Forrester Consulting study — Adobe Experience Platform applications deliver a 431% ROI
Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study in 2023 which found that a composite organization representative of interviewed customers using Adobe Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics, all built on Adobe Experience Platform, saw a 431% return on investment and a payback period of less than 6 months.
Forrester quantified the bottom-line impact the composite organization achieved with Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics over three years, including:
- $534 million net gain in additional revenue from additional conversions and converted customers
- $3 million in avoided costs from legacy point solutions
- $4 million recovered from ad spending efficiencies
- 8,320 hours saved by marketers with more natively connected applications
- 30% increase in analyst productivity
- 20% efficiency gain for campaign orchestration
- 11% business growth from larger audiences, conversions, and order value
Adobe Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, and Journey Optimizer are all leading applications in their respective markets, and they can be adopted individually or jointly. However, when working together, these applications provide natively connected benefits that power outsized growth for companies looking to achieve personalized insights and engagement.
Using these applications together, customers can build actionable profiles, develop real-time insights, and impact and optimize journeys throughout the customer experience lifecycle. While each application provides significant value to customers on its own, using them together delivers even greater differentiated value. Driving strategy from an interconnected foundation, as opposed to operating in disparate tools, provides business users and their wider teams with a common framework that offers seamless and real-time availability of data across applications. It also offers the ability to achieve faster time to value as new applications are onboarded, and a standard user experience and user interface to drive efficiency.
Other key value-enabling benefits
In addition to the above quantifiable impacts, the Forrester study noted additional benefits that customers of Adobe Experience Platform enjoy, including:
- Seamless connection across Adobe applications, alongside a robust external ecosystem. The common workflows of the Adobe applications eliminated technical gaps that could create headaches for employees. Data was correctly pulled through the applications which eliminated back-and-forth conversations between IT and marketing — a common issue with disconnected systems. Meanwhile, moving data between Adobe applications without transferring outside of the ecosystem eased concerns around data security.
- More efficient data use. The Adobe applications enable the organization to incorporate data from across marketing channels, to better understand their customers. The speed with which the organization can leverage customer data supports more use cases while allowing AI models to help understand and apply data insights.
- Growth in offline business performance. Through interviews with multiple customers who use these applications, Forrester found that organizations stitched together offline and online data to deepen customer insights and create richer customer experiences across all channels. Location data helped marketers to more accurately tailor notifications to regional or local audiences, helping to drive in-store foot traffic. Meanwhile, the real-time speed with which data is collected helped organizations to retarget faster — for example, using follow-up phone calls with customer to close deals.
“Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics are the trifecta. They more efficiently and effectively help us realize evergreen marketing use cases that incorporate all the customer data.”
Senior Director of Customer Data Platforms, Business Services
Natively connected data, insights, and journey management give customers an edge
The findings demonstrated in the TEI study shows that when organizations adopt Adobe Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics they see significant business impact. Customers interviewed noted how their organizations’ data from various digital and offline channels resided in silos prior to working with Adobe. Legacy tools could not fully unify and visualize data to illustrate the total context of the customer journey. This limited analysts’ and marketers’ ability to engage customers effectively. The speed with which marketers could analyze data was slow and not in real-time, hindering marketers’ ability to follow up with customers.
Since investing in Adobe applications, the interviewees united data across channels to create individual customer profiles that were automatically updated in real time based on new customer engagements and information. This change helped marketers to better personalize and optimize messaging to maximize relevancy for their customers and impact for their business.
Learn more about how customers are evolving their business with Adobe Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics by downloading the full study.
Ryan Fleisch serves as head of product marketing for Adobe Real-Time CDP and Audience Manager. His current role coupled with his previous leadership roles in solution consulting have allowed him to understand the technical nuances of marketing and advertising technology as well as the big-picture trends that are transforming the industry at large. Prior to Adobe, Fleisch worked at J.Crew and iProspect where he gained a strong understanding of challenges and needs from both a client and agency perspective.