Adobe Journey Optimizer: Everything You Need To Know

Adobe, frontrunners in the race for innovation, have just announced their new application Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Adobe Journey Optimizer is the newest addition to their Adobe Experience Cloud and offers businesses the ability to meet the rapidly changing customer expectations in both the B2B and B2C markets. Most customer journeys are defined as a relatively linear progression through a series of touchpoints and struggle to deliver against the varied paths that real customers take through their buying cycles across multiple devices – there is no such thing as a typical customer! Adobe Journey Optimizer gives marketers the tools to meet this challenge and construct hyper-personalised, real-time, customer driven journeys that can efficiently be deployed and optimised using AI and Machine Learning to understand the patterns in your data. 

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What is Adobe Journey Optimizer?

Journeys can be defined in response to real-time triggers from across your organisations' applications and data or scheduled in line with your campaign calendar. Adobe Journey Optimizer will intelligently manage the different touchpoints and identify the most appropriate message and channel at any time. This will prevent over communication to an individual, and avoid under communication where whole segments of data go unaddressed for months. Configured correctly, Adobe Journey Optimizer will keep all customers and prospects in the ‘just right’ Goldilocks zone for communications based on their engagement and stage of the buying cycle.

Built natively on Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer can access all of the data in your organisation including CRM, web, marketing automation, e-commerce, inventory management and more in a single customer profile. This data can be activated through Adobe Journey Optimizer to create cohesive, personalised customer experiences across multiple channels and devices. Importantly, AEP is designed with modern privacy requirements at its heart, removing the need for each campaign, channel or platform to implement its own complex privacy and governance rules. This gives organisations, marketers and their customers the confidence and trust to know that their data is being managed appropriately at all times.

By investing in the internal development of Adobe Journey Optimizer rather than acquiring a new business, Adobe have been able to develop a modern and friendly UX, whilst also supporting an open API, to scale your development according to current needs and address the unique quirks of your business with ease. Adobe’s continued vision and investment in the Adobe Experience Platform gives us the confidence to recommend it as a strong foundation for the future of our clients customer experience.

Adobe historically have focussed more on the Journey Orchestration of powerful B2C use cases in retail, hospitality and tourism; but at Clevertouch we believe there are just as many compelling use cases in B2B and B2B2C industries like financial services, recruitment, technology, distribution and manufacturing. The launch of the new B2B Edition of Adobe Real-time CDP complements the support for B2B use cases and enables marketers to activate and optimise journeys for an individual or whole accounts. Sales teams too stand to benefit from an unrivalled view of their customers engagement providing them new insights whenever they follow up an MQL. 

This is the age of seamless digital journeys, and customer experience is rapidly becoming the cornerstone from which marketing is operated.  We believe that Adobe Journey Optimizer and the wider Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem offers marketers world-class capability to craft those journeys. Unlocking and delivering on those capabilities will require a vision, skills and roadmap and we are excited to support our pioneering clients on this journey.

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Adobe Journey Optimizer: Why it matters to your industry

Adobe Journey Optimizer’s capability goes much further than B2C experience, and we’ve pulled together some example use cases across Financial Services, Recruitment, Software and Manufacturing where our clients are looking for the ability to activate data beyond their CRM and Marketing Automation platforms. Hopefully, these ideas will get you thinking about how Adobe Journey Optimizer can build better experiences for your customers. In future blogs we will discuss how you can demonstrate the ROI of an improved customer experience, building a business case for investment and the steps required for effective deployment. To discuss your use cases with one of our Adobe Consultants, sign up for a complimentary 1-1 workshop.

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Financial Services

Financial Services require a myriad of communications to customers, from product marketing to market analysis and regulatory updates. Often, these communication streams are run in silos by different teams and technologies, which result in a fragmented brand and customer experience. Journey Optimizer and Adobe Experience Platform permit all of these communications to be intelligently managed within a single platform from a shared, unified customer profile. For example, if a client needs to receive a regulatory fact sheet update today, then Journey Optimizer can hold off on sending the weekly market analysis blog update for 48 hours. This is a great way to prevent over communication and maximise the impact of your marketing material. There is no faster route to the unsubscribe button than putting 5 emails in a customers inbox in one day!

By bringing together data from across the organisation, and not just the CRM, Journey Optimizer and AEP allow a new level of segmentation and targeting based on their portfolio or role within an institutional client. They give you the capability to automatically target investors in low-cost ETFs with your latest analysis on low-cost fund providers, whilst also sharing details on your new sustainable investment fund with clients who already have a strong sustainable investment portfolio. This highly relevant segmentation can be achieved by blending the data from your brochure website, investment platform and sales teams’ insights into a unified customer profile to understand a customers needs – all without requiring them to tick boxes on a preference centre!

Data governance and compliance are at the heart of the Financial Services industry, and bringing customer data together into one profile allows this to be managed efficiently. AEP’s inbuilt data governance rules enable you to tag and manage each data attribute according to the required policies and can restrict the access, sharing and export of each data point at a field level. These rules can apply inside and outside your organisation, so you can be confident that your intermediaries are only accessing the data that they need.

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Software & Subscription businesses

SaaS businesses need to continually provide great customer experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Selling an initial license is only ever the start of your relationship with that customer and you need to continuously demonstrate your value in order to secure future renewals and unlock further upsell opportunities across the organisation.

By bringing together CRM, web and platform usage data into AEP, the right journey can be selected by Journey Optimizer for each individual or account. In addition to onboarding and renewal campaigns aligned to fixed milestones, you can also trigger journeys in real-time response to user behaviour. For example, if you identify an uptick in the number of searches in your support knowledge base from a customer, you can trigger a campaign to remind them of their support managers phone number or trigger a pro-active call from their Customer Success Manager through a CRM integration.

If features of the platform are under-utilised, Adobe Journey Optimiser will automatically identify this and start a journey to encourage adoption. However, importantly, Journey Optimizer can prioritise your journeys and understand the context – you might not want to remind a customer of features they are not using in the month running up to renewal, so instead send a hyper-personalised summary of their years worth of usage and the benefits it has returned via an email and in-app notification.

Bringing the data together will also allow you to discover patterns that have been previously hidden. AEPs’ built-in AI/Machine Learning capability allows you to easily deploy AI to uncover your clients that have the highest likelihood to churn. No more guesswork, you’ve now got the data to back it up and prioritise your early interventions.

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Manufacturing

Manufacturing organisation’s understand the value of data and rely on it to improve the efficiency of their factories. They often also rely on B2B2C modelling involving a complex array of partners and distributors to get their products into the hands of end customers. Journey Optimizer and AEP can bring together operational and marketing data with an understanding of the relationships between different types of customers to build new experiences on top of previously siloed data.

Using the built-in, AI powered ‘Next Best Offer’ recommendation engine, Journey Optimizer can use real-time local stock information from an integrated inventory management system to push personalised offers to distribution partners based on stock availability and purchase history.  

Manufacturers can automatically share and receive data on prospects with your partner network whilst maintaining strong governance rules. AEPs Trust features ensure the only data shared is with a customers’ permission and allows your compliance team full control of the data. Use shared data to execute campaigns on your partners behalf and build relationships directly with the end customer.

Continue to nurture your end customers through the lifecycle of their purchase with journeys built around warranty periods and aftercare services. Provide your service teams with a real-time picture of the customers' engagement – for example, which support articles have they searched for, what other products do they have and what is their lifetime value to your business? Use this information to orchestrate fantastic digital and offline customer experiences and build a direct relationship between your brand and the customer.

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Recruitment

Recruitment firms often identify the relationships they build with their placed candidates as their biggest source of leads. Yet, client and candidate marketing is often siloed, providing a disjointed customer experience. By bringing together journeys that nurture an individual through both the sales funnel and their career lifecycle you can unlock synergies and ensure the two do not conflict.

By building a unified profile that can support multiple professional and personal devices with different contact numbers, you can provide your marketing team and recruitment consultants a complete picture of the individuals' behaviour. You can then use this information to provide personalised job alerts or market insights depending on whether they are looking to hire or be hired.

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What Next?

Clevertouch are a leading partner for Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Real-time CDP and the wider Adobe Experience Platform. Our world-class Adobe Consultants are on hand to offer complimentary sessions to discuss, demystify or brainstorm any of your thoughts, queries or use cases to help continue your journey to a better customer experience. We've helped organisations all over the globe such as Fujitsu, Adecco, Grant Thornton, Deliveroo, and are offering consultancy sessions to help you today. Sign up here.

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