Personalization at scale at the intersection of marketing and consumer journeys

Over the last two decades there have been a few transformative moments driven by technological innovation and society’s compulsion to change. Looking back — all the way to the advent of ecommerce or the widespread adoption of mobile devices — the common theme is consumer control. Whether it’s when (like 2:00 am during a bout of insomnia), where (on the train during evening commute) or how (on a device small enough to be carried in one’s back pocket), technology has enabled increasing levels of consumer control, and the trend is not ceasing.

Today we find ourselves in another generational shift in consumer control caused by the near-complete adoption of mobile devices and overwhelming customer choice across almost every industry. The world of marketing and customer experience is yet again transforming as a result, and the technology used to power these experiences not only needs to respond but be the catalyst for making it possible.

While we refer to this shift as customer journey management (CJM), it is not the consumer we’re trying to manage, but rather the processes that allow brands to ensure their marketing campaigns are in sync with the consumer as they progress through the moments they initiate with brands throughout their day. Of course, marketers are looking for ways to reconcile and harmonize those consumer-initiated moments with marketing priorities or campaigns and close the context gap that exists between them. It can be a lot to juggle, but that’s where Adobe’s customer journey management solutions can help.

At Adobe Summit 2023 we signaled the convergence of several markets, tech stacks, and capabilities — bringing together all customer-facing touchpoints that span the customer lifecycle. We are committed to helping drive the long overdue elimination of pure product- or campaign-centric approaches that emphasize channel centricity and the silos it creates. We are seeking to create true customer centricity with fluid experiences from one moment to the next — regardless of how a consumer chooses to interact with a brand. This year, at Summit 2024, we are paying off this vision in several significant and concrete ways.

Since we launched Adobe Journey Optimizer in 2021, we have seen incredible adoption of the product with more brands using it to reimagine traditional campaigns and evolve into real-time customer journeys based on customer behavior and business signals. Brands still have a story to tell and products to launch and audience-centric engagement is not going away anytime soon. To that end, we continue to enhance the audience-centric engagement capabilities in Adobe Journey Optimizer inspired by more than two decades of cross-channel campaign management expertise. We also recognize the need to create a wide aperture of the data that is used to drive audience segmentation or profile enrichment for personalization — including data that sits in a brand’s enterprise data warehouse or data lake, such as order information, or prior bookings, or product information and more.

And of course, generative AI will play a large role in making this a reality for our customers. In addition to the incredible power of generative AI to create content that exceeds the bounds of imagination, for marketers it can make the job of knowing how to facilitate awesome customer journeys easier than was ever thought possible. We are excited to announce several innovations across our B2C customer journey management portfolio this year.

Adobe customer journey management innovations for 2024

We are announcing several innovations that support our vision for the next generation of customer journey management (CJM). To further facilitate the convergence of one-to-one customer journeys and batch-oriented campaign management, we are excited to announce Federated Audience Composition. Federated Audience Composition provides Adobe Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer customers with the flexibility to decide what data they want to use when and helps avoid unnecessarily duplicated data sets or integration patterns. This represents a unique combination of a federated approach to leverage enterprise data to curate audiences and high-value attributes, combined with a system optimized for in-the moment engagement.

In addition, we are excited to announce these new Adobe Journey Optimizer capabilities that will be generally available this year:

Expanded channels and authoring surfaces

Engage customers across additional channels with visual authoring for web push messages and web in-browser messages, as well as code-based authoring for nonvisual or server-side surfaces.

• In-browser messaging is a web version of mobile in-app messages. It is a versatile and powerful tool that can be used by marketers to communicate seamlessly with customers who are actively browsing on the brand’s websites that are being personalized by Adobe Journey Optimizer. This new extension of the web channel allows users to quickly build and deliver no-code web overlays like sliders, modals, and spotlights, as well as building with custom HTML. In-browser messaging is available today.
• Code-based experiences allow Journey Optimizer to extend into any inbound surface to deliver static and dynamic content. Code-based experiences can be used to deploy server-side web and mobile app experiences or to integrate Journey Optimizer into kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, Smart TVs, connected devices, voice assistants, ATMs, call centers, and more. The code-based action allows the use of HTML or JSON payloads and leverages the full set of personalization and rich decisioning capabilities provided in Journey Optimizer. Code-based experiences are available today.
• Cards allow for a non-disruptive, personalized, and interactive feed to share the latest messages from your brand. Feeds in Journey Optimizer will provide marketer-friendly no-code authoring to create dynamic content cards for inbound surfaces and provide a repeatable handshake between mobile app developers and the marketing team. Cards are in beta and coming soon.

New visualizations for analysis and reporting

Measure impact consistently and accurately with a unified metrics framework across Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics.

• New reports and measurement enhancements in Journey Optimizer facilitate consistent design patterns and visualizations across both Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics. With an updated reporting engine powered by Adobe Experience Platform, you can easily find, discover, and analyze data across multiple campaigns and journeys. These capabilities will be in beta soon.
• Seamlessly transition from Journey Optimizer reporting dashboards to Customer Journey Analytics analysis workspaces with a single-click so users can explore deeper insights and customize the analysis based on their business needs.

Guided channel setup

Speed up new channel configurations with guided channel setups for web and mobile apps.

• Guided channel setups automate the steps for web and mobile channel setup and configuration, eliminating up to 80% of clicks required to onboard a new channel. With guided channel setups, you will experience a single self-serve workflow and automated validation of SDK and channel configurations. Guided channel setup is currently in beta.

Experience decisioning

Expanded next-best experience decisioning capabilities make content offers available at any point in the journey across multiple channels while identifying the optimal pathway for a customer to flow through their journey based on defined goals.

• A new experience decisioning workflow that reimagines the practitioner experience for next-best offer and next-best action for real-time decisions. This new workflow includes schema-based offer catalog management, enhanced item grouping, robust collection rules, updated decision policies, and selection strategy configurations, and will soon include experimentation on ranking methods. Experience decisioning is currently in beta and will be generally available this spring.
• A new journey activity on the canvas allows users to retrieve offers directly and leverage those offers in any journey activity, including messages and custom actions. Reuse the same offer in multiple communications or query the decision engine again to re-decision with context changes in mind. Decisioning as a journey activity will be available later this year.

Use Case Playbooks

Unlock value faster with Use Case Playbooks for Adobe Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer.

• Use Case Playbooks are a library of actionable use cases, visualizations, and ready-to-go implementation assets designed to help our customers drive faster time-to-value. These playbooks — available in both Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Journey Optimizer — are comprised of a growing number of pre-packaged, industry-specific use cases that marketers can use to prioritize business needs, auto-generate implementation assets, and hand off to data engineers and technical counterparts to review and set live. Use Case Playbooks are generally available today.

Built on a platform designed for innovation at scale

Scale your experimentation program and outcomes. Leverage embedded platform experimentation services in platform-based applications to power experimentation management and omnichannel experiment execution across platform applications and multiple surfaces — from content to audiences, machine learning models, paid media, and more. Measure impact and perform post hoc analysis consistently and accurately with a unified metrics framework so you can understand lift and ROI and drive concrete business outcomes. Leverage generative AI to accelerate inputs such as scaling content generation and use experimentation to pick the best variants and optimize for high-value, personalized interactions across any customer journey.