[Music] [Chris Stolz] Hello, and welcome to this Virtual Summit. This is VS816. This is Tips & Tricks to Unlock the Full Power of Journey Optimizer. My name is Chris Stolz with Adobe Consulting. So let's get right to it because we only have so much time today. So let's get into just a quick introduction. So my name is Chris. I come to you from Niagara Falls, Canada. I've been in Adobe Tech for well over 20 years. I've been at Adobe for eight. I was a client and a partner before I was here. What I like to tell customers is if it has a logo in it, I can implement and I can teach it. And my job really is to put technology to work. As an enterprise architect, my role is to solution your capabilities and use cases and make sure that all of your Adobe and non-Adobe technology works really well together. So speaking of technology, let's talk a little bit about Journey Optimizer. So Journey Optimizer, sort of, has two or three different parts to it. You have campaigns, you have real-time journeys, and then you also have our decision engine as well. But today, we're focused more on campaigns and journeys. Now there are two different types. There are your brand-initiated campaigns, meaning as an organization, I am choosing to send something out at a certain time. That could be a big batch and blast campaign. That could be sending a business event to put people on journeys together at the same time, which we'll talk about as one of our tips today. And then we also have customer-initiated journeys. That means some other factor, be it the customer making a purchase, visiting my website, doing something that I can track, kicks off a journey, and puts them on their way. So without getting into too much, let's just get right into eight tips and tricks to unlock the value of Journey Optimizer, shall we? So let's start here. This is one of my absolute favorites. So a lot of the time when we're testing journeys and campaigns, what we're doing is we're sending push messages to our own device or SMS to our own device and telling our co-workers how it went and doing our own, sort of, local testing. But sometimes what we want to do is we want to test in a way that our whole team can participate and see it. So this is something I've been doing a lot. You could use Slack, or Teams, or any other messaging service that you have internally that allows for an API. It took me roughly five minutes to set up what you're looking at here, and I have a channel with which allows me to add other people to it, and then I build a simple custom action in Journey Optimizer so that I can send messages to it. So instead of sending a push message, I'm posting to a chat room. And what that allows me to do is send messages and then allow my entire team to see every single message that was received, so we can all test together. This is a fairly easy process. It didn't take long to set up, but the value here is incredible. One of the reasons why I also like this is it allows me to separate the channel from the equation if I'm troubleshooting something. So if I've got something particularly complex, something isn't going my way just yet, I'll take the channel out of the equation, and I will just send a message directly to the chat just to make sure that everything's working as I expect. So I really like this one. The next one is another group testing methodology, and this is, kind of, a neat little trick. If you've never seen this before, this is popular with things like Gmail, Microsoft has a version of this as well. Most inboxes allow you to do some version of this. The mechanics of it may be a little bit different, so, of course, check your documentation. But what this is allows you to do is create additional unique email addresses that all still go to you. So for example, in Gmail, if you add a '+' symbol before the '@' symbol and then anything else, that allows you to create a unique email address. And Gmail knows anything between the '+' and the '@' symbol to ignore and send all of it to your email address. So why is this useful? Well, if I have a Dev sandbox and I want to create a whole bunch of different customer profiles that qualify for different audiences, I can send them all different campaigns, but still receive all of those campaigns. So you can see the possibilities here. If I were to create five different segments, I could go load a Dev sandbox with five different profiles. All of them are me. Each one is, you know, Chris Stolz +1, +2, +3 for the email addresses. All of them will come to my email address, and then I can see that everything worked as I expected. So a cool, handy, little tip.

Number three. We are rocking through. You can also message your team. So this is more in the context of a use case. Typically, when we think about use cases, we think about sending a message to our customer. I send them a push and an SMS, or I hit them on the web channel, or I send them an email, etcetera. But what you can also do is use a custom action similar to tip number one to hit a messaging platform or any other way to message your team. You could send an SMS or a push to your team as well. So why is this useful? Well, think about use cases where based on something your customer does, you want your team to know about it so that they can provide more personal service. In the images on the right, you can see that this lady is parking her car, and then she's going into a hotel, or she could be going into a shopping mall or an event venue where she has booked a stroller for the day. She's rented a stroller, she's pulled up, and so perhaps with a journey when she enters the geofence, you can check to see if she has an appointment, send a message to the customer service desk, the customer service desk can have the stroller ready to go. So there's a lot of different use cases here. I like the second one here as well, where you can tell a shipping department that an order is high priority. So somebody places an order, but because they're a gold member, you want to send an additional message to the shipping system or even directly to the people in the shipping department themselves. That secondary message can be triggered by a journey based on the status of the customer who just placed the order.

Tip number four. You can leverage API responses for decisioning and personalization. Now this is something that came fairly new about halfway through 2023, so we've had it for a while. I don't think I can call it new anymore. But what this means is that you can hit an API in your journey, and whatever response that API sends back, you can use it to either split the journey, or you can actually use the value itself in personalization. A really good example is weather. If a customer does something, let's say they buy a ticket to a physical event that is today, you can check the weather, find out if it's going to be raining, and send them a message and tell them not to forget their umbrella. Or you can check an API that gives you the scores of the big sports game, or you can check product availability and see whether or not something is available, or you can check to see if the customer has a open support ticket right now.

And whatever that response is, I can either use it to send different messages based on whether it was raining or not, or I can use the value in my messages themselves directly. So if I kick off a journey based on the scores of a sports game and I send an email, that email can actually contain the score of the game that's happening right now. So there's a lot of possibilities here to use whatever the response is for personalization and decisioning. Number five. You can pair business events with a really clear segment to power new use cases. So typically, we think of use cases as being initiated by the customer. Somebody abandons a cart, or places an order, or enters a geofence, etcetera. But a business event is a non-people identifying event that you send into platform the Journey Optimizer can pick up on, evaluate an audience, and then at that moment, put everybody who's in the audience onto a journey.

So a really good example is if you're doing live events. Let's say you're a sports team. Every time the inning, or half, or period, or whatever the mechanics of your game is, any time the game changes, you can send an event into platform that will give you the current score of the game and various other information about the event that's happening right now. Your audience could be everybody that has scanned a ticket today. So now you're actioning against everybody who is there in attendance right now based on that audience.

Once that happens, everybody starts on the journey. And then from that point on, let's choose your own adventure, right? Depending on what decisions and splits you have within your journey, different customers are going to go down different paths, and then they will get whatever the action is. This works really well for live events as I've described. It could also work for things like a back in stock notification. If a customer has a specific item on their wish list and that item has a new version or is back in stock or something has changed that you want to alert those people, you can build a segment of everybody who's got that item on their wish list, and then you can trigger a business event when you're ready, puts everybody onto a journey, and then they receive the messages as you want. Let's take a look at number six, which is timing the message to match the experience. So we've talked about sending messages, but we often think of it in terms of real-time, right? Journey Optimizer, the journey component, allows me to do real-time. And that's true. You may want to kick it off in real-time, but you may not want to send it in real-time. If you think about an abandoned cart email, you don't want to send the email the moment they click add to cart. You want to wait, check to see if they've placed an order after some time, let's call it four hours, then send the message. This example that I have in yellow here is actually really, really interesting. It's one that we did for a sporting customer this past year, where they have event venues. And oftentimes in their venue, there's a little bit to go through before you're actually in the venue itself. You've got to go through security and check your ticket and make your way up an escalator. So we actually had somebody ride the escalator and time it. And it took about 35 seconds. We gave an extra 10 seconds to get through the rest, and every time people get to the top of the escalator, we observe people taking out their phones to take a photo of the venue. "Hey, look, I'm here." That's the moment that I want to send the message because everybody puts their phone away so they don't drop it in the escalator. And so I'm timing the digital experience to match what's happening in real-life. This is a really interesting little play, but it's something you should think about with pretty much all of your use cases. Is there a reason to wait before I send the message? Let's go to number seven. This one sounds like a B2B use case, but just stick with me just for a moment. So we can send custom actions from Journey Optimizer, and we often think of just sending a push or an email or an SMS, etcetera. But as we've talked about a little bit, you can send a custom action to some other platform. Well, what if you do group sales, not just individual sales? In the previous example of talking about an event venue, they may sell seasons passes or tickets, they may sell group. There's various other ways in which they have an actual physical sales team that's also selling beyond just what's happening online. And so in this case, based on somebody's activity on a website, I may want to pass that lead over to the sales team to make an actual phone call.

And so I can use a custom action to create objects in my CRM system, be it Salesforce, or Dynamics, or whatever else they have. And this is something that we have done for customers a fair bit this year, which is using custom actions to create objects in other systems. And so when somebody is visiting a group sales page, and they abandon cart, and they don't buy 30 tickets at once, or they don't fill out the group sales form, I want a salesperson to contact them as opposed to a traditional abandoned cart email. And so a custom action in a journey creates a lead in my CRM, and that really is just a matter of grabbing the API documentation or working with the CRM partner themselves and then creating that. Another use case for this may be in-person events where you have customers that are going to be in a physical space, and you want to tell somebody on your team to go make a visit. So for example, if I run sporting events and I've got a season ticket holder, or someone who happens to be a particularly high roller, or somebody who buys a lot of group tickets, I may want to tell my salesperson that they've arrived. And so when they scan their ticket at the gate, that gets them into the journey, and then I can go create a lead, or an opportunity, or something on the CRM side for which my salespeople have a mobile app. They will get that notification immediately, and then they will come to their seat or come to wherever they are to make a visit and give them a good service experience.

And last but not least, number eight, use fragments for re-usable global elements. So when I'm building emails and I have fragments, you can also use this for other global elements. So let me explain. A fragment is a reusable chunk of code. It can be an expression that's checking the profile, it could just be a big chunk of HTML that I chose to write and drop in. I can put that in, and then I can use it in multiple campaigns. Whenever I update the fragment, it updates for everything else. And so now every time I use that fragment, I'm using the new version. And so think of it almost as a code library. One of my favorite uses of this is putting your global style sheet as a block of HTML into a fragment. Now for every campaign, all I have to do is drag that fragment into the top of the email somewhere above the logo, it doesn't really matter where you're not going to see anything, but that effectively drops in my style sheet and now puts all of my brand guidelines and global styles in the entire email across the board for every email that I use it in. Additionally, we've seen customers get a little bit fancy and create a list of global variables. So they'll define how they want to display dates or how they want to display different information pulling from the profile or some kind of an expression that grabs today's date. They'll predefine all of those expressions, and then they've got a whole list of variables that they can use. And so they build themselves a little variable library effectively in a fragment. And then that those variables, again, you drop the fragment at the top of the email. Those variables could be used across. It's really interesting use. This is where we're seeing customers get really creative as a way to build a global re-usable code library that they can use across the board...

and more. So my name is Chris Stolz, and I thank you for tuning in. [Music]