If you’re ready to move from marketer to experience maker, you’ve come to the right place. Here you can dive into a curated collection of study materials, organized into seven lessons. And learn to turn real-time customer insights into actions that drive results.
Nicolas Mériel is no ordinary marketer. He continually pushes the boundaries of digital marketing to create outstanding customer experiences. Like the one above, which won the “Mindblowing Optimization” competition at Adobe Summit.
As senior digital strategist for Swisscom, his focus is on creating a personal experience for each customer, making it as relevant and positive as possible. But he couldn’t do it without the help of a great digital toolbox — including analytics, AI, automation, and targeting. Good data, backed by good analytics, helps Swisscom turn real-time insights into real results.
Combined, these tools help Swisscomo gain a deeper understanding of their customers, build unique audience profiles, and connect instantly with them, one-on-one.
Master this marketing art to do the same for your business.
We've organized customer experience study materials into seven lessons. Apply what you learn to your current situation, then dive deeper into the next lesson.
01 | Analyze all channels.
Businesses seem to have plenty of data these days. But they can’t always act on it. “Many people are using analytics as a data collection dump or a data filter,” says Amber Thornton, product marketing manager at Adobe. “They’re collecting some data and creating reports, but they aren’t doing anything with it.”
That approach just won’t fly anymore. Nor can you look at just one specific channel or device. You need to think bigger and look at the entire journey your customers take — from first interaction to final purchase or drop off. “It’s about the orchestration of experiences — offline and online,” says Mériel.
And that’s where customer journey analytics comes in. It will give you a better understanding of each customer’s behaviors and preferences and allow you to do the amazing — deliver incredibly relevant experience across any channel or device.
Learn to engage with customers on a whole different level, stitch together customer data, and get to know your customers across devices.
Breathe New Life into the Customer Journey
Read article (12–15 min.)
02 | Do more with AI.
Understanding what makes your customers tick will make you a better marketer. And now you have AI-powered analytics to help. It can help you discover insights you never even considered, then turn those insights into action with personalized, relevant customer experiences.
Gartner says it simply, “Enterprises that are able to harness diverse customer data through analytics to provide more relevant customer experiences will win.”
Swisscom had been doing a lot of AB testing but realized they needed a more automated approach to scale the audiences. Now with AI and automation, Mériel says they get better results by identifying customer behavior patterns without any prior analysis. With AI-powered analytics, you, too, can discover insights you never even considered.
Learn how AI and machine learning can assist, augment, and amplify your work, taking away stress and tedious activities.
Artificial Intelligence Unlocks the True Power of Analytics
Read article (7–10 min.)
Turn Data Into Action
Watch Video (2 min.)
Become an Insights-Driven Business
Watch Video (2 min.)
Insights-Driven Marketers Love Data
Watch Vdieo (1:30 min.)
“One of the big benefits of using web analytics software is that it automatically tunes the website experience to each individual visitor.”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
03 | Study best practices.
You can create amazing experiences when you blend online and offline insights and interactions to get a single, deeper view of your customers. “Some brands are able to use their data to paint a beautifully complete portrait of their customers. Others are still drawing stick figures,” says Ben Gaines, Adobe group product manager. “The businesses that are ahead of the curve are the ones that have aligned their internal teams, processes, and technologies to capture and draw actionable insights from all of their data.”
Gaining a more complete view of your customers is just one best practice. The article below has several others that will help you turn data into actionable insights.
Learn how to narrow your focus, jumpstart your implementation, and find the right people to set you up for success.
Turn Customer Data into Customer Intelligence
Read article (7–10 min.)
04 | Know your audience.
Deep inside your data is a greater understanding of what delights your individual customers. And a data management platform (DMP) will help you mine it. It combines data from every channel and device to reveal how the people behind the devices engage with your brand. “Delivering a great experience really begins with the data,” says Gordon Ho, senior vice president of global marketing and sales at Princess Cruises. “We use our data management platform as our central data warehouse, acting as the foundation for us to drive customer insight.”
Markus Eberhard, former senior vice president online and crosschannel development at Swisscom, couldn’t agree more. He believes analytics is one of the biggest assets they have. “You need targeting to bring the right stuff to the right people. And you need analytics insights to understand what people look at, what they like, what they don’t like. The combination of that is absolutely fundamental for success.”
Learn how a DMP can help you deliver the right message at the right time to create amazing customer experiences.
Market to Me. Not my Device
Read article (7–10 min.)
Princess Cruises Customer Story
Watch video (2:45 min.)
The Forrester Wave™: Data Management Platforms
Read Forrester report (15 min.)
05 | Learn from leaders.
Swisscom is mastering the art of customer intelligence. They try to have one test a week and have it run for two weeks to get enough people. After doing about 60-70 tests, they’ve achieved an average uplift of 40 percent.
There are many other organizations you can look to for similar inspiration. Redtag.ca, Canada’s largest independent travel agency, wanted to know more about their customers on a daily basis but they couldn’t do it with the free analytics tool they were using.
After completely revamping their tool set, their customer knowledge soared. “Day to day I’ll come in, see my site traffic, my conversions, and I think I’ve gotten to the point now that if I see X-numnber of visits, I can already guess how many conversions I expect to have,” says chief digital officer Robert Gennaro.
Learn how other leading companies are gaining insights to deliver deeply relevant experiences throughout the customer journey.
Far From Ordinary Experiences
Watch Redtag.ca video (3 min.)
Citizen Data Anlytics: Give Everyone a shot at the Action
Read article (10 min.)
Swisscom achieved an average uplift in web traffic of 40%
06 | Explore top tools.
Choosing which customer intelligence solution to use is an important decision and you’ll want the utmost confidence in your choice. That starts by evaluating the options out there.
There are many questions you’ll need to investigate:
• Can this solution collect data from all the sources that matter to me?
• Can it grow to accommodate new sources in the future?
• Does it run anomaly detection and automatically flag outlier data?
• How will it help me take action on the insights it provides?
While the research wil take some effort, it will be well worth it. You can start by studying the guide below.
Learn what questions to ask and issues to look for when choosing a marketing analytics solution.
How to Select the Right Marketing Analytics Solution
Read article (7–10 min.)
“The Adobe solutions are our digital Swiss Army knife. They have the right tools for every situation to offer our customers the right experience and the solutions complement each other perfectly.”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
07 | Prove business value.
You’ve learned all the benefits of customer intelligence, and how to implement the best solutions. The next step is to build your business case, so analytics becomes a top priority for others in your organization. But don’t try to do it alone. Look to the experts who’ve evaluated customer analytics solution providers and have shared their findings.
Build a business case for customer intelligence. Explore top solutions and see what kind of ROI you can realize.
The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018
Read guide (15–20 min.)
The Total Econimic Impact of Adobe Analytics & Adobe Audience Manager
Read IDC report (25–30 min.)
“The Adobe solutions are our digital Swiss Army knife. They have the right tools for every situation to offer our customers the right experience and the solutions complement each other perfectly.”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
About the experience maker
Nicolas Meriel
Nicolas Mériel thinks outside the box. In addition to being called “a profound thinker,” he received the #1 prize in the “Mindblowing Optimization” contest for his “SHAKE (Super Hot Awesome Killer Experiences) campaign. He also received the Adobe Experience Business Award in Excellence in AI-Powered Personalization. With 15 years of online experience, he’s an international digital transformation expert — where the six languages he speaks must come in handy. (Catalan, English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish.)
Adobe can help
Our products will give a deeper understanding of each customer and help you deliver amazing experiences that drive results.
Don’t stop now. Master another marketing art.
Now that you’re a Customer Intelligence expert, it’s time to take on a new marketing art. Choose one below, then work your way through that collection of guides, videos, inspiration articles, and more — all created and curated by Adobe experts to help you become an epic experience maker.