Selecting the right customer engagement tool from Adobe

At CACI, we have been working with the Adobe Experience Cloud for over 12 years, helping clients maximise the value they get from their investment in the platform, delivering award winning outcomes and producing significant revenue streams as a result. 

We’re proud to be an Adobe Gold Partner and are widely recognised as a thought leader and specialist, especially around Adobe’s campaign and journey orchestration offerings.

In this series we dive into the Adobe upgrade pathway and discover the pros and cons of each version, key upgrade considerations, and enable you to decide which one suits your needs best. 

How will businesses be affected by Adobe’s latest upgrade pathway?

Following Adobe’s recent announcement that Adobe Campaign v8 (ACv8) and Adobe Journey Optimiser (AJO) represent the future of their marketing automation and journey orchestration offering, businesses currently relying on older versions of Adobe Campaign Classic and Standard are strongly encouraged to transition to either AJO or ACv8.  

For B2B clients, Marketo Engage remains Adobe’s core marketing automation solution, alongside a newly released B2B editions of the ‘Real-Time Customer Data Platform’ and ‘Adobe Journey Optimizer’ 

While both AJO and ACv8 boast robust features, the process of selecting which one is most appropriate for your needs requires careful consideration to ensure you are setup to enable long-term customer success and CRM scalability. 

With change comes opportunities for businesses to evolve their CRM programmes with the new capabilities of the Adobe Tech stack, such as utilising new channels.  

So, how can businesses decide which of these tools will be right for them? 

Face-off: Adobe Campaign v7 vs v8 

The console version of Adobe Campaign v8 is very similar to v7. Until now, the primary reason to migrate would be to take advantage of faster data processing and integrations with other Adobe products.  

The new web UI however will be attractive to lots of AC customers, offering a much more marketer-friendly interface for less technical users, and will appeal to clients currently using the web-based Adobe Campaign Standard. 

One consideration with a move to v8 is that it includes the additional layer of support provided through Adobe’s new Managed Cloud Service.

Is Adobe Campaign v8 right for my business?

In our opinion, v8 is an incredibly versatile tool and is perfect for delivering complex campaigns at scale for businesses. Those who are on ACS are in for a significant upgrade given the additional capability and scope for customisation offered by the tool.  

Comparative to ACS, Adobe Campaign is a much more customisable and extensible tool and can be leveraged to meet very bespoke requirements as a result. As per ACS, at its heart is a fully relational and extendable data model. However, unlike ACS, you are not limited to a single set of rules governing sending requirements and this can be bespoke to different targeting requirements. For example, having different rules for Newsletters, automated campaigns, and other different types of marketing communications.  

Some examples of custom implementations of Adobe Campaign v8 completed by CACI include:  

1. A custom integration with OPTA to incorporate live football results and statistics to personalise a football results newsletter for a publisher based on a customer’s favourite team.
2. Custom integration with an external mobile marketing platform to trigger push notifications and in-app messages from campaigns orchestrated within Adobe Campaign.
3. Creation of a custom web app interface for a gaming client to allow their local venue managers to create basic campaigns to their local customers.  

One consideration of Adobe Campaign v8 is it does not offer a RESTful API. However, its SOAP API is extensive and can be used for any required implementation, such as data integration, triggering workflows or sending transactional messages via the Message Centre.  

Introducing Real-time journey orchestration with AJO

Adobe Campaign is built on a traditional relational database. While this fully extendable data model makes it well-suited for advanced batch segmentation and personalisation campaigns, it is not as well suited to real-time, journey-based orchestration use cases that some newer customer engagement platforms support.  

Adobe’s answer for these use cases is its Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) platform, built on Adobe Experience Platform. AJO offers the ability to build 1:1 journey-based, triggered experiences at scale. E.g. For anyone wanting to build seamless omni-channel personalised experiences at scale then AJO is the platform to consider 

Additionally, with support for web and mobile in-app messaging alongside DM, SMS, push and email, the platform makes for a compelling choice for clients looking to leverage these channels and respond to real-time, streaming data. AJO can also leverage the existing data in AEP to enrich the incoming event and further personalise the customer journey.

Is AJO right for my business?

We believe Adobe Journey Optimiser (AJO) stands out as an excellent real-time journey orchestration platform. It being underpinned by AEP means that it can leverage much more complex data structures than alternative customer engagement platforms, so it will no doubt appeal to clients facing more complex data needs, especially those who have not yet invested in a CDP and will therefore benefit from other products within the AEP stable.  

Many clients may still need some of the more traditional features that come from an enterprise grade campaign management platform, however, especially if they need to orchestrate complex batch campaigns (e.g. insurance renewals). A combination of Adobe Campaign and AJO will therefore appeal to clients looking for that perfect blend of traditional batch and real-time triggered orchestrated journeys. The improved Campaign -> AEP integrations that also come with AC v8 make this combination much easier to manage.  

CACI are Gold Adobe partners and have hands on experience planning and migrating into the Adobe Experience Cloud.

Download our whitepaper series to explore the Adobe upgrade pathway and discover the pros and cons of each version, key upgrade considerations, and enable yourself to decide which one suits your needs best.

Should you need independent help when planning your Adobe Campaign upgrade, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with our experts.