Defining the Customer Journey with Adobe Campaign

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is defined as the path a customer takes with a brand. Traditionally, a pre-established journey has been defined, but the current reality is that each customer takes different paths and behaves dynamically depending on the situation or the channel, as noted in the Retail Barometer 2024. Hence the importance of defining all paths based on customer knowledge and not adapting the customer to the channel strategy.
It is also worth noting that more than 60% of Spanish retailers admit they have not defined their journey, compared to 34% who admit they have done so and also have it updated to their current customers. Given the need to understand customer behavior through the physical and digital store (Phygital), it is considered very necessary to have tools that allow collecting customer behaviors and, if possible, even redefining the journey in real-time.
Initially, 5 stages can be differentiated in the definition of a journey:

1. Awareness: a need arises for the customer. Information about a specific brand captures their attention.
2. Discovery: the brand's products or services perfectly match what the consumer is looking for.
3. Shop: the exploration of the brand's products begins to find the one that best suits their needs.
4. Purchase: once the right product is decided, they enter the purchase funnel, a critical moment in the process.
5. Post-purchase: while it is important for the purchase process to be frictionless, the after-sales service must also convey security and speed, strengthening future loyalty to our brand.

In each of these phases, it is important to collect feedback from our customers and thus have a journey adapted to the customer, thereby increasing our revenue and probably reducing the costs of the process chain.

Customer journey map

A first step is to build the customer journey map, which is nothing more than a visual representation of each of the stages, interactions, channels, and elements that a customer goes through during the entire purchase cycle. Adobe Campaign provides us with different tools to work on this map:

• Campaign management.
• Preferences/consent management.
• Segmentation.
• Customer profiles.
• Personalized offers.

Campaign Management

Adobe Campaign allows us to enhance campaign management by focusing on:

1. Planning: plan campaigns throughout the year and manage activities, budget, and results in advance on a single platform.
2. Automation: launch different messages (emails or push notifications) in real-time depending on how each customer interacts during the journey.
3. Rules: ability to configure different rules, for example, limiting the number of contacts to the customer per channel, thus reducing the possibility of fatigue. This configuration can be dynamic based on different factors and even through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), via Adobe Sensei. This AI allows us, for example, to predict the best time to send to each recipient and the likely churn rates based on historical engagement metrics.
4. Measurement: measure the campaign results by detecting its strengths or weaknesses. Create reports to analyze them more easily at the level of sending, campaign, user, or segment. It is important to highlight at this point the integration with Adobe Analytics where we can export this data for further exploitation as it is integrated with the rest of the analytics of our digital ecosystem.

Management of preferences/consents

Through Adobe Campaign's preference centers, we can track which products or topics interest our customers, what messages they want to receive, how often, and through which channels. This allows us to impact our customers in a more personalized way as they increasingly communicate their preferences to us. According to Euromonitor, 49% of digital consumers globally (ages 15 to 29) share information about their personal preferences with online brands.

Segmentation

Campaign allows us to create segments based on almost any customer profile variable. For example, we can segment by customer age, but target only those who have been inactive for X months through a specific promotion. Another different case would be in insurance companies, segmenting by customer, but targeting only the regular driver of the vehicle and not the policyholder.
These segments can later be used by channel or exported to other solutions of the Experience Cloud. It is important to highlight again the value provided by the integration with Adobe Analytics, as it allows us to combine all the information of our customers collected from other platforms (e-commerce, CDP…) and define even more significant segments.
Analyzing this large volume of data on customer behavior helps us identify important marketing opportunities, as well as enhance audience sharing to prepare our actions and campaigns. A particularly booming case is Retail Media and how retailers offer their platforms for other brands to place their ads in segmented and personalized campaigns, taking advantage of their traffic and channel audiences.

Customer profiles

Campaign offers the necessary flexibility to enrich customer profile data and add new attributes or tables. These profiles will be useful for subsequently generating more accurate segmentation, personalization, and reports that help us impact in a more appropriate way.
In addition to this flexibility, Campaign constitutes a platform where customer data from both online and offline channels can be unified in a simple and intuitive way. This is possible thanks to its easy integration with other data sources such as CRM, points of sale, or e-commerce through its APIs.

Personalized Offers

One of the main priorities for retailers today is hyper-personalization, that is, the adaptation of products, messages, and offers to the explicit, implicit, and emotional needs of each customer.
Campaign allows the creation of an offer catalog based on different rules, for example, based on a customer's purchase history. We can manage offers by weight or priorities and limit the number of times a customer sees a specific offer. Additionally, it allows us to personalize these offers according to different criteria such as location, customer lifetime value (CLV), or loyalty degree (NPS + churn rate).

Recap and Conclusions

In an increasingly expanded scenario among retailers where the customer is the center, it is therefore essential to study their behavior and needs, and for this, it is necessary to provide our teams with the best and most advanced technology. Adobe provides us with powerful tools that allow us, in a simple and dynamic way, to analyze our customers and impact them appropriately at each step of our Customer Journeys.
Each of the 5 stages described in this article is addressed through the alliance between Adobe and Seidor, which guarantees a complete solution, based on the market-leading solution Adobe Campaign.
The Seidor team combines the capabilities to implement the different scenarios covered in this article and has experience in multiple sectors both nationally and internationally.