We all have a morning ritual. Maybe you start your day with a cup of coffee. Perhaps you kick things off with a workout or opt for some quiet meditation. Humans are creatures of habit, so consistency is key to starting your day off right.

Consumers expect the same comfort and familiarity when they engage with a brand. They want consistent, cohesive experiences that show them a brand understands who they are and what they want. Irrelevant experiences can be a roadblock to engagement and conversion. Well-planned, dynamic engagement, on the other hand, is a chance to foster healthier customer relationships.

A unified customer experience ensures the customer is the focal point of your strategy. It combines real-time data and insights, personalized content, and continuous optimization to make every aspect of a customer’s journey seamless and relevant.

When experiences across an entire lifecycle feel personal and authentic, your brand can rise above the noise and build loyalty and trust with customers.

Knowledge is power — but only if it’s shared.

Many B2C companies struggle with unintentionally sending conflicting or irrelevant marketing messages. And that all comes down to data. When data is fragmented across different applications and channels — where multiple departments may be working in technology silos — your teams don’t have what they need to do their best work and deliver the seamless experiences customers require.

Fractured data like this leads to customer interactions with disconnected messaging and offers. Instead of a unified experience where your brand delivers value and connection in every engagement with personalized content and a focused omnichannel journey, disconnected data can make customers feel like they’re dealing with different companies. Nothing erodes trust quite like a brand that should know you but treats you like a stranger.

From initial engagement to acquisition and beyond, discover how enterprises are using Adobe to bring every aspect of customer journeys together in a seamless, personal way to build brand loyalty. And learn how your business can, too.

1. Gain more customers with less wasted effort.

Brands often struggle to identify the right prospects, determine the best strategy to reach them, and drive new business. Failing to identify these audiences can lead to squandered marketing spend, higher acquisition costs, and low conversion rates. Properly targeting the right audiences to ensure your marketing budget is efficiently driving acquisition and growth is essential.

U.S. Bank turned to Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) to gain information on when and how to engage different audience segments. This helped U.S. Bank quickly provide relevant solutions, like presenting home equity loan information to customers that recently purchased home improvement materials. They also created audience segments for new customers — the most likely group to try other new products — and sent additional offers.

By using Real-Time CDP to determine channel spend for upcoming campaigns efficiently and strategically, U.S. Bank “cut down the time it takes to reach new customers from weeks or months to a matter of hours or days,” according to Chris Yu, senior vice president, head of owned channel personalization at U.S. Bank.

Getting more out of your first-party data is another way to make your customer engagement strategy more efficient. Henkel uses Real-Time CDP to make sure every customer interaction automatically enriches the data in their customer profiles. That means each unified profile can provide an ever-expanding view of previous interactions and potential communication opportunities.

Using Adobe Journey Orchestration, Henkel — known for its cleaning and beauty brands — viewed the history of customer interactions and adapted all customer communications to meet customers where they were in their decision-making cycles. Bundling the insights gained from the user experience into uniform profiles with Real-Time CDP helped Henkel deliver personalized messages at the perfect time.

“We want to offer our customers tailor-made experiences,” said Sascha Wirtz, chief vice president consumer, customer, and market at Henkel. “Adobe apps are so flexible that we were able to easily integrate them into our ecosystem and adapt them to our needs.”

The takeaway: Use return on investment insights and reach planning tools to plan your channel spend and audience segments for upcoming campaigns. The right set of tools will also enrich and expand first-party data for better prospecting, retargeting, and audience suppression strategies.

2. Turn transactions into lifelong relationships.

Meeting customers at the right moment for one sale is good, but it’s not enough in a world where every brand is constantly vying for customers’ limited attention. Generic, randomly timed messages won’t cut it. Enterprise brands need to combine customer data, insights, orchestration, and native omnichannel content delivery to create hyper-relevant experiences that keep customers coming back.

Without linked personalization tools, consumer data ends up in silos, limiting the effectiveness of marketing efforts. By using Real-Time CDP, HanesBrands was able to centralize its data and tap into features for mining insights to better identify and target high-value customer segments with personalized messages and recommendations.

The ability to continue these timely messages builds the connection that turns a first-time buyer into a brand loyalist.

Macy’s connected its data sources to create a unified profile of each customer by adding Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to the brand’s implementations of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Target.

“Personalization isn’t new. What’s new is our approach to achieving one-to-one personalization at scale across multiple channels,” said Bennett Fox-Glassman, Macy’s senior vice president, customer journey. “With immediate insights into what customers shop for, we can deliver tailored offers, personalized digital and app experiences, and highly relevant communications. These perfectly timed experiences foster profitable growth, brand love, and loyalty.”

For example, when customers purchase in store, check prices in the app, or browse online, that information feeds into their unified profiles in real time. Macy’s used this information to design personalized, omnichannel lifecycle journeys that could adjust to customers’ behaviors. With every channel using the same real-time data about each customer, Macy’s shoppers now enjoy a level of personalization previously not possible, leading to more repeat customers.

The takeaway: With personalized, omnichannel lifecycle journeys that adapt to customers’ needs, you can create immersive experiences that engage customers in the right moments to build loyalty.

3. Create and repurpose content across touchpoints to deliver custom experiences at scale.

More chances to connect with customers seems like a positive, but when runaway content production causes confusion, those interactions can alienate your audience and impact engagement. By building a foundation that can scale, marketers can create, repurpose, and manage content quickly and consistently.

Vanguard’s marketing team solved its content sprawl problem with the content management system Adobe Experience Manager Sites. The reusable templates, assets, and components drove massive improvements in content creation speed and efficiency, with limited IT assistance.

“We spent much less time on redundant work, leading to greater efficiencies and saving about $2.2 million on personalized content delivery within a single marketing team,” said Therron Hofsetz, Vanguard head of martech platforms, engineering.

With Journey Optimizer, Telmore was able to activate relevant, personalized content across channels to maximize customer engagement and conversion. Using unified customer profiles, Telmore identified incomplete purchases and sent well-timed email reminders — 80% of which were opened and up to 11% of customers completed their purchase. Instead of targeting a larger audience with a single message, Telmore focused on individual customers to ensure they saw relevant offers encouraging them to add on services or even switch over from competitors.

The takeaway: Establish a content foundation so your marketers can create, repurpose, and manage relevant content at scale from a central location. This will allow your team to activate personalized content across every digital channel at the perfect time.

Turn first-time shoppers into brand loyalists with a unified customer experience.

Seeing your favorite barista behind the counter gives you a brand connection that keeps you coming back. You know they know what you like. With a unified customer experience foundation, enterprises can deliver that same feeling of one-to-one connection that drives engagement, conversions, and customer lifetime value.

And by building a strong marketing technology foundation, your brand can create a single source of customer data so you understand exactly who your customers are and deliver what they need at every point in their journey. You can eliminate silos to reduce costs and streamline customer engagement orchestration. Your brand can create personalized assets and experiences across every channel that build trust and increase loyalty by making customers feel known.

Learn more about Adobe’s customer engagement solutions and start unifying your brand’s customer experiences.