Adobe Unveils Real-Time Personalization for Marketers

Marketers often are at the forefront of adopting real-time analytics. That’s because it’s critical to influence decisions at the moment of customer purchase. With that goal in mind, Adobe today announced new capabilities in Adobe Campaign that let sellers create a scalable, personalized, real-time engagement tailored to a specific customer.

The latest Adobe Campaign leverages Adobe Analytics and Adobe Sensei machine learning algorithms that enable companies to create a set of messages for an individual buyer. These can be triggered by events such as an email, a push notification, in-application notice, a change in loyalty status or location, engagement with customer support – even a weather update.

“To drive real-time customer experiences, you really need to have access to the data,” said Ronell Hugh, global brand and product marketer for Adobe.

The new capabilities enable what the company calls Triggered Journeys, which are informed by all the data for an individual buyer, including demographics and transaction history, stored in the Adobe Experience customer database platform (CDP).

Adobe envisions organizations taking advantage of geo-fencing to drive a series of customer experiences involving multiple products and services within, say, an airport.

See also:Inside Adobe’s Big Data Strategy

To make that happen, the company had published a set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Organizations can use these to pull third-party data from a customer relationship management (CRM) application into the company CDP, for example, or to complementary applications.

At the core of all these capabilities is an ongoing Adobe effort to build a Big Data analytics platform as a service. Adobe is making a concerted case for creating dynamic customer experiences that leverage a wide variety of data. That effort, however, puts it on a collision course with other providers of marketing automation platforms, as well as with CRM vendors like Salesforce now fielding competing offerings.

Customer (Experience) is King

Regardless of their preferred approach, marketers are now racing to provide a better digital customer experience. Many companies have come to realize that the differences between their core products and services and their competitors are relatively minor. What tips the balance in their favor is the customer’s overall experience over time.

Increasingly, with customer experience involving everything from mobile applications to drones, the success or failure of any digital process transformation will depend on smartly applying analytics to events in real time.

Adobe argues that a series of subscription cloud services is a better alternative for organizations than building out their own Big Data analytics platform and associated applications.

It’s too early to say which model will be the surest path to success. Adobe is betting that many marketers would rather rely on a service available today versus waiting for their company’s internal IT teams to build that capability some day.

In the meantime, more customers are exposed to real-time application experiences on their mobile devices. It’s a good bet most will become less and less tolerant of impersonal legacy applications built on stale, batch processed data.