Improving your customers’ experiences with your brand is a big deal. But how can a company make sense of all the information out there, reach out to their customers in a meaningful way, and not get drowned in the noise? The Adobe Experience Platform is designed to address those modern marketing challenges.

As the amount of information teams must manage grows, achieving a robust strategy for digital customer experiences gets more complicated. Your customers are interacting with your brand across multiple channels, and you have to be able to engage with them in real-time. All without overwhelming them or creating a disjointed customer experience.

This situation presents a huge opportunity and, at the same time, a significant challenge. But with the right tools —such as Adobe Experience Platform—, challenges can become the biggest opportunities.

The demands of evolving customer experiences call for integrated solutions: Rethinking real-time Customer Experience Management

The Adobe Experience Platform is a real-time customer data management platform that allows brands to unify customer profiles by sourcing data points from multiple channels.

You can quickly and easily make informed decisions about your customers, products, services, and marketing campaigns by using Adobe Experience Platform as your single source of data truth at the speed of business. Since it's all based on real-time customer data, you can easily deliver the right experience in any context.

Adobe Experience Platform works in real time. It takes less than 100 milliseconds from consumer action to decision and experience delivery. So, it's like having a workforce of marketing, sales, IT, and revenue professionals at your disposal.  

We'll dive into the basics of the Adobe Experience Platform with practical information vetted by experts in the field. The team goal? To help you become a brand that excels at providing memorable customer experiences.

Understanding the Adobe Experience Platform

With Adobe Experience Platform, you get a customer data management suite created from the ground up to satisfy the needs of marketing and tech professionals looking to build, optimize and manage customer experiences.

The main selling point of Adobe Experience Platform is the ability to act as a single source of customer data truth. In other words, your one-stop shop for accurate, updated and actionable customer data powered by best-in-class solutions for content management, analytics and marketing automation.

What challenges are marketers facing and how does Adobe Experience Platform fit into them?

Nowadays, the digital world is an exciting and constantly-evolving space with new challenges and shifting customer expectations that need to be met. Some of the issues companies are facing in this regard include:

  • Consumers' evolving preferences.
  • Privacy concerns.
  • Too many Martech tools.
  • Customer journey orchestration.
  • Data governance, silos, and fragmentation.
  • Lack of automation.
  • Different customer touchpoints.
  • Delivering seamless omnichannel experiences.
  • Personalized content.

Let's break them down and explore how Adobe Experience Platform will help you overcome them.  

1. The challenges of data collection: Forget about manually managing data.

Most solutions are not created to work together, so if you use multiple software from multiple vendors, chances are you are running data management issues. Let’s explore them:

  • Manual management: The lack of automated management solutions increases the chances of human errors and prevents data from being widely accessible and actionable across the organization.
  • Data silos and fragmented data: For many brands, the marketing, sales, and customer service teams are each their own silos: each has their own software stacks, processes, and their slice of customer data. This leads to every department having only part of the customer dataset, with mostly no way to share that data with others.

To truly harness your data and use it effectively, you need an automated solution that will help you manage all those different software and vendors, making sure that:

  • Data is where it needs to be.
  • Everything works in real time and is connected.
  • Everything is streamlined and accessible for everyone involved.
  • Everything can be measured for ROI.

The solution to all your data challenges? Adobe's Customer Data Platform (CDP). Let's explore exactly how Adobe's CDP can help you tackle this issue, connecting and intertwining all your data silos and allowing you to create personalized experiences specifically tailored to each customer.

With a data-driven approach, your Customer Data Platform will be the foundation of your customer-centric marketing strategy. It’s become an integral part of most CMOs’ and CX designers’ arsenals, as organizations recognize its essential role in their ability to drive business value.

Adobe’s CDP is an application built natively on Adobe Experience Platform. It collects, unifies, segments, personalizes, and activates customer data across multiple channels. It acts as a centralized source of customer data, capable of stitching together data fragments from multiple sources to create real-time customer profiles.

CDPs are designed to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts by giving you a single place to look at your customer information and ensuring it is correct and up to date. With it, you’ll be able to collect and share information across departments (marketing, customer service, IT, data science) and lines of business (B2C, B2B), breaking down silos.

In short, not only do Customer Data Platforms complement your marketing knowledge and experience —they reinforce it as well.  

2. Start delivering personalization at scale.

“Personalization” is no longer a buzzword. It’s one of the golden rules of modern marketing and goes back to one fundamental principle: understanding your customer and delivering experiences that feel tailor-made for them. Let's see what consumers say about personalization:

  • 91% are more likely to shop with brands that make offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.
  • 80% are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
  • 63% will stop buying from brands that use poor personalization tactics.

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Source: Adobe: Thinking beyond the third-party cookie.

Deliver personalization with the Real-Time Customer Profile

Adobe Experience Platform enables personalization at the individual level with the Real-Time Customer Profile feature, which builds a full view of each customer by combining data from multiple channels, including online, offline, CRM, and even third parties.

Furthermore, Adobe Experience Platform's Real-Time Customer Profile feature consolidates customer data into a unified view to offer an actionable, timestamped account of every interaction. This feature can boost your efforts and help your brand by:

  • Getting a 360-degree view of each customer by registering all the ways they interact with your brand.
  • Mapping the consumer's journey to identify trends and behaviors. By knowing where your customers stand in their journey you can develop strategies to get them closer to the purchase.
  • Ingesting data faster than ever, allowing you to personalize experiences with the power of AI.
  • Getting quick automated reactions. AEP's capabilities allow you to get millisecond-level access to data and trigger contextual experiences.

With a clear view of each customer’s journey that the Real-Time Customer Profile allows you to have, you’ll be able to deliver more relevant and consistent experiences across your entire organization.

3. The Martech software stack problem.

Currently, there are thousands of Martech software solutions available —and that number will only continue to grow.

How, then, are marketers still facing significant challenges if so many solutions exist? It's mostly due to a lack of integration, which goes back to silos and fragmentation.  

Most tools are not made to be compatible with other tools and the integration process may require talents your company may not have immediately available. So how does Adobe Experience Platform solve the Martech stack problem?  

The ultimate goal of Adobe Experience Platform is to provide the integrated tools and services brands need to make data-informed decisions for a better customer experience across channels. It uses Adobe’s existing assets and capabilities (such as the Real-Time Customer Profile feature) to provide a comprehensive solution.  

4. Data governance, security, and privacy.

In the last decade, there’s been a push for more transparency about the data that brands collect from customers and how they use it. You’ve probably heard a lot about:

  • Legislation such as the GDPR attempts to regulate its use.
  • Features like iOS 14.5’s App Tracking Transparency prevent smartphone apps from tracking your activity in other apps (potentially devastating return-on-ad spend in the process).
  • Web browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are cracking down on third-party cookies.

All of these changes lead to a safer experience for users. However, they also lead to less accessible user data for marketing teams and a much more fragmented web in general.

When it comes to your customer's privacy, it's important to take a proactive approach. Adobe Experience Platform helps you make sense of these rules and regulations. In addition, it helps you:

  • Keep customer data safe.
  • Understand and comply with regulations, standards, and terms of customers' consent while providing excellent customer experiences.
  • Manage individuals' requests and comply with global regulations more easily.
  • In addition to providing built-in data security measures, the fact that all data is stored in a single database reduces the possibility of leaks by reducing the number of places in which the data must be protected.
  • Keep up with future privacy regulations through its powerful, extensible architecture.
  • You’ll have the tools to make the best out of these limitations while keeping customer data safe.

Looking into the future with Adobe Experience Platform

Being a relatively new platform, diving into Adobe Experience Platform is an exciting learning process into a software already shaping how brands interact with the customer journey.

As such, there’s still much to discover. Over 2022 we've used it in different projects across multiple industries. In that time, we’ve learned a thing or two about its inner workings, but more importantly for you, we now understand client needs better.

This deeper understanding has led our Data and Insights Practice Leader, Alexis Artus, to come up with 3 key elements you should keep in mind when choosing an Adobe Experience Platform implementation partner:

  • Look for a partner who can discover and categorize all your data sources, use cases, and customer journeys to create an architecture that fits the reality of your brand. This will allow you to obtain better insights and design better experiences.
  • Must be able to implement that architecture in Adobe Experience Platform by setting all the schemas, datasets, and connections used to create the customer profile.
  • Must be able to guide your brand to useful insights from the solution that will satisfy their use cases and improve the customer journey.

Exploring such a vast set of tools will take time for both implementation partners and clients to understand and get comfortable with, but you can rest assured that Adobe Experience Platform is here to stay, and it will become an essential part of the Martech and CX spaces for years to come.

If your company is looking to boost its CXM practices, don't hesitate to reach out to us.