Email marketing with Adobe Campaign
Why (email) marketing automation?
There’s no time like the present for marketeers and companies who wish to stand out when it comes to their online visibility. The old way of doing marketing no longer covers it and consumers are becoming more and more demanding of brands each day. Without relevant and personalised campaigns, chances are your marketing efforts are going to waste.
Now, more than ever, it is vital to show consumers the right content — relevant to them — at exactly the right time. As the on- and offline world merge together more and more, finding the right time to contact your customer is becoming more challenging every day.
Offering a unique experience through every channel, the so-called omni-channel approach, is gaining importance in marketing strategies. A good omni-channel marketing strategy also needs a proper marketing automation solution that can reach potential consumers in a semi-automated way.
Why Adobe Campaign?
At iDA Mediafoundry we’ve been working with the Adobe Experience Cloud solutions for quite a while. Over the years, we’ve implemented all the Adobe tools for a wide range of customers across different markets. One of those tools is Adobe Campaign, Adobe’s solution for all email-related marketing efforts in an omni-channel marketing strategy.
So why do we like Adobe Campaign?
1 — Customisation
Adobe Campaign, AC in short, gives you complete control over your email marketing. You can create custom email templates ranging from a pretty simple email template to a widely complex and customised template.
Because the tool is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud platform, it can also pull data from Adobe Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager to further personalise email campaigns. Which seamlessly brings us to the importance of storing your data in one centralised platform:
2 — Centralised data
Adobe Campaign can store a significant amount of consumer data, which allows you to heavily segment audiences for targeted email campaigns.
As an example, we will give you an example of hyper segmentation as used by one of our customers, a big player in the outdoor retail sector.
This customer runs a marketing campaign where they send out different emails based on the consumer’s buying behaviour.
One of the segments used in this campaign is the following: “All consumers between the ages of 25 and 40, who are loyal customers, who have a preference for fashion articles and who have bought brand X in the previous year, should get email A on that specific day.”
Segmentation is incredibly important for direct (e-)mailing. It allows for consumers to receive messages relevant to their needs. You wouldn’t want to send a discount voucher for a chocolate product to someone who hates chocolate.
Gathering the right data is key, so you need to make sure you only include data that is relevant for email campaigns. Once you have gathered this relevant data, it would be an enormous waste not to use this in your next email campaign.
Campaign and its use of data makes it an incredibly powerful platform, even more so when combined with other Adobe suite tools. You can, of course, plug in different databases other than the Adobe suite platforms, but we have seen the power of the Adobe ecosystem when you use all of their products together.
3 — Automatisation
Automatisation is another substantial strength of Adobe Campaign. AC allows you to create a simple “workflow” or a very sophisticated workflow that sends out different emails based on buying behaviour, as we have touched in the example above.
These workflows contain certain rules and triggers so that Campaign automatically sends the right emails to the right audience once you have set up a workflow & segmentation.
Below is an example of a Campaign workflow.
Once the workflows are established, you can run campaigns automatically without having to manually interfere.
4 — Omni-channel solution
As mentioned a few times already, Adobe Campaign becomes especially powerful when combined with other Adobe solutions. Using the right tools together, a customer who purchases a product right before your campaign goes out will be pulled out of the segment before your email is sent.
This way, the client will not get the (now) irrelevant communication, making sure your end-client has the highest possible customer experience by not swamping him with messages that “feel like spam”.
Conclusion
It all comes down to this: if you can reach your customers in a fast and personalised way, you create an excellent customer experience. Your customer will remember you and appreciate your brand even more.
It doesn’t take a big company to be big on marketing. Any company, big or small, that implements high-standard marketing strategies can generate big results, as long as they send relevant information to their specific segments at exactly the right time.
