Adobe wanted to streamline content creation within the campaign process, eliminate technology silos and complex data flows and accelerate campaign time to market. In the Marketing Cloud, Campaign orchestrates the campaign workflow, manages targeted segments and provides measurement and reporting. Experience Manager provides the tools to create and manage content that would be delivered through a campaign.

Here are the benefits from integrating these products:

• Integrated cross-channel content authoring. Messages are created in AEM and then delivered by Campaign.  This gives you access to existing assets, and great tools to compose a personalized email message through pre-built templates. One company cited a 50% reduction in the time to publish content.
• Extend collaboration with AEM Assets that come from the Creative Cloud can be reused easily in each campaign without copying files from one system to the other.  This makes both creative and marketing teams more agile, effective and efficient. Also workflows in AEM can be used to make sure content is approved before it gets pushed out to customers.
• User data can be shared between both systems.  This unified data can be used to personalize email as well as the web site.  Segments created in AEM can be used within Campaign. You can also create forms in AEM that can be used in the email.  Further, user data can be pre-populated to make it easier for the user to submit the form.

All of these capabilities are available across channels. 

Where to start with this integration?  First understand your organization and who has what content and assets.  Next centralize your content and assets into Creative Cloud and AEM.  Finally reimagine your workflows and how you can improve the process.  

At the Adobe Summit, I’m attending a session called Adobe on Adobe:Implementing a next generation cross-channel marketing solution where we get to hear how Adobe replaced two incumbent enterprise marketing solutions with Adobe Campaign.

The Challenge

Adobe has acquired several companies who each had their own marketing tools. After the acquisitions, Adobe struggled to be consistent in their marketing efforts across all these other legacy systems. They had trouble sharing marketing data.  Platforms had trouble scaling and performance issues. The need for reinvention became apparent as Adobe grew faster.

The Plan

After Adobe acquired Neolane which became Adobe Campaign, they decided to move all the cross-channel marketing to Campaign. They were asked to move all of there programs in a few months which was really impossible.  So they decided to create a thoughtful plan that included a current state assessment, requirements gathering, and user research to figure out exactly how to move over to Campaign.

They focused on change management because of the move from a variety of old systems to this new platform.

In addition to using the Adobe system, they also managed the project following their best practices for deploying the solution to Adobe customers. They developed a roadmap along with requirements that included must haves and nice to haves.

The Results (so far)

Within 6 months they started migrating lead management and within 9 months they moved all of their high-volume emails over to Adobe Campaign.

Now Adobe has 130M recipients in their database.  They deployed 1.1B personalized emails in 2014. They had 130+ lead nurturing programs in 2014.

In lead scoring across several dimensions, they had 11x performance increase for the automated platform and 3x performance increase in the end-to-end, CRM to automated platform.  This has lead to dramatic increase on contact rate for those leads.

Lessons Learned

• The migration was hard because Adobe had built up a lot of assets, knowledge and practices across all the acquisitions over the years.
• Build an inventory of what content / programs will move and which will be left behind.  This helps identify how long the migration will actually take.
• Don’t design for perfection, but get going fast and make updates as you go along.
• The most challenging part of the implementation was not the technology side, but change management, business process change, and skills changes.

Tips and Tricks

1. When doing an implementation like this, make sure you have a good time with authority to make decisions.
2. Campaign is very flexible, so you should spend time planning out what you want to do before diving into it.
3. From a technical perspective, Campaign is very transactional.  So you have to make sure the database is tuned, decide what data is going to reside in the database versus what can be referenced.
4. Need a well defined process for on-boarding users.  Adobe created scenario-based user guides rather than feature-based.  Templates are a must to get the users up and running quickly.  Checklists are very handy to remind occasional users what to do when they use the system.
5. For training, they did a hub and spoke model to train a hub person in each region.  They also held specific office hours for each region so they could call when they were first starting out.
6. They used to use Batch and Blast for campaigns. Now they are starting to use workflows to plan out the experience better.

Adobe hasn’t finished the migration just yet.  They will continue to migrate everyone over to Campaign and will be optimizing their programs this year.  They are also integrating with their other Marketing Cloud tools.

Here are the steps in Jeff’s model:

Learn the landscape

Understand the analytics buying team. Often its a CxO teaming with a CIO.  Below the CxO is the budget approver, the decision maker and the feature evaluator.  On the IT side, there is also a feature evaluator and typically a VP/Senior leader involved.

When looking at the Technology Purchaser Messaging Matrix, address the individual contributor who is a technical purchaser like an analyst, IT manager, etc. These people are the evaluators. They don’t want to hear from their peers that what they bought stinks. The IT evaluator has to make sure the product meets the IT standards.

On the business side, you want to address the CMO, VP Marketing, etc.  These are the approvers. They usually approve the budget but don’t make purchase decisions.  Typically they are interested in consensus among the buying team.  They are interested in stability and reputation of the vendor.

Somewhere in the middle are the decision makers who would be directors, sr directors, etc.  They look at how to make or save money, not features or experience. Their job is to build the business case for anything they buy.

In other words, decisions are made in the middle!

Learn the Language

Schedule a meeting to discuss how this will address a specific business needs. Bring a perspective on business justification.  For analytics, dashboards are a good area.

There is a fallacy that if you can get to the right executive who can single handedly approve a deal. Executives are really looking for consensus from their team to approve a purchase.

When an executive gets excited about a product, they are good at handing out assignments that hold the decision makers feet to the fire. Adobe has myanalyticsscore.com that can help you figure out your maturity.

Weigh the Value

Instead of bludgeoning people with endless fact and features, bring unique insights about how the business can make or save money.  (See the book The Challenger Sale). Here are some values you can weigh in your justification:

• Multi-/Cross-Channel Analytics Views
• More Advanced Analytics
• Real time data
• Replacing an outdated product
• Overcome data limitations
• More functionality to support strategy change
• Easier to use tools

Qualify the Value

Here is how organizations qualified the value:

Saving money

• Time Savings / Efficiencies from fewer better tools
• Smarter investments, Higher MROI
• Better Targeting
• Fewer Resources
• More useful info
• Ability to monetize to offset cost

Make Money

• Identify cross selling
• Increased revenue

Here are some other ways:

• Standardize on a single vendor
• Bringing new insights

Quantify the Value

You need to separate hard and soft ROI.  For hard ROI, it has to be cleaHard ROI

• Clearly quantifiable cost savings or sales/revenue increases.  For example, a 50% reduction in time required to prepare weekly scorecards

Soft ROI

• Loosely quantifiable cost savings or sales/revenue increase.  For example, better targeting will lead to higher conversion rates.

Jeff provided a series of equations to calculate various savings and revenue numbers for the ROI estimates.

Patrick Tripp (@ptripp), Sr Product Marketing Manager, introduced Adobe Campaign at Adobe Summit. He started with a poll of the audience. Most people use a variety of channels with eMail being the most popular.

Kelly Reilly (@KerryReilly1), Director Product Marketing talked about the details of Campaign. Campaign is intended to redefine how brands engage with consumers. Kelly introduced the following core:

• Integrated Customer Profile brings together information you about the customers.
• Targeted Segmentation using the data from the customer profiles.
• Visual Campaign Orchestration or workflow for the campaign.  Visual is the key here as the tool is very visual to build the workflow making it easier for marketing professionals.
• Cross Channel Execution to deliver the campaign
• Real time interaction management to target a customer as soon as they visit the web site or call the contact center.
• Operational Reporting is a must have to identify which programs are working and why.

Best practices for campaign management:

• LA Kings wanted to increase customer knowledge and deliver personalized fan experiences.  They saw a 10% uplift in online renewals.  They identified positive ROI and increased revenue through these personalized experiences. Below is a video that talks about how the Kings did this.

• Sephora used campaigns for both instore and online experiences.  They saw a 70% productivity jump in creating campaigns
• Elsevier wanted to enhance customer communications, increase engagement, and implement best practices. They saw 30% increase in open rates and cost savings across their marketing efforts.

Campaign is now integrated across the Marketing Cloud to address these three challenges:

• Big Data to integrate customer data from a variety of sources
• Delivery of Campaigns offline and online, different devices, etc.
• Content personalization and streamlining content across channels

Here are the integrations

• Campaign and Analytics – Real Time analytics connected to targeted segments. Analytics can tell you about abandoned carts and those customers can then be targeted via Campaign.  If you can target those customers within an hour, you can increase conversions.
• Campaign and Core Services – Can share audiences to the marketing cloud and push marketing cloud audiences back to Campaign.  The shared data can be used to enhance personalization.
• Campaign and Target – Target is the testing and optimization tool.  Target has been extended to include eMail content.  Campaign can target content in the email using personalized and contextual content.
• Campaign and Experience Manager – connects the Marketing Cloud with the Creative Cloud. Assets loaded into the cloud are reflected in the content used by Campaign.  This creates a consistent brand experience.

Ben Tepfer (@bentepfer), Product Marketing Manager demo’d Campaign.  He showed how a campaign workflow can integrate content from Adobe Experience Manager to create highly personalized content when a user opens a web site from a push notification generated by Campaign.

Brad Rencher, Adobe’s SVP for Marketing Cloud, made the argument to more than 7,000 people attending this year’s conference that customer experience is now the key part of your brand.

Brad Rencher

This makes Digital Marketing the epicenter of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, Adobe is at the epicenter for many brands and wants to be the epicenter of more customers.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, talked about Changing the World Through Digital Experiences. Marketing is on a reinvention journey but fundamentals of marketing are not changing. The art of marketing creative is still a key pat of the equation. Science in the form of data analysis, behavior analytics, etc have contributed to elevating marketing to a new level. Real-time has impacted the enterprise is completely new and different ways.  

This has led to the era of “Your Product is Marketing”, according to Shantanu.  So now, you have to ask broader questions about your products and look at new ways to enhance the customer experience. This has impacted Adobe too and they are looking at how to enhance their own products into a unified experience through the Marketing Cloud. 

Brad came back onstage to talk about consumer expectations around being consistency and continuous. The customer experience is the brand and marketing has to move beyond just marketing. Marketing has to take on the many customer experiences your brand has and make them consistent and continuous.

Coca Cola talked about their mission is to create happiness experiences for their customers. Their marketing efforts are not just about the logo, the colors, or even the product. By creating these happiness experiences they keep consumers connected to the brand.  As an example, they created a “hug machine” for finals week at a college campus.  When a student hugged the machine, they received a Coke in return. It was a fun and creative way to help students relieve stress and connect to the Coca Cola brand.

One way Adobe is developing a unified experience is through the Marketing Cloud. Adobe follows these these principles when looking at the Marketing Cloud:

• Comprehensive
• Integrated across channels both online and offline
• Actionable for both data and content

Brad fired off a bunch of announcements that will detailed out throughout the week at Adobe Summit. Briefly, here are some of those announcements that I could capture as Brad talked:

• Adobe Analytics announced Customer Intelligence (integrate customer data) and Predictive Analytics.
• Experience Manager is the backbone of content in the Marketing Cloud.  AEM Assets provides asset management in a Saas environment. Adobe is also delivering a pre-built AEM to get smaller companies and departments running quickly.
• Campaign has been integrated across all the Marketing Cloud solutions.  They also greatly enhanced the email marketing components of Campaign
• Target will deliver personalization beyond just web and mobile and into IoT.
• Social is mobile enabled so you can publish on the go.
• Media Optimizer has been rebuilt to be more programmatic.

Brad announced two new solutions:

• Adobe Prime Time – this puts the TV experience on any screen.  Marketers can track usage.  There is also continuous delivery from mobile to desktop to TV.
• Adobe Audience Manager connects audiences to programmatic features of the cloud and integrates across the Adobe Core Services.

Connect with Perficient on LinkedIn here.

When I looked back over the trends from the last several years, Customer Experience is the only topic voted highest two years in a row. Back in 2014, Customer Experience was predicted to be the hottest trend. In 2013, Content Marketing came out on top.  In 2012 Social was the top opportunity and Mobile topped the charts in 2011.

Econsultancy added a nice chart to this year’s report that showed how their predicted trend at the beginning of 2014 turned out. While Customer Experience was expected to be the highest priority, it turned out that both Customer Experience and Content Marketing tied for first in actual importance at the end of the year, with mobile and social coming in a close second.

The report also showed that 78% people said their company was attempting to differentiate using customer experience. Only 5% said they were not trying to use customer experience to differentiate.

Another interesting part of the report is the number of respondents who said that strategy was a key component of the customer experience. 82% had strategy as either one, two or three on their list of key building blocks.  This tells me that people are clearly thinking through the issues around building great customer experiences and know that just throwing technology at it isn’t the answer.

Likewise Culture came in second at 63%. Again this tells me that the people being surveyed are very thoughtful about customer experience.

One trend in the customer experience space caught me by surprise a little bit. 30% said that targeting and personalization were a top priority for them.  We have talked about personalization for a long time, so its great to see the message getting out to the rest of the market.

So when does a trend become table-stakes? Clearly trends of previous years either went on to be become ubiquitous or died off.  I mentioned mobile was a trend back in 2011. It’s clear – to me at least – that mobile has become table stakes. We hear “mobile first” all the time now when it comes to web design.

For customer experience, the Digital Trends report says that not only do people think this is a hot topic for 2015, but they also expect it to remain a top opportunity for the next 5 years. My guess is that in the next year or two, Customer Experience will be table stakes and anyone not trying to tackle this topic will be left behind.

What do you think? Has Customer Experience already surpassed the trend status?

They started off with a video on key information you know about customers like:

• bought 5 concert tickets
• is a season ticket holder
• opened but did not click season renewal
• How he bought his tickets
  • 2 at the door
  • 3 online

Definition: Cross-Channel marketing is about understanding the preference of the consumer and determining how you can engage with them.

Adobe Campaign brings the data together to deliver a personalized experience via a variety of channel.  You treat different segmented consumers differently based on their known interests and preferred channels.

Quote: There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to customer engagement anymore.

The Solution

It delivers six unique capabilities

1. Integrated Customer Profile
2. Targeted Segmentation
3. Visual Campaign Orchestration
4. Cross-channel execution
5. Real-time interaction management
6. Operational reporting

Integrated Customer profile

This is the life blood of Adobe Campaign.  It’s central to everything they do with Adobe Campaign. Match.com knows more about their members than anyone else.   They store the profile of every consumer. They use it to deliver messages in real time.  They send millions of messages a day.

Target Segmentation

Use the profile  to drive one-to-one personalization.  It enhances the effectiveness of marketing.

Visual Campaign Orchestration

Use the segmentation, data, and workflow to create the interaction with the customer.

Cross Channel Execution

Deliver your messages to mobile app pushes, in store, ATM, web site, email, SMS, and any channel you can access via an api.  Barnes and Noble delivers 5 billion emails a year.

Real Time Interaction Management

Create offers from a central catalogue and embed them in any channel.  TMU, online sports betting uses the interaction management capability to deliver 13,000 unique recommendations per minute.

Operational Reporting

The Demo

Stephan walked us through a demo using Jenny a marketer at Geometrixx. Amma is the customer who enjoys running and loves her iPad.

• Jenny logs into Adobe Campaign and creates a campaign for a product launch
  • Uses a template to create the campaign.
  • Template gives a pre-configured segmentation and workflow
  • Workflow was fairly complex and pushed messages to a variety of customers across many channel.
• Emma received an email message in her inbox on her iPad.  It was of course, responsive
  • By clicking, she hit the landing page
  • Adobe Campaign gathered key information like the email open, clicking, etc.
  • Emma got a voucher as part of the offer and used the offer to hit the site to buy a pair of shoes
  • System automatically sent a confirmation message for the shoe receipt
• Jenny logs in and runs reports. She can get a lot of information like
  • overall program sucess
  • overall campaign success
  • who opened
  • What segments
  • By city, state, device, ROI (if you put costing in), etc.
• Jenny looks at the customer profile
  • The profile shows all interactions, emails, buying patterns, opening email, accepting an offer, etc.
  • Showed profiling on social and other sites

What’s Next?

• New release coming in Q3 2014
• Will be embedded i Marketing Cloud
• Will have a full web version
• Will be integrated with all the solutions in the  marketing cloud
• Improves the interface. Much cleaner, less Windows like
• Much more graphical interface in reporting, workflow, etc.

Tips and Tricks

Are introducing a campaign management tool at adobecampaignpro.com.  This self-assessment helps you understand where you are.  Seven sections with five questions each gives you a score based on 35 total questions. It lets you benchmark yourself based on what your peers in your industry are doing.

They have a broader digital marketing maturity model as well.

Presenter showed results to an online questionnaire. It was a real-time poll using a web site and text messaging.