3
Jun 2019
Summit 2021: What is Adobe Journey Optimiser?
TAP CXM
What is Journey Optimiser?
Adobe Journey Optimiser or AJO is Adobe’s latest solution aimed at managing and optimising customer interactions across channels. Journeys and workflows have been long-standing features of Adobe Campaign, but it is fair to say that those are primarily outbound focused and are not always easy to optimise for the average marketing user. Let’s look at this in more detail.
The Adobe Journey Optimiser user interface
Adobe Journey Optimiser – Main User Interface
As illustrated in the above screenshot, there are 4 key areas of capabilities accessible from the left-hand side navigation pane of Journey Optimiser:
- Lifecycle
- Journeys
- Goals
- Messages
Lifecycle
The concept is interesting in terms of defining the different life stages of a customer. It is unclear yet just how this is used in practice, but we assume Events move customers between Lifecycle stages, each an opportunity to better communicate.
Adobe Journey Optimiser – Lifecycle
Journeys
If you know Adobe Campaign, you will be familiar with the Workflows approach to customer journeys. The interface is similar with a palette of activities available (from events to messages) to build a custom journey flow on a canvas.
A notable difference is the native availability of Events which points to a greater emphasis on real-time data triggers, certainly one of the hot topics of the moment.
Adobe Journey Optimiser – Event-Triggered journeys
Goals
Goals are a neat way of encapsulating business objectives. This gives a measurable context to a journey. Without goals, workflows are used to automate a set of actions, but measurement is mostly an afterthought. Here, the metric, the target, and the control group necessary to measure the impact of the journey are integrated from the get-go. This functionality certainly gives some focus to the optimisation aspect of AJO.
Messages
Messages is a cross-channel template management solution that has a similar approach to the Offer Representations in Adobe Campaign’s Interaction module. The idea is that the same message can be represented in various ways depending on the channel constraints (for example a Text message vs an Email).
The Email editor looks very slick and usable, something that has historically been challenging in Adobe Campaign Classic.
We have been informed that web push will be available in the product as a native channel. The first version of the product will also have email, push and In-app push notifications. It will additionally be possible to connect to third-party systems for message execution.
Support for AMP email content was also presented as a leap forward in terms of customer experience. The Accelerated Mobile Page technology allows users to interact and transact directly from an email. On the downside, Microsoft has stopped supporting this technology backed by Google. No consensus there but there is potential for better CX – a space to watch.
Licensing and availability
Journey Optimiser is currently positioned as a standalone offering. This means it does not require licensing of AEP or RT-CDP, nor do you need Campaign for message execution… On the flip side, an Adobe colleague we talked to was quick to add that “of course it works nicely with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud”. This makes sense from a go-to-market perspective; the aim being to have each product able to work in standalone mode but leveraging the wider Adobe ecosystem when multiple solutions are licensed.
Availability is scheduled “in the summer” and TAP CXM is working with Adobe to get early access and skill-up on the new solution.
Our take on Adobe Journey Optimiser
Journey Optimiser seems like a natural progression from Journeys. Creating workflows is great from an automation perspective but once the technical challenge is solved, there is a logical need to measure and improve. AJO was described as a “result-driven application” – we could look at it as workflows in the context of a maximisation metric.
On the one hand, most of the use-cases can technically be achieved in an Adobe Campaign Classic workflow. On the other hand, doing so looks much easier in AJO, and when it comes to marketers, usability is crucial, something that can be a challenge in ACC.
As always, the devil is in the detail and what looks easy in a demo is always more challenging when faced with complex customer data and real-life technical environments. We are certainly looking forward to using and testing this new product.
Links to Relevant Sessions
If you would like to further investigate this topic, many Adobe Summit sessions are available on demand, and you will find below a curated selection to guide you:
The future of customer Journey Management (23minutes)
https://business.adobe.com/summit/2021/sessions/the-future-of-customer-journey-management-e133.html
Orchestrating Personalized B2C and B2B Customer Journeys at Scale (27min)
https://business.adobe.com/summit/2021/sessions/orchestrating-personalized-b2c-and-b2b-customer-jo-ess12.htmlFast forward the first 19min to see the Demo of AJO.
One-to-One Engagement with Journey Orchestration (23min)
