How To Use Adobe Target For Personalised Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Customers today expect a personalised experience. Personalisation is the key to cultivating a loyal customer base and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) to grow your business.

Most marketers intrinsically know the value of personalised messaging and deliver it through direct messaging channels such as email or SMS marketing.

But personalisation becomes exponentially more complex in the context of omnichannel campaigns.

In this guide, we’ll explore how Adobe Target enables marketers and brand managers to deliver better customer experiences by:

• Collecting and analysing first-party data
• Creating progressive user profiles
• Enabling multivariate testing
• Integrating CRM contacts and anonymous website visitors
• Optimising the user journey across devices

With a considered customer segmentation strategy and Adobe Target training, marketers can deliver relevant, personalised experiences that delight customers.

And the rewards are well worth the effort.

Why is a consistent omnichannel customer experience necessary?

When running an ambitious marketing campaign, you’re faced with two options:

1. Scale up: Provide one-to-one personalisation across devices, apps and sessions
2. Pull back: Personalise messaging on one or two channels only and replicate messaging elsewhere

All things being equal, every marketer and brand manager would choose to scale up. But it’s not always immediately possible for budget or resourcing reasons.

Here are three business cases to convince the C-Suite that Adobe Target (and Adobe Target training) are smart investments.

1.     Know your audience

Before you can personalise messaging, you need to know who’s on the receiving end.

It’s fine to start with a generic experience. But the faster you can deliver an experience that feels personalised, the better chances you have of earning that customer’s loyalty.

• 79% of customers said they wouldn’t purchase until the brand demonstrated they understood and cared.
• 57% of consumers spend more on brands they’re loyal to
• 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalised, while 77% have chosen or recommended a brand after a personalised experience

Data-driven insights allow you to understand customers better so the conversation can be on their terms.

Build a complete profile with Adobe Target

Most good customer segmentation tools build comprehensive customer profiles based on browsing behaviour and intention. But the AI in Adobe Target goes beyond the last viewed product or single-session browsing, generating cross-channel insights by:

• Analysing a user’s long-term behaviour*
• Comparing similar users
• Providing analytics to monitor behaviour
• Eliminating siloes between data

Going further, integrating Adobe Target with Adobe Experience Platform enables a single customer view that can be used to understand and engage customers on a deeper level.

*It’s worth noting that Adobe Target tracks visitors returning on the same device and browser, or known CRM contacts. Like all customer segmentation tools, cross-device tracking remains challenging due to GDPR restrictions and cookie capability.

2.     Send the right message

Although personalisation is possible on a single channel (e.g. emails, customer profiles or SMS messages), a siloed experience quickly becomes jarring.

This is where the distinction between multichannel and omnichannel becomes important.

Omnichannel means a consistent, progressive experience across multiple channels (though not necessarily all). Multichannel refers to methods like retargeting, which serve similar messaging on different channels.

Multichannel is noisy. It’s not always the wrong move, but a consistent omnichannel customer experience will generate loyalty and deliver better results every time.

Adobe Target features for progressive omnichannel customer experiences

Adobe Target helps dissolve the barriers between platforms by responding to user behaviour. It integrates customer data from every touchpoint and turns that data into recommendations.

While Adobe Target has some automation features to optimise the user journey, it can’t replace your experience. Instead, it equips you with the tools to:

• Build omnichannel user journeys
• Deliver one-to-one messaging efficiently
• Adapt to changing customer profiles
• Stitch together insights from different channels into a holistic picture

As you might expect, there’s a learning curve to reach the level of sophistication where you can use Adobe Target to deliver one-to-one personalisation at scale.

We’ll touch on that shortly.

3.     Test new ideas

All this talk about technical solutions quickly moves away from the human element inherent in your marketing.

Humans are unpredictable. We’re fickle. We lead full, complicated lives where the idea of a linear customer journey is laughable.

In other words, you can never be 100% sure how an idea, message or image will be received.

Being able to A/B test creative and design variables or user journeys provides valuable feedback to iterate for better customer experiences.

A/B testing with Adobe Target

Adobe Target was initially called ‘Test and Target’, which reflects the platform’s powerful multivariate testing capabilities.

A/B testing content, navigation and styling is straightforward through Adobe Target. The platform takes you through multivariate testing, analysis and attribution. It even has audiences, test criteria and design templates built-in.

You can also integrate audiences from Adobe Experience Platform to gather data from known CRM contacts and anonymous website visitors.

Adobe recently released the recommendation engine, an AI-powered dynamic content feature that extends Adobe Target’s capabilities to deliver highly personalised recommendations.

This article goes more in-depth into A/B testing in Adobe Target.

The components of an effective omnichannel customer experience

Adobe Target is a significant contributor to delivering one-to-one messaging at scale, but it’s not a silver bullet. There are three building blocks that contribute to effective omnichannel customer experiences.

1.     Strategy

To move beyond ad-hoc campaigns and single-channel personalisation, your organisation needs a forward-looking customer experience strategy.

This strategy should detail:

• Long-term goals
• Measurable KPIs
• Roadmap to maturity
• Key stakeholders
• Roles and responsibilities

Investing time in personalisation strategies is synonymous with investing in growing the business.

2.     People and process

Building the right team is crucial for long-term success, both in marketing overall and especially in personalisation or CLV programs.

The strategy needs champions, resources and accountability. While it doesn’t require an enormous resource base, people from across the organisation (and upper management) need to get behind the idea that a long-term personalisation strategy delivers long-term value.

3.     Technology

The maturity roadmap defined in the personalisation strategy will identify the required technology stack.

Adobe Target may be the only missing piece, or it might be part of a bigger martech picture. If you’re starting from a place of siloed software and looking for an integrated stack, Adobe Experience Cloud is one of a very short list that provides sophisticated, full-scale marketing intelligence.

Where to start with omnichannel customer experience programs

Consistency, relevance and personalisation are the ingredients that build CLV – and thereby build your brand.

So, where do you begin?

Before rushing out and buying an Adobe Target subscription, step back and consider the long-term customer experience strategy.

In other words, build your strategy, team and toolkit around your customers.

Implementing customer segmentation tools and marketing intelligence software takes time and resources. Eventually, that investment will generate CLV and brand loyalty, growing your business and establishing the brand’s authority.

But like any investment, you need to be committed.

TAP CXM’s expertise as customer experience management consultants and Adobe specialists can help you make the right moves from the start.

You’re always welcome to get in touch if you want to learn more about our consulting services or speak with an expert about Adobe Target or Adobe Target training.