The customer journey for any user on a platform or application begins with consumer awareness and customer engagement. Until recently, the overarching trend of the customer journey was product-centric rather than customer-centric.
As the shift is made to a customer-focused approach, we see customers in charge of their journey. With the introduction of the Adobe Journey Optimizer to the Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe set out to deliver a product within the Adobe Experience Platform that assists marketers in driving customer engagement through the customer journey.
What is Adobe Journey Optimizer?
Built on the Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer helps businesses plan and manage customer journeys across different channels, like email, social media, or in-person interactions. Users can also import data from external data sources to collect information from other systems and use it in the journey context.
Using Adobe Journey Optimizer, businesses can determine the next best action to take while giving them personalized experiences that are relevant to their needs in real time. Journey Optimizer helps improve customer experience by driving customer action and increasing the chances of making a sale.
Customer journey optimization allows you to figure out how customers interact with your business across multiple touchpoints and use that information to guide and influence a customer’s end-to-end experience.
Adobe Journey Optimizer: Vision
Adobe Journey Optimizer came about as a way to bring together brand-initiated and customer-initiated moments. Previously, merging these two ideas together has been a point of friction for marketers as inbound and outbound channels often aren’t connected.
Adobe took the approach of looking at 6 markets to research how channel communications are being managed. Based on this research, Adobe set out to provide focused improvements in these areas:
Audient-based, one-to-one experiences for the customer
Merging of inbound and outbound channels
Experimentation, personalization, and intelligent decisioning engines
Adobe Journey Optimizer: Strategy
The overall strategy for Adobe Journey Optimizer was developed by Adobe working alongside their customers to create a tool that focuses on audiences, journeys, channels, and content. To keep experience optimization at the forefront of Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe also focuses on how to create the most optimal journey for a customer. This brings together the acts of orchestration, experimentation, measurement, decisioning, and governance to solve the needs of any brand to drive better customer interactions.
Adobe Journey Optimizer for Customer Engagement
In today’s world, the average customer is plugged into an estimated four devices at any one point in time. Adobe Journey Optimizer has set out to orchestrate any channel for any touchpoint with every interaction through omnichannel orchestration.
A customer may have the ability to choose what type of communication works best for them (i.e., email, text message, in-app notification, push notification, etc.), and Adobe Journey optimizer can assist with delivering communications in real-time or scheduled marketing campaigns.
The goal is to provide consistent conversation with the customers in the way they feel most comfortable, leading to more customer engagement!
Adobe Journey Optimizer for Hyper-Personalization
Another emerging trend within customer-focused user journeys is hyper-personalization based on a real-time customer profile. For instance, using the message designer marketers can send personalized communication directed at specific individuals or they can elect to send audience-based batch communications.One use case for this would be if a product that was in a customer’s cart was out of stock at one point in time and then available weeks later, the marketer could send a directed communication to customers who had the product in their cart but were unable to complete an order.
Adobe Journey Optimizer also uses the principle of active listening to respond within milliseconds to any signal which can be layered into the context of a user’s customer journey.
This is being used today in a variety of ways outside of traditional marketing campaigns from geofencing notifications when a customer is near a store location or sending weather alerts based on a customer’s flight itinerary.
This functionality also allows for additional optimization of non-marketing-specific use cases such as password resets, two-factor authentication, and safety information based on a user’s location. 
Adobe Journey Optimizer will also allow for the experimentation of these hyper-personalized customer journeys using a drag and drop interface. This can be done by inputting hypothesized variables into the Journey Optimizer which will provide data supporting how successful the new customer journey may be.
Experimentation, journeys, campaigns, and channels can be configured within Adobe Journey Optimizer by a marketer without development support. Reports and visualizations are also available to drill down on specific data points and attributes.
Get Started with Adobe Journey Optimizer
Adobe Journey Optimizer provides marketers with powerful tools to drive consumer awareness and engagement. It’s clear that customers are looking for a customer-centric approach from any website or application and want to feel in control of their interactions while still receiving valuable communications.
Omnichannel communications and hyper-personalization within Adobe Journey Optimizer allow marketers to fulfill the needs of their customers, and so much more.
Do you need assistance with Adobe Journey Optimizer? As an Adobe Platinum partner, we can help! Reach out today to schedule a consultation or for more information about our services.
About The Author:
Brandi Morillas, Sr. Adobe Product Manager | Sagepath Reply
Brandi is an Adobe Experience Manager expert with an extensive background in account and product management. As an Adobe Certified Business Practitioner with over 12 years of experience, Brandi assists clients in bringing their vision to life.
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