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Adobe Target empowers marketers to listen to customers

Adobe Solutions Consultant, Melissa Froehlich, explains how Adobe Target takes the gut feel out of decisions so deeper customer engagement can be based on testing and data, not the loudest voice in the marketing office.

How would you describe Adobe Target?

Adobe Target is a solution that offers marketers and analysts, and anybody working for the digital presence of a brand, the option to create personalised and optimised conversations with their clients. It’s used by a wide variety of companies in different industries, including Heathrow, Sky UK, Vodafone and BMW.

There are three core components of testing, personalisation, and recommendation.

You take the baseline of your page, and then on top of it you create experiences through the system’s testing, personalisation and recommendation components to create a unique user experience, all based on the behaviour and the datapoints your customers are sharing with you.

How do marketers use it on web pages?

Marketers usually look at the overall conversion and maybe see whether the performance of one page is not as well as they had hoped. They have a look on the page, to decide what they might change to make it more appealing to their customers or make it easier to navigate. After they implement a few small changes they go ahead and test if the new version or original is the better performer.

That scenario can be taken to the next level. For example, if a customer goes to your website and have logged into their account, they will have already subscribed to the newsletter meaning there is no need for a marketeer to present a newsletter subscription option so prominently. Instead, you can leave the space available for more relatable content for that customer.

Melissa Froehlich, Adobe Solutions Consultant

How does Target help personalise web sites for different groups?

You can use Target to ensure that a customer you know, perhaps they previously purchased from the brand, has the most relevant products shown to them. If you’re a newspaper, for example, and somebody always goes straight to the sports section, you can highlight sport article more prominently on the home page.

I was recently asked what my favourite example of personalisation is and, for me, it’s where a retailer goes beyond trying to push sales of a particular product they are focussing on, and concentrates instead on what I am interested in, perhaps picking up on what I looked at on my last visit. A good example of this is when I recently browsed a clothing store and was mid-way through purchasing a pair of jeans, but I didn't finish the order. I went back a few days later and the page highlighted what I had previously been looking at.

Looking at the bigger picture, beyond an individual page, what are marketers using Adobe Target for?

Ultimately, marketers are finding improvements at page level but they also know that it is not just about the colour of a button or where you position the call to action. The bigger picture comes from paying attention to the structure of the user journey.

Marketers want to understand the correlation of different functions from within the organisation which often means multiple people have different ideas on what they want to present and how it should be presented to customers. A performance manager may have a very different view from a salesperson about the path to conversion, for example. With Target, they can come up with really good test scenarios for each idea to see what really works well for each audience segment.

It empowers teams to work together to build new experiences that improve the customer journey by moving away from gut decisions and not having one person pushing through what they think is right. Instead, Target allows you to see what your clients tell you they want or need. It’s all about the data rather than always listening to the loudest voice in the room.

Adobe Target clearly has an impact on the customer journey, does it play a role in maximising marketing ROI as well?

Yes, it’s very helpful in empowering marketers to find the best way to increase overall sales, average order value or striking up conversations with customers that arrive from paid-for marketing campaigns.

A brand may be spending a lot of money on paid marketing to get people to come to a landing page but then notice a high drop off rate and, on first sight, they have no idea why that is happening.

They review the landing page to see why people might not be engaging with the content. In Target, they have the ability to run tests through a simple drag and drop interface and make changes to the page to create new experiences, so you can make sure you have the right content to engage users with.  So, for example, you could target a new group – say only those people who have come from a specific Facebook campaign – and have a 50:50 split of those going to the new and old landing pages.  It’s a good way of maximising the efficiency of their marketing budget.