Experience architect. Personalization pro. Customer journey strategist. Whatever your title, you’re working tirelessly, every day, to build better personalized experiences for your customers. You’ve said goodbye to siloed, batch-oriented marketing campaigns and hello to real-time omnichannel customer journeys. But even the most sophisticated Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) users often overlook powerful features hiding in plain sight. After consulting with the experts, we’ve identified five things you might not be doing in Journey Optimizer — but absolutely should be.

1. Activate geofencing for location-based personalization with Adobe Experience Platform Places Service.

Geofencing might sound complicated, but the idea is simple. Here’s a quick breakdown.

What is geofencing?

Geofencing relies on various technologies, including GPS (Global Positioning System), RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), Wi-Fi signals, and Bluetooth beacons, to accurately determine a device's location and thereby create virtual perimeters. These perimeters can be established around diverse locations such as retail stores, event venues, specific neighborhoods, or even competitor locations. The fundamental purpose of geofencing is to act as a dynamic bridge, connecting businesses with their target audience in a highly personalized and impactful manner by leveraging real-time location data.

While geofencing involves creating virtual boundaries that trigger actions based on boundary crossings, geomarketing encompasses a broader array of strategies and tactics that utilize geographical information to plan and execute marketing efforts. This includes techniques like geotargeting (delivering content based on location), store locators, and local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with geofencing serving as one specific tool within this larger domain.

Benefits of geofencing.

Geofencing offers several significant advantages for businesses aiming to enhance their marketing effectiveness and customer engagement:

• Real-time, location-aware personalization: The foremost benefit is the capability to deliver timely and contextually relevant promotions, push notifications, advertisements, or other personalized content precisely when a user is physically near a designated point of interest or in a specific situational context. A well-cited example is Starbucks, which utilizes customers' real-time location data to send notifications about special deals, thereby creating a memorable and immediate call to action.
• Local engagement and foot traffic: Geofencing proves exceptionally effective for engaging potential customers who are near a business's physical location, thereby encouraging store visits, event attendance, or other local interactions. Common marketing objectives facilitated by geofencing include directly stimulating a purchase, encouraging a visit to a new store, attracting new visitors from the immediate vicinity, or even strategically targeting areas around competitor locations to attract potential customers.
• Valuable data collection and insights: Beyond its role in direct engagement, geofencing enables businesses to gather crucial data on consumer behavior. This includes insights into foot traffic patterns, the amount of time users spend within specific geofenced areas (dwell time), and the effectiveness of location-triggered messages. Such data is invaluable for refining future marketing strategies, optimizing store layouts, and tailoring product offerings.
• Local SEO boost and visibility: Geofencing can indirectly support local SEO efforts. By targeting consumers in specific geographic areas with relevant information, businesses can increase their visibility in local search results when customers are actively looking for nearby products or services, driving qualified traffic to both physical and digital properties.

Seamless Integration with Adobe Experience Platform Places Service.

The foundational geofencing capabilities in Journey Optimizer are centered around its native and seamless integration with Experience Platform Places Service. Places Service is a sophisticated geo-location service that empowers businesses to define, manage, and visualize Points of Interest (POIs). These POIs are, in essence, the geofences that marketers wish to target. Places Service enables the creation of these POIs, complete with descriptive names, defined radii, physical addresses, relevant categories, and custom metadata tags, providing rich contextual information.

This service operates in close conjunction with Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK. When Mobile SDK, which includes the Places Service extension, is implemented within a brand's mobile application (and the user has granted necessary location permissions), it actively monitors the device's geographical location. It can then detect when the device enters, exits, or dwells within these predefined POIs. This interaction between the mobile app, Mobile SDK, and Places Service generates the location-based events that Journey Optimizer can "listen" for and subsequently react to, forming the trigger mechanism for location-aware journeys.

Real-time event triggers for geofence entry, exit, and dwell.

Journey Optimizer is designed to respond in real time to location-based signals originating from app users who have enabled location services on their devices. When a user's device crosses a geofence boundary meticulously defined in Places Service — whether it's an entry into the area, an exit from it, or a sustained presence (dwell) for a specified duration — an event can be triggered within Journey Optimizer.

These geofence interactions are classified as "unitary events" within the Journey Optimizer framework because they are directly linked to individual profiles and their specific real-world behavior. For example, a marketer can configure a journey condition in Journey Optimizer to specifically react to a geofence entry event. This condition can be further refined by specifying the name of the POI, such as "Arlington Stadium," to ensure that only entries into that particular geofence trigger a specific journey path or action.

Journey Optimizer also supports the advanced strategy of "nesting" multiple geofences within each other. This allows for the creation of highly sophisticated and continuously refined sequences of engagement as a user moves through different, often concentric geographical zones. A practical illustration of this is the "fan traveling to an event" scenario: the fan might receive an initial welcome message upon entering the airport geofence, followed by another message with local tips and recommendations upon entering the city or hotel district geofence, and finally, a specific message with event details or venue offers upon approaching the event venue geofence itself.

Personalized messaging and dynamic journey orchestration.

Once a geofence event (such as entry, exit, or dwell) successfully triggers a journey within Journey Optimizer, marketers gain access to the platform's powerful orchestration canvas. This canvas allows them to design and dispatch highly personalized messages through a variety of mobile-centric channels, most commonly push notifications and in-app messages, but also potentially SMS if integrated and appropriate for the use case.

The true strength of Journey Optimizer in this context is its ability to seamlessly combine the contextual location trigger with the rich, unified profile data available for each customer. This means that the messages sent are not merely location-aware (e.g., "You are near our store") but can be deeply personalized using a wealth of attributes such as past purchase history, expressed preferences, loyalty status, or recent browsing behavior. For instance, a personalized message could be, "Welcome back to our Downtown Branch, Sarah! As a valued Gold Member, we invite you to enjoy an exclusive 10% discount on any purchase today."

Furthermore, dynamic content capabilities in Journey Optimizer enable different content blocks, offers, or information within a single message to be displayed based on the specific geofence that was triggered, the time of day, or other real-time profile attributes and contextual data. This ensures maximum relevance and impact for each interaction.

Conceptual steps for setting up geofence-triggered journeys in Journey Optimizer.

While detailed, step-by-step instructions are best found in Adobe Experience League documentation, the conceptual workflow for establishing geofence-triggered journeys in Journey Optimizer involves the following key phases:

• Define Points of Interest (POIs) in Places Service: The initial step is to create and meticulously manage the geofences that will serve as triggers. This is done within the Places Service user interface, where marketers can define the geographical boundaries (e.g., around store locations, event areas, or competitor sites) and enrich them with relevant metadata such as POI name, category, and custom tags.
• Implement and configure Mobile SDK: It is essential to ensure that Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK — specifically including the Places Service extension — is correctly implemented and configured within the brand's mobile application. This process also involves ensuring that the app appropriately requests and handles user consent for location tracking, in compliance with privacy regulations.
• Configure a location-based event in Journey Optimizer: Within Journey Optimizer, a new rule-based event must be configured. This event will be set up to "listen" for specific geofence interactions reported by Places Service. For example, the event could be triggered by an entry into any POI tagged "Retail Outlet" or an exit from a POI named "MainStreet Competitor." The schema for this event must include the necessary place Context fields to capture and pass details about the geofence interaction (like POI ID, name, metadata) into the journey.
• Design the journey in Journey Optimizer: A new customer journey is then created within the orchestration canvas in Journey Optimizer. The configured geofence event serves as the entry trigger for this journey, meaning individuals will enter this path when the specified location-based condition is met.
• Add actions and implement personalization: Once the journey is triggered, marketers can add various actions, such as sending a push notification or displaying an in-app message. These messages should be personalized using data available from the event payload (e.g., the name of the POI entered) and more powerfully, from the customer's unified profile (e.g., past purchase history, loyalty tier). Conditional logic can also be implemented within the journey (e.g., sending a different message to a first-time visitor of a geofence versus a repeat visitor).
• Test thoroughly and publish: Before activating the journey for all users, it is crucial to utilize the test mode in Journey Optimizer. This allows marketers to simulate the journey with test profiles to validate that the geofence triggers are working as expected and that messages are being delivered correctly and with the intended personalization. After successful testing, the journey can be published to go live.

2. Orchestrate omnichannel customer journeys.

An omnichannel customer journey addresses the customer's expectation for fluid, consistent, and interconnected experiences, regardless of how, when, or where they choose to interact with a brand.

Defining the omnichannel customer journey.

An omnichannel customer journey is characterized by a seamless and integrated customer experience that spans multiple channels and touchpoints. These channels can be digital (such as a website, mobile app, social media platform, email, or chatbot) or physical (like an in-store visit or a call to a contact center). The defining characteristic of an omnichannel approach is that all these channels work in concert, not in isolation, to provide a unified and consistent brand presence and experience.

This strategy is fundamentally about recognizing the same individual customer across every interaction point. The goal is to ensure that each experience, regardless of the channel, feels connected to previous and potential future interactions, making the overall journey feel deeply personal, intuitive, and effortless from the customer's perspective. Today's customers rarely think in terms of distinct channels — they expect a fluid transition and consistent information as they move between, for example, browsing on a mobile app and then visiting a physical store or seeking support via a call center.

Benefits of an omnichannel strategy.

Adopting a true omnichannel strategy yields substantial benefits for businesses aiming to build stronger customer relationships and drive growth:

• Consistent branding and messaging: An omnichannel approach ensures that a brand's voice, visual identity, core messages, and promotional offers are uniformly presented across all interaction points. This consistency reinforces brand recognition, builds trust, and creates a more professional and reliable image.
• Unified customer view and deeper insights: By centralizing data collected from all touchpoints (both online and offline), businesses can construct a comprehensive 360-degree profile of each customer. This unified view enables a profound understanding of individual needs, historical behaviors, expressed and inferred preferences, and purchase intents, which are invaluable for personalization and strategic decision-making.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty: A well-orchestrated omnichannel experience is inherently frictionless, intuitive, and responsive. When customers can interact with a brand on their preferred channels without encountering breaks in context or service, their satisfaction levels increase significantly. This positive experience is a key driver of customer loyalty and long-term relationships.
• Increased engagement and higher conversion rates: Delivering relevant messages, personalized offers, and timely support at the right moment, on the customer's currently active or preferred channel, dramatically boosts customer engagement. This heightened engagement, in turn, leads to improved conversion rates, whether the goal is a sale, a sign-up, or another desired action.
• Improved customer retention and lifetime value (CLV): By proactively addressing customer needs, identifying and resolving pain points revealed through journey mapping, and consistently delivering personalized value, businesses can significantly improve customer retention rates. Retained customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and engage more deeply with a brand, thereby maximizing their lifetime value.

Best practices for designing and implementing omnichannel strategies.

Successfully designing and implementing an effective omnichannel strategy requires careful planning and adherence to several key best practices:

• Deeply understand your customer journey and personas: The process must begin with meticulously mapping out all potential customer touchpoints and interactions, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement and advocacy. Developing detailed customer personas and representing different segments of the audience is crucial to understanding how these various groups engage with a brand at each stage of their unique journeys.
• Centralize customer data: A cornerstone of any omnichannel strategy is the consolidation of customer data. Implementing a robust Customer Data Platform (CDP) or an advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial for gathering data from all online and offline sources and consolidating it into a single, accessible, and real-time profile of each customer.
• Integrate all customer-facing channels: Ensure seamless transitions and the consistent carry-over of context as customers move between different channels. For example, if a customer initiates a query via a web chat and then escalates to a phone call, the call center agent should have access to the chat transcript and the customer's history to avoid repetition and provide efficient support.
• Implement AI and automation strategically: Employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) and marketing automation technologies to streamline complex omnichannel processes, enable real-time decision-making (e.g., next best offer), personalize experiences at scale, and dynamically optimize journey flows based on customer behavior.
• Continuously measure, analyze, and optimize: An omnichannel strategy is not static — it requires ongoing monitoring and refinement. Regularly track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), conversion rates by channel and journey stage, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Systematically gather customer feedback through surveys and other mechanisms. Utilize these quantitative and qualitative insights to iteratively refine and enhance omnichannel strategies, adapting to shifting customer expectations and evolving market conditions. It is also valuable to define a clear service strategy and design principles tailored to different customer segments and their digital behaviors, as this helps prioritize efforts and investments in each channel.

3. Connect physical actions to digital outcomes with event-initiated journeys.

External data sources can reshape journeys in real time.

Deciding who gets placed in a journey — when and why — is the foundation for every successful engagement strategy. There are two ways to start a journey — targeting a user segment or listening for a real-time event. Targeting a user segment initiates the journey for all members of that segment, most similar in practice to a batch campaign. For instance, you might want to kick off a journey for all members of your rewards club to alert them of an upcoming promotion.

This tip is about another method for entering a journey — real-time events. Events come in two flavors — person-driven and business-driven. Person-driven events could include actions like entering or exiting a segment. For example, imagine your last hotel stay bumped you from gold to platinum status, which is then reflected in your segment memberships, or a real-time action like a form submission. Business-driven events are events that a business can update, like back-in-stock alerts or delayed shipping routes. The best part of this tip is that events can also occur in the physical world, like the Places Service we talked about in tip #1, based on human interactions and discrete actions your customers, fans, patients, or guests perform every day.

Here are some cool ways you can use a unitary or business event to kick off a journey:

• A fan just scanned their ticket at the front gate of a concert venue, theater, arena, racetrack, or museum. This ticket scan is logged in Adobe Experience Platform as a unitary event that initiates a personalized customer journey.
• A guest has just checked in or out of their hotel.
• A member has crossed a geofence, indicating that they are close to a physical store or branch.
• A customer has just had a conversation with a store associate, which was logged for follow-up.
• A sports team is making a fantastic comeback in the fourth quarter, which triggers a notification for fans to tune back in.
• A hot new restaurant has just had a cancellation, and reservations are now available for Friday night.

4. Make personalization even more powerful with conditional rules for dynamic content.

This tip is technically two tips, but conditional rules and personalization go together like peanut butter and jelly. Here’s what you need to know. Dynamic content enables you to tailor the content of your messages according to conditional rules that can be composed of profile attributes, event-specific contextual information, or audience segments. Personalization takes it a step further, allowing you to tailor your messages to each specific recipient using the data and information you have about them.

Here are a few ways you could deploy conditional content:

• Change up subject lines or message body for silver, gold, and platinum members based on loyalty status.
• Highlight unique offerings per region, hemisphere, country, or season to focus on the most relevant information.
• Localize content across a variety of languages based on customer-indicated preferences.

Now that you have dynamic content blocks in your email or other messages, personalization can take over. When sending out the message, Journey Optimizer replaces the personalized fields with the data contained in Experience Platform: “Hello {{ profile.person.name.firstName }} {{ profile.person.name.lastName }}” becomes “Hello John Doe.”

Here comes your bonus tip. What happens if John Doe never filled in their last name during profile registration? You wouldn’t want to show “Hello John {BLANK}.” We’ve got you covered because the personalization builder in Journey Optimizer has a wide variety of helper functions to ensure that your messages resolve with backup text even when you have incomplete profile data.

5. Use Adobe Experience Platform Assurance as your mobile app sidekick.

We’ve arguably saved the best for last. Adobe Experience Platform Assurance is a set of tools designed to give you confidence that your painstakingly built customer experiences work properly when you push them live. Assurance works for apps and websites implemented with Adobe Experience Platform SDKs to help you inspect, simulate, and validate app events, location signals, configuration parameters, SDK logs, device information, and more. With quick setup, hassle-free connection, and real-time signals, Assurance will change the way you integrate and deploy Adobe applications in your mobile app.

Here are the ways Assurance can change the way you build mobile apps and websites powered by Journey Optimizer:

• Push Debug View lets you quickly validate the push setup for your app and send a test message to your device.
• Places Service lets you inspect entry and exit events at point-of-interest locations, dramatically reducing the friction of troubleshooting geography-related personalization.
• In-App Messaging lets you validate your app, monitor in-app messages that are delivered to your device, and simulate messages to your device.
• Browser-based debuggers (available for all major browsers) let you quickly validate and preview web experiences you’ve created before you send them out to your users.

If you’re ready, learn more about Assurance and start building these Assurance Tools into your app or site.

Unlock advanced capabilities with Adobe Journey Optimizer.

These five features provide a comprehensive framework for creating, personalizing, and validating dynamic customer journeys. The process begins by utilizing a customer's physical location via geofencing or specific real-world actions, such as a ticket scan, to trigger event-initiated journeys. These journeys remain relevant and accurate by incorporating external data sources for real-time updates, including store hours and inventory.

Once a journey is underway, the content of each message is tailored to the individual using conditional rules and personalization, which adapt the content based on user attributes such as loyalty status or language. Finally, the Adobe Experience Platform Assurance toolset serves as a crucial quality control step, enabling developers to test and validate all aspects of the mobile and web experience before it goes live — ensuring everything functions as intended.

Book a demo now or watch an overview video to see how Journey Optimizer can help your business target the right customers at the right time.

Jason Hickey is a principal product marketer for Adobe Journey Optimizer. For the past 15 years, he has been immersed in the personalization and real-time engagement space — first as an end user of Adobe applications, and then as a technical solutions architect, strategic consultant, and product marketer. Jason is highly passionate about data-driven decision-making and is now sharing all things Journey Optimizer with the world.

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