Feature
Adobe Campaign Completes Marketing Cloud
When Adobe announced it had spent US$ 600 million on acquiring campaign management company Neolane, we certainly didn't think it would be integrated this quickly. However, Campaign now joins Experience Manager, Social, Target, Analytics and Media Optimizer to complete Adobe's headlong leap into the marketing technology world.
Most people know Adobe from its creative tools. Things like Photoshop and Lightroom are some of the company's biggest sellers, so the company's commitment to digital marketing tools is a side of the company many still don't really understand. Now with a dedicated campaign management tool in the form of Neolane, customers that are already using tools like Experience manager or Analytics can marry those capabilities with an integrated marketing automation system.
The ability to automate marketing activities across channels is what data and digital technology are allowing companies to do in 2013, Matthew Langie, Adobe's senior director of strategic marketing said at an Adobe event this week.
Companies have to figure out how best to connect with customers, and because so many of those connections take place online, organizations that can deliver relevant, personalized campaigns have the advantage, he said. Already in 2013, Adobe has made updates to its Social, Experience Manager, Analytics, and most recently Target segments of its Marketing Cloud, and now it's added Campaign.
Campaign Connects Online and Offline Experiences
Langie introduced a series of customers at the Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium that had been using the company's marketing tools, and a company called Ulta, a beauty products supplier, has been using Campaign (Neolane) for nearly a year. Ulta has an 11 million member loyalty program, and it uses that program to collect customer data. It then uses Campaign clean the data that comes in via a daily feed.
The system uses something called a harmonization tool to find duplicate entries, and then decide which one is the correct entry, for example. If the same person's contact information shows up twice, Campaign can tell which one includes the proper email address. Ulta can then segment the data and select lists of customers to add to a particular campaign.
Before implementing Campaign, Ulta sent out the same emails to all of its loyalty customers, and now it has over 1,000 different email templates it uses to target particular kinds of customers. Ulta will send out an email to customers when they become platinum level members, for example, and if their email isn't known, a direct mailer will go out. Campaign also recognizes special events like birthdays, and a message can be automatically sent in those instances as well.
Adobe Eats its Own Dog Food with Marketing Tools
It may not be surprising to learn that Adobe uses its own marketing tools to run its Adobe.com website, but we did learn that website gets 80 million unique visits per week. Rob Giglio, VP of ww ecommerce and retail is in charge of that side of Adobe.com, and he joined Langie on stage at the symposium to share just how the company's various tools have improved the site.
"We used to have pathetic conversion rates," Giglio said.
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"The site used to be very rigid, and quite HTML heavy. It was hard to do things like A/B testing. Experience Manager has allowed us to develop a common framework of templates and components, and we reduced our page count by 40% because of it."
Many of those millions of page visitors are students looking for discounted Photoshop subscriptions, as it turns out, and Adobe can now use its own marketing tools to quickly address that particular segment of users on its home page.
When Adobe switched its creative products pricing from licenses to a subscription model this year, this situation came in quite handy because traffic went way up with the news. Before the Marketing Cloud, Adobe wouldn't have been able to respond in the same way.
Campaign Road Map Yet to Come
While Campaign is indeed now part of the Marketing Cloud, a full product road map and integration plan has yet to be released, Suresh Vittal, VP of strategy for Campaign, announced in a blog post. For now however, Adobe customers can take advantage of the product, if not all of its full fledged capabilities.
Included in Campaign are the ability to orchestrate marketing campaigns across timelines and manage budgets, activities and results in one place. Additionally, automating campaigns based on customer journey interactions and activity is possible, along with automating data management and teamwork processes.
Campaign allows customers' complete profiles to come into view, and their preferences, buying history and behavior are all able to be targeted across programs. Also, because offline and online channels are integrated with Campaign, direct mail, call center and point of sale channels can be enhanced.
This is really only the beginning of what Adobe plans to do with Neolane, and even though it's not fully integrated yet, it's good to see the company made it a priority to give customers access to it sooner rather than later.
