Jeremy Finch
Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they were acquiring leading content management platform for B2B and B2C companies, Magento Commerce. The leading martech company has a clear mission to continue with digital transformation while delivering high-value customer experiences for desktop, mobile, social and display. Today, Adobe looks set to blow away the major challenges that marketers face in delivering truly omnichannel customer experiences. To better understand how customers could leverage Adobe to create superlative cross-channel Customer Experiences, we spoke to Adobe’s Product Marketing Manager, Jeremy Finch.

What is the true state of “Customer Experience” in 2018?

In 2018, customers are becoming more experience-loyal than brand-loyal. But, according to a recent study by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Adobe, only 31% of brands qualify as experience-driven businesses. People don’t care that organizations have different functions for managing their marketing, advertising or analytics technologies. Customers just want to be treated like individuals and be spoken to in a cohesive, unified voice without being overloaded by irrelevant and transactional offers and messages.

As brands increasingly prioritize customer experience, they should tap into research from behavioral science that suggests people often look at three key points when judging experiences – positive first impressions, helpful surprises and satisfying endings. A good “customer experience” should consistently include all three of these elements. Technology can help enable this trifecta at scale.

What are the major challenges for marketers in delivering truly omnichannel customer experiences?

The three main challenges marketers face include data, content and delivery.

• Data: Customer data can be scattered across different systems or siloed in different parts of an organization, making it hard to develop a complete view of each person’s interests, values and journey stage. On the reporting and measurement side, the fact that marketers use many technologies across different channels can also make it hard to get an accurate view into the tactics that resonate best and how those tactics interact with each other.
• Content: It can be challenging to create content that is personalized to the recipient, relevant to the channel it’s delivered in, and optimized for the format and device it will be consumed on. And it’s even more challenging doing all of this in a time- and energy-efficient way, especially when so much content is being created and used by different groups.
• Delivery: It’s also challenging for marketers to connect email, mobile, web and offline marketing technologies at scale and to deliver timely, relevant communications to people at exactly the time and place they want it. Timing and context is everything.

These are large challenges for marketers to overcome, but tools like Adobe Campaign can help people pull together these elements in a way that improves collaboration and makes omnichannel marketing achievable for most organizations.

How is CX linked to overall business goals? To what extent does technology help achieve those goals by delivering relevant CX?

Customer experience is deeply linked to overall business goals, but it must be measured cohesively next to other organizational priorities in order to stay front and center. The four key areas where technology can help achieve business goals include customer acquisition, customer retention, win-back and virality. Great customer experience makes customer acquisition easier and cheaper – marketers don’t have to spend as much money and effort convincing people that their product or service is great if the experience clearly speaks for itself. Customer experience also helps with retention and win-back by starting with the assumption that customers seek different types of information and services at different stages of loyalty or involvement with a brand. And it also helps with virality in the sense that satisfied customers are your best marketers – they want to share their positive experiences with friends, family, colleagues and peers. And the happiest ones will scale their recommendation power using reviews, social media and referrals.

How do customers leverage Adobe to create superlative cross-channel Customer Experiences?

For digitally-empowered consumers, making an informed decision about a brand takes only a few seconds. These decision-making opportunities are happening constantly. That’s why it is imperative that brands deliver relevant experiences on every channel, at the most crucial moments. One way Adobe Experience Cloud customers are implementing this omnichannel approach is through the combination of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign. Using this integration, marketers can leverage real-time user behavior on web and digital properties to trigger personalized messages through email and mobile channels. The combination of Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics also helps marketers eliminate unnecessary guesswork by only sending targeted follow-ups and reminders to customers who may have gotten side-tracked while attempting to complete a particular task.

Redtag.ca, one of Canada’s top digital travel agencies, is using Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to turn online journeys into real-life vacations. Redtag.ca found its customers were actively engaging across online, mobile, email and call center channels, but they struggled to improve and personalize these experiences due to legacy limitations around data consolidation. Using Adobe Analytics, Redtag.ca consolidated all of their cross-channel data to see which vacation packages, activities and offers resonated with certain customer segments. The marketing team then took these insights and used these segments in Adobe Campaign to target people with more personalized and relevant content through email and other mobile channels. This effort helped Redtag.ca increase email open rates, clickthroughs and time spent on its website, and enabled a more data-driven organizational culture.

How do you see investments in CX technologies impacting overall marketing budget in 2018-2022?

Companies are actively prioritizing improving customer experience. In fact, the Forrester Consulting study I mentioned earlier indicated that 80% of brands surveyed viewed improving the customer experience as a critical or high priority over the next 12 months. Their top two areas of focus in improving customer experience include manging the entire customer journey and improving cross-channel customer experiences – both of which require investment in connecting people, processes and technology. Also, when looking at the budgets of experience-driven businesses (the 31% I mentioned earlier), the Forrester study found that these brands are now more likely to have dedicated budget specific to improving the customer experience than other companies. But it’s all paying off: Experience-driven businesses report an average revenue growth rate of 15% (compared to the 11% average growth from other companies) and 1.6x higher growth in brand awareness.

How do you pivot AI/machine learning to deliver CX at the highest level of engagement?

Leveraging AI and machine learning, marketers can break through the noise and surface only the most relevant customer experiences possible. These tools also give marketers the ability to get more granular and build individualized campaigns that are tailored at the 1:1 level. For example, leveraging functionality in Adobe Campaign powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, marketers can now predict the open rate of an email based on the words used in the subject line. We also highlighted a project last year from our research labs that’s aiming to predict customer churn based on how customers engage with emails.

AI and machine learning saves marketers valuable time and energy, automates manual tasks, uncovers data that was previously hidden, and frees up space to focus on the most important thing: Building better customer experiences.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jeremy.
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