. You’ll gain insights into how you can take your cross-channel journeys to all new heights.
Learn how B2C companies can increase engagement rate and upsells and how B2B companies can use automation to expand and do more for less.
Virgin Holidays Customer Story
Watch video (3.5 min.)
Panasonic Customer Story
Read story (2-5 min.)
“We’ve seen engagement rates of our emails up to 10% higher, an 11% increase in the amount up upsells and finally, a 7% increase in customer self-serving.”
— Saul Lopez, Customer Lifecycle Lead, Virgin Holidays
When implementing a big initiative, like a cross-channel campaign solution, you want validation that your investment will be worth the expense.
Recommendations from third-party experts can help you to determine if a campaign management solution will lead to a strong ROI — and help you to build your case with internal stakeholders. By implementing a solution that has proven success, you’ll be able to start achieving more marketing-sourced revenue and more marketing alignment across the organisation.
See which technology vendors Gartner recommends for helping you with scale and cross-channel transactions.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs
Read Gartner report (45-60 min.)
About the experience maker
Meet master marketer and experience maker Claire Cronin. Claire’s marketing journey began at Barclays Bank, but she eventually packed her bags and left for Next Jets, Europe’s largest private business airline. Her next stop was Virgin Holidays, where she combined customer experience and marketing under one umbrella. In 2017, she brought her experience maker expertise to Virgin Atlantic, where she is SVP marketing and CMO — and flying higher than ever. Claire is also an advisory board member of Beyond Analysis, which helps businesses use data to unlock human behaviour.
Whether you’re focused on B2B or B2C, we have what you need to create email and cross-channel campaigns — and deliver epic brand experiences.
Now that you’re a Campaign Orchestration expert, it’s time to take on a new marketing art. Choose one below, then work your way through that collection of guides, videos, inspiration articles and more — all created and curated by Adobe experts to help you to become an epic experience maker.
Experience foundation
Deliver thousands of personal experiences with a unified, cloud-based experience foundation.
Customer intelligence
Turn real-time customer insights into actions that drive results.
Content velocity
Keep audiences engaged with brilliant content that’s perfectly timed.
Enrolment & communications
Make your enrolment forms and applications effortless for all.
