July 1, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

The Road to Omnichannel Marketing Success

the next several months worked to build its marketing cloud around six solutions—Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Campaign. A reincarnation of Neolane technology improved by Adobe's ease-of-use functionality, Campaign is arguably Adobe's strongest feature, and is the one that makes the company a force to be reckoned with when it comes to building new-age omnichannel campaigns.

"Adobe Campaign enables marketers to plan and execute [omnichannel] campaigns from a single environment and market to customers individually based on a centralized, real-time customer profile, which consists of purchasing behavior, loyalty information, and other data points," Mathieu Hannouz, senior product marketing manager for Adobe Campaign, explains.

Additionally, Hannouz says, Adobe Campaign can optimize campaigns by drawing in information from other solutions on Adobe's marketing cloud. Using Adobe Social, for example, marketers can create social campaigns and track their performance alongside other campaigns, while Adobe Experience Manager can help ensure that campaigns are consistent across channels and result in streamlined—not redundant or disparate—brand experiences.

Typically, customers that use Adobe Campaign for omnichannel outreach start with an email campaign, "the most logical point of origin for most omnichannel endeavors," Hopkins says. After winning the NHL Stanley Cup in 2012, the Los Angeles Kings, for example, turned to Adobe to gain a better, more complete view of their fans and integrate multiple data streams including transactional data, campaign responses, social media activity, and other Web behaviors.

Using Adobe Campaign, the Kings and Adobe partner FanOne Marketing worked together to design and execute marketing campaigns, including a holiday pack email offer. For this campaign, the Kings' strategy was to automatically segment individuals who exhibited certain behaviors for a series of follow-up messages. "This is where context-based content wins out over traditional campaigns, Hannouz explains. "Rather than sending the same three emails to the same group of customers, the Adobe Campaign technology can pick up on certain behaviors on various channels, like the e-commerce site, and respond to those behaviors specifically," he adds.

The solution eliminates redundant messaging to customers who are clearly not going to make a purchase, and sends targeted, personalized messages to customers who exhibited a behavior that shows interest, such as placing the holiday ticket pack in their online shopping cart, for example. In the series of three emails, the second email doubled the revenue of the first, while the third email generated the highest return per email sent. Within two months of the deployment, the franchise drew in roughly $70,000 in revenue from the campaign.

With a solid email strategy in place, the Kings organization turned its attention to another channel—the microsite—to drive online season ticket renewals. The Kings' marketing team built a personalized URL and microsite for each existing season ticket holder, and promoted the feature through email outreach, promising savings and benefits along with other exclusive content. Following the implementation, renewals jumped by 10 percent. Again, context plays a pivotal role in this campaign, Hannouz maintains. "It's not just bombarding customers with offers—it's determining who the most loyal customers are, and giving them this special opportunity," he says.

Adobe has helped the Kings organization integrate social media outreach into its omnichannel campaign as well. For example, the team recently launched a Twitter contest, sending followers a direct message detailing the prizes and encouraging them to enter after completing a registration form that asked for their names, email addresses, and Twitter handles. "The Twitter campaign generated a six to seven percent response rate, netting hundreds of new contacts in our database," Aaron LeValley, director of CRM for the team, said in a statement issued by Adobe. "The key is that we were able to identify anonymous followers, make them marketable via other channels, and start assigning them value," he said.

There's more: According to Hannouz, Adobe is one of few vendors that can harness offline data and merge it with online data quickly and effectively enough to launch large-scale, real-time campaigns. "When you buy a ticket to a game online, chances are we've got your email address. Once that ticket is scanned at the venue, we then have the capability to email customers and give them special offers on their mobile devices. We could send a coupon for merchandise, promote the beer available in the VIP room, or encourage them to Tweet with a certain hashtag," Hannouz says. "That is context-based content, and that is how you deliver an omnichannel experience," he adds.

Though Adobe's solution is turning some industry heads with its "rich, well integrated collection of new tools," Adobe is still "missing many pieces of the puzzle," Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, suggests. The company doesn't, for example, offer loyalty and advocacy marketing solutions to match those of Oracle, and though Adobe Campaign has powerful email marketing tools, Adobe doesn't have a standalone email marketing solution like Salesforce.com's ExactTarget, he says. With all the buzz around Adobe, comparisons were bound to be made, and it was only a matter of time before Oracle and Salesforce.com made moves of their own as well.

At the time this article was written, Oracle had just officially unveiled its marketing cloud, a new platform made up of marketing

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