Create an exceptional email program with Adobe Journey Optimizer

Getting email right matters. In fact, nearly 400 marketing leaders ranked email as the number one channel in their toolkits for moving customers through the funnel from consideration to conversion and driving loyalty and advocacy for their brands. Exceptional email programs drive exceptional returns, with nearly 80% of marketers reporting email has the highest ROI of any channel and Litmus research showing the email channel returns about $36 for every $1 spent.

Unfortunately, many marketers feel they’ve hit a wall with their email programs. Email teams often remain siloed from other customer engagement channels such as web and mobile, resulting in a disjointed customer experience. Additionally, email marketers are often pushed to “send more” to squeeze value out of the channel. As a result, consumers are inundated with too many messages that don’t genuinely connect. In a recent Adobe research report, we found that consumers are averaging 70 emails and 139 omnichannel messages per week from brands and that nearly 60% of messages are deleted or ignored without reading. Consumers are overwhelmed and tuning out.

Source: Reimagining customer journey management

So how can you evolve your email program beyond “good enough”? This blog will explore how Adobe Journey Optimizer empowers you to create an exceptional email program that resonates with your customers and streamlines your workflows. It’s time for richly contextualized, personalized, and dynamic email programs that truly engage your customers in their unique contexts.

Go beyond your email calendar to in-the-moment engagement

What if you could take your existing email marketing calendar and layer on real-time, one-to-one emails targeted for each customer based on their behaviors and interactions with your brand?

Most companies today send brand-initiated emails — pushing out campaigns, announcements, newsletters, deals, and other communications from their marketing, brand, and service teams. These emails are generally pre-planned and audience based. Unfortunately, customer journeys and engagements with your brand don’t follow your pre-determined email calendar. Instead, customer journeys are much more fluid and individual. Customers onboard, engage, abandon, explore, and communicate across channels. These interactions create opportunities for you to respond with authentic emails that cater to each customer’s unique context.

That’s why, in Journey Optimizer, we’ve introduced the ability to orchestrate one-to-one email journeys based on a person’s actions. Email journeys are multi-step, going beyond transactional emails like order confirmation and password reset. They actively listen for signals from your customers or business, sending personalized updates in real time.

Making the shift

First, make sure your data foundation is strong. Contextualized email engagement requires lots of data, and more specifically, actionable unified customer profiles. Journey Optimizer is built on Adobe Experience Platform, equipping you with customer profiles that unify data from across sources to give you a complete, up-to-date dataset for each customer.

Next, brainstorm the experiences you want to create for your customers and identify opportunities to engage in the context of a customers' journey. For example:

• When a customer explores more than three products in a category and then leaves your site, re-engage them with an offer for that category and related ones to encourage exploration, conversion, and cross-sell.
• When a customer visits one of your locations, send an email encouraging them to download your app for upcoming events in their area.
• When there are changes to products, services, inventory, or other business details that may be of interest to a customer, share this information to keep them in the loop.

Finally, start slowly and ramp up. The most successful brands continue to optimize a foundation of campaign-oriented emails while layering on one or two journey-centric email use cases. They test, learn, and expand to more use cases as they experience how contextualized, real-time email engagement works for their organization.

Create dynamic, hyper-personalized emails that break through the noise

Personalization within emails isn’t new. For years now, marketers have understood that personalization boosts receptivity and the likelihood of their customers engaging. In fact, our research shows that 50% of customers are more likely to visit a brand’s website when message content is personalized.

Source: Reimagining customer journey management

But sending emails to each customer based on their unique context relies on operationalizing personalization at scale, which can seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, Journey Optimizer was built to help you achieve this. Beyond the basics of personalization, like including a name or loyalty status, you can customize every aspect of the email to each individual customer:

• Content. Tailor email content, including subject lines, pre-header, header, body copy, imagery, layouts, and languages, based on each customer’s information and context.
• Offers. Use built-in intelligent decisioning to determine the next-best offers for each customer. Embed relevant offers into emails, which you can access directly in your email workflows.
• Send time. Use machine learning to predict the best time to send an email to each customer based on when they are most likely to engage.
• Frequency. Set business rules to cap the frequency of email sends for different customer segments based on their willingness to engage.

To extend personalization beyond audience-based campaigns, marketers must create content and variations that resonate with specific customers. This is where generative AI can help. AI Assistant Content Accelerator in Journey Optimizer empowers you to create message content and variations fast. Generate everything from distinct email components— such as subject lines, pre-headers, email copy, and images— individually or within preselected templates. Expand to generate full on-brand email ideas that incorporate your context, content, and brand guidelines. Then, run experiments to determine the best email variants to maximize your business goals and scale up winning variants without interrupting your current email programs.

By bringing together generative AI, personalization, and experimentation capabilities, Journey Optimizer empowers you to create emails that feel like they were written and delivered from your brand to each customer — just for them.

Allow your marketing tools to handle the complexity so you can focus on strategy

Marketing practitioners know that email workflows are incredibly complex. In fact, we’ve often seen companies shouldering time-intensive processes of 8 to 12 weeks or more just to get a single email campaign out the door.

This is because many email tools are built without considering the broader picture in which email specialists and other marketing practitioners operate. Unfortunately, this leads to a web of poorly integrated authoring tools, multiple email service providers (ESPs), and other systems that create work rather than boost efficiency. To handle this, we provide powerful new authoring and delivery workflows within Journey Optimizer to support marketers.

1. Work with your existing email ecosystem tools

Journey Optimizer’s expansive partner ecosystem, integrations with third-party solutions (such as Movable Ink, Stensul, and Litmus), and custom APIs help you to get started quickly without disrupting your existing workflows. Let’s look at two of our powerful integrations.

Movable Ink: Movable Ink Da Vinci simplifies email creative workflows by using AI to assemble and personalize email variations for batch campaigns. Use profile data from Journey Optimizer to fuel the AI models that determine the best variation for each customer. Then, use Journey Optimizer to orchestrate and send emails authored in Da Vinci.

Stensul: Building emails in Stensul ensures adherence to your brand guidelines, zero rendering issues, and a fast review and approval process. Then, in Journey Optimizer, you can access the email’s HTML to use as an email template, and add scripted logic, personalization, and more before orchestrating and sending.

2. Boost your workflow efficiency with more reusability and built-in controls

Journey Optimizer provides a marketer-friendly Email Designer tool to design, assemble, and edit emails from scratch, from templates, or from HTML imports, with easy access to all your assets. Because we know that efficient marketers are masters of reuse, you can use Email Designer to take parts of top-performing emails, including text snippets, headers and footers, and design templates, and use them to evolve and optimize email performance.

We’ve made reuse simpler and more powerful by improving visual content fragments that allow you to store, enhance, update, and control content across your email programs.

• Fragments in live journeys and campaigns: Update content fragments within live journeys and campaigns while understanding the status and impact of the change. Set publishing permissions for authorized users.
• Customizable fragments: Make any property of an email visual fragment editable upon usage. Swap in different content to tailor each campaign, while maintaining the integrity of your email components.
• Fragment global variables: Increase reusability of fragments by defining input variables that populate values within each email, such as links or tracking codes.

3. Increase deliverability without all the time-intensive grunt work

Deliverability lies at the foundation of any successful email program. If your emails aren’t landing in your customers’ inboxes, your messages won’t connect. While maximizing deliverability requires attention to detail and a clear strategy, we’ve built tools into Journey Optimizer to boost your deliverability success.

• Efficient IP warmup: Create, execute, edit, and track campaign IP warmup from a centralized canvas to boost your sender reputation. View stats on qualified profiles and delivery, bounce, error, and retry rates by domain.
• Header unsubscribe support: Provide recipients with the option to unsubscribe in the email headers to respect preferences and reduce marked-as-spam rates.
• Spam check: Proactively run a comprehensive analysis on your emails to detect and correct potential spam elements. Receive scores on multiple email components and view results directly in-line with your editing and preview workflows.

Ready, set, engage

Evolving email programs from “good enough” to exceptional can drive major impacts for your business. And while change can feel overwhelming, remember that the best, most innovative brands are evolving incrementally. Start by brainstorming a few real-time behavior-based use cases and the experience you want to create for your customers. Explore some ways to increase personalization. Try out generative AI capabilities to boost your content velocity and variations.

Adobe Journey Optimizer supports your path to excellence by offering a robust customer engagement tool. It unifies all your channels, marketing teams, and customer data, empowers you to become an AI-driven marketer, and seamlessly integrates with the top-tier solutions you already use.

Rohan Bhatt is a senior product marketing manager for Adobe’s B2C customer journey management portfolio, including Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Campaign. He is passionate about helping brands deepen customer engagement through compelling, personalized experiences. Prior to Adobe, Bhatt spent over five years in technology and payments consulting, advising some of the world’s largest technology companies on product and go-to-market strategies. Bhatt has an MBA and an MS in Design Innovation from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

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