“I don’t know where to reach them. So, I reach them everywhere.”

Rohan — a marketing lead at a leading bank — found himself saying this every day. Whenever a customer visited the credit card platform, he triggered messages across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile app alerts — all at once. Rohan doesn’t know which channel to communicate and at what time user is the most active, so he ends up using all at a standard time. This isn’t just his story — it’s the reality for countless marketers facing pressure to deliver results with incomplete signals.

But what if a simple fix could solve this? Global marketers are exploring Adobe Customer Solutions powered by Adobe Real-Time CDP and Customer AI. These tools predict not just how a marketer can communicate but also when they should.

Why now? Because spray-and-pray is breaking budgets.

Traditional campaigns are inefficient because they rely on events, like clicks or logins, to trigger follow-ups, reducing the likelihood of customers returning. This leads to:

• Skyrocketing marketing costs
• Declining response rates
• Opt-outs and churn

Today, financial institutions are solving this by communicating via preferred channels to enhance engagement and build trust. Sending messages through the right platform — SMS, WhatsApp, email, or app notifications — deliver higher response rates and fewer opt-outs.

And here’s the real win: Adobe’s experience with digital transformation for global businesses shows that marketing personalization can drive a 20%–30% increase in digital revenue and optimize marketing spends by >50%, giving financial institutions a strong competitive edge.

From multichannel to right channel and right time.

Marketing propensity is a smarter, more human-centric way to engage. It’s not just about choosing the right channel, but also the right time to talk to each customer. This approach uses the customer’s own profile and behavior to create a personalized marketing blueprint.

Channel propensity tells marketers how to reach someone:

• Riya checks her email often but seldom checks SMS. She’s email-preferred.
• Arjun always responds faster on WhatsApp. He’s WhatsApp-dominant.
• Megha never opens email. She’s email-non-preferred.

Schedule propensity adds another dimension — when they want to be reached:

• Riya tends to check emails at 8 AM during commute hours.
• Arjun responds to WhatsApp messages only after 7 PM.
• Megha never clicks marketing messages on weekends but responds quickly on Wednesday afternoons.

Using Adobe Real-Time CDP and Customer AI, financial institutions can now:

• Optimize marketing spend. One perfectly timed message with the right channel beats 10 generic ones.
• Minimize spam. Communicate only when the customer is open to it.
• Improve engagement. Better messaging increases the likelihood of engagement.

How it works — the power behind personalization.

Customer touchpoints across platforms are tracked. These behavioral signals are then processed through Real-Time CDP to determine two key dimensions:

Channel propensity.

Customer AI models in Real-Time CDP generate propensity scores for each communication channel based on the customer’s historical engagement.

Then, Adobe Data Distiller classifies channel preference to determine preferred, dominant and not preferred channels.

Schedule propensity.

Next, the system analyzes when customers are most likely to engage. Using Customer AI, Real-Time CDP predicts propensity scores for various time windows — for example, 8–9am, 10am–2pm, and 5–7pm.

Using Data Distiller, time slots are categorized into preferred and not preferred schedules.

This unlocks personalized timing, ensuring messages are delivered when the customer is most receptive.

Orchestrating campaigns using Adobe Campaign.

Once both channel and schedule propensity scores are in place, Adobe Campaign executes personalized marketing as follows:

• Channel strategy: If the customer has a dominant channel, then suppress communication from all the other channels. Else, for the first three days, communication is sent via the preferred channel. If no engagement occurs, the second-best channel — excluding not preferred channel is used for the next two days.
• Schedule strategy: Messages are delivered within the preferred time slot identified for each customer.

The result? A truly one-to-one customer experience.

Marketers finally feel in control, and customers feel understood.

Marketers who once feared missing out if they weren’t showing up on every channel now know which channels work and when to best reach customers.

By shifting from event-based targeting to a preference-aware approach, marketers can deliver substantial results:

• 20–30% higher response rates by aligning with customer-preferred channels.
• Smarter marketing spends with >50% reduction in costs.
• 10-15% reduction in opt-outs through non-intrusive communication.
• Improved Net Promoter Score  thanks to timely, respectful messaging.

What’s next for marketers?

The evolution of personalized marketing has only just begun. Here’s what lies ahead:

• AI-driven content strategy. AI models can personalize the tone, length, offer type, and visuals based on behavioral traits. Imagine sending a festive-themed, short-form offer to a Gen Z user and a detailed financial breakdown to a mid-career professional — all automatically.
• Customer lifecycle orchestration. Models can enable personalized communication based on the customer’s life stage — be it early career, parenthood, or retirement — ensuring the message, tone, and channel align with their current needs and priorities.
• Inbound, outbound, and offline channel orchestration. Combine global and local engagement rules to rank and score products and services based on customer affinity, then use active and inactive data to determine the most effective time, place, and method to engage — across inbound visits, outbound pushes, and even offline touchpoints.

Unlock the power of Customer AI with Adobe Real-Time CDP. Reach out to your Adobe Customer Solutions representative for a demo.

Aradhana Padhiary is principal digital strategist with over 17 years of experience across banking, telecom, airline, and retail industries. Padhiary is an expert in leading martech transformations, driving strategy, and enabling insight-driven personalization.

Parth Hetamsaria is a digital strategist at Adobe, where he has made significant contributions over the past four years. Hetamsaria has led digital transformations, with experience in areas such as data, strategy, personalization, customer experience, product, and value realization.

Asim Chatterjee and Pratibha Sharma also contributed to this article.

Asim Chatterjee is an enterprise architect with a passion for designing future-ready digital ecosystems, powered by Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to help organizations create seamless, personalized, and scalable customer journeys. His work bridges strategy and technology — aligning enterprise architecture with business goals, leading cross-functional teams, and integrating Adobe DX into complex tech landscapes.

Pratibha Sharma is a senior data architect at Adobe with over 17 years of experience in data engineering and architecture. She specializes in Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and modern cloud technologies like AWS and Snowflake. She has led several strategic data initiatives across enterprise ecosystems.

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