Getting Started with the Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform
Transformative digital experiences have revolutionized how companies engage with customers. Contender firms leverage digital strategies to disrupt traditional industries, while established enterprises are deep into their digital transformation journeys. Modern customer expectations largely drive this shift, since modern consumers as today’s customer demands engaging, seamless, and tailored-to-them brand interactions. A recent study by Forrester underscores this notion, revealing that customer-obsessed organizations reported 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better customer retention than those at non-customer-obsessed organizations.
Recognizing that customer experience is pivotal to acquisition, engagement, and retention, software vendors are focused on helping businesses meet these demands. Leading the pack are technology giants like Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and notably, Adobe. Adobe has dedicated itself to making experience management the linchpin of its marketing, product, and technology strategies.
At the heart of Adobe's offerings is the Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC). The Adobe Experience Cloud encompasses a comprehensive suite of software solutions, platform capabilities, and foundational data tools, that enable companies to amplify customer engagement. It's no wonder that 74% of Fortune 500 companies, including the largest corporations, harness the power of the Adobe Experience Cloud today.
Key Differences Between Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform
As Adobe introduced Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), the difference between Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform has increasingly been questioned. Are they the same thing? Is Adobe Experience Platform Adobe’s Customer Data Platform product? Is Adobe Experience Platform a separate product? What does Adobe Experience Platform do?
To clarify, the Adobe Experience Cloud is the entire suite of Adobe’s software products across marketing, analytics, content, and commerce, while the Adobe Experience Platform is a foundational data layer that collects, standardizes, governs, applies AI insights, and unifies data to be utilized by various Adobe Experience Cloud products.
Adobe Experience Platform is a powerful foundation. It centralizes data across multiple Adobe applications, reducing data redundancies, increasing overall processing efficiency, and enabling real-time integration across products. Adobe has made significant investments to build native products that sit on top of the Adobe Experience Platform, including Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics. Adobe continues to invest in enhancements based on its existing suite of offerings to leverage the Adobe Experience Platform foundation across the entire Adobe Experience Cloud. All these products and solutions work together to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
Due to the vast number of products within Adobe Experience Cloud and the robust data foundation of Adobe Experience Platform, it may be overwhelming to know what the products are and how they fit together. Whether you are using just one product or have already invested and integrated many into your organization's stack, reviewing newly added products and capabilities can provide clarity and hopefully enable you to realize more value from your technology stack.
Content, Commerce, and Workflows
Adobe Experience Manager
At the core of the marketing cloud is Adobe Experience Manager. Adobe Experience Manager is an experience management platform that allows marketers to create customized digital experiences with little to no IT involvement.
Adobe Experience Manager comes in a variety of available offerings:
- Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Core content management system (CMS) product offering for building digital web experiences
- Adobe Experience Manager Assets: Core Digital Asset Management (DAM) product offering, with capabilities for managing an organization’s digital media (images, video, etc.)
- Adobe Experience Manager Screens: Advanced Adobe Experience Manager functionality for creating, managing, and deploying digital displays across online and in-venue experiences
- Adobe Experience Manager Forms: Enterprise-scale data collection capabilities through the ability to build, author, and deploy form experiences
- Adobe Experience Manager Guides: Integrated content management capabilities for structured content authoring, typically using the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard, used to simplify the creation and distribution of product documentation, user guides, support content, and other structured content types.
Adobe Experience Manager is now primarily a cloud-based offering. As enabling personalized experiences at scale has become critical, Adobe has focused recent investments in integrations with other Adobe products that enable an organization’s content supply chain (Adobe Workfront, Creative Cloud, and GenStudio), and capabilities that facilitate rapid and flexible development of web content (Edge Delivery Services).
Adobe Commerce
Adobe acquired Magento and rebranded it to Adobe Commerce in 2018. Adobe Commerce is a powerful platform for B2B and B2C businesses of any size. It enables companies to launch and manage online storefronts quickly without starting from scratch. Adobe Commerce Cloud provides a secure, high-performance foundation, supporting scalable, PCI-compliant app development in a serverless environment. With ready-to-use services and an extensibility framework and orchestration layer, it facilitates rapid deployment, customization, and integration, utilizing modern composable commerce solutions critical for enterprise success and cost reduction.
Adobe Workfront
Acquired in late 2020, Adobe Workfront is a project and resource management tool that supports marketing operations across the entire Adobe Experience Cloud. Workfront is a cloud-based, cross-functional work management system designed to help teams streamline workflows, manage projects, and enhance collaboration.
With features like customizable project request forms, resourcing tools, and robust project planning, Workfront improves productivity and creates efficient operational environments. From project inception, task assignments are made easy with templates and request routing, while program status and reporting are handled with customizable dashboards and views.
Workfront sits at the center of all marketing operations and is the heart of the Content Supply Chain, enabled through direct integration with Adobe Experience Manager. This integration provides easy asset publishing and management as projects progress through centralized project orchestration, asset reviews, documentation tracking, and publishing. Advanced content approval workflows allow users to upload assets that can be automatically routed for appropriate stakeholder feedback or approval.
Data Insights & Audiences
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics facilitates in-depth web and mobile app analytics and data insights. It plays a crucial role in helping businesses understand customer behavior across digital channels. By leveraging real-time data and advanced segmentation capabilities, Adobe Analytics enables organizations to track and analyze key performance metrics, discover trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize digital user experiences. Its seamless ability to integrate with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions allows for a holistic approach to digital marketing; marketers can personalize content and campaigns effectively across web, email, and other channels, based on the engagement activity captured through web and app interactions. These integrations ensure that insights from Adobe Analytics can be applied to improve customer engagement and drive business growth.
Customer Journey Analytics
Customer Journey Analytics is the newest analytics offering within the Adobe Experience Cloud, and it expands on the functionality available through Adobe Analytics. Leveraging the Adobe Experience Platform foundation, Customer Journey Analytics pulls together disparate data sources, seamlessly integrating web, mobile, email, and even offline data, such as in-store transactions or call center logs, to report on the entire customer journey. This unified data stream allows for robust end-to-end experience analysis, letting users slice and dice data through a user-friendly interface and sophisticated AI-driven insights. Adobe intentionally kept much of the easy-to-use Adobe Analytics workspace interface, making the transition to using Customer Journey Analytics painless.
Within the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem, Customer Journey Analytics plays a pivotal role by offering intuitive visualization tools and capabilities like real-time analytics and customizable dashboards that highlight key performance indicators and customer journey touchpoints. Its ability to analyze historical and real-time data empowers organizations to not only understand past customer behaviors, but to anticipate what they might do next, enabling proactive strategy adjustments.
To some, the differences between Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics are unclear, so the best way to view capabilities across these tools is as follows:
- Adobe Analytics: Is limited to capturing web and app event data, whereas Customer Journey Analytics takes the same reporting and analysis tools from Adobe Analytics and applies them across multiple data sources to report on the entire customer journey.
- Customer Journey Analytics: Is also natively built on the modernized Adobe Experience Platform infrastructure, including the edge network, data lake, and query service, with options like Healthcare Shield for HIPAA compliance.
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Adobe Real-Time CDP facilitates the collection of B2C and B2B data across systems, unifies it into real-time profiles for both known and unknown users, and creates audiences that can be leveraged for cross-channel marketing activation.
As a natively built tool on the Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Real-Time CDP serves as the core engine for aggregating and harmonizing customer data from various touchpoints, such as online interactions, offline transactions, and third-party systems. Its primary role is that of a traditional Customer Data Platform, leveraging in-depth identity management capabilities to build enriched, unified customer profiles that are updated in real-time, providing businesses with a holistic view of their customers.
These enriched profiles facilitate hyper-personalized marketing efforts so businesses can tailor experiences and communications that resonate based on individual customer needs and preferences. Adobe Real-Time CDP seamlessly integrates with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, such as Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, to enhance their capabilities with deeper insights and robust audience segmentation. Perhaps most exciting, however, are the integrations with Adobe Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics. With all three products sitting on the same Adobe Experience Platform foundation, users can easily leverage shared menus and native capabilities across tools to take advantage of added marketing efficiencies.
For example, segments created in Adobe Real-Time CDP are immediately accessible through the Adobe Journey Optimizer interface for use in campaigns and journeys. Similarly, segments can be seamlessly created and shared within the Customer Journey Analytics interface as marketers uncover new or high-performing audience groups throughout their reporting and analytics activities.
In addition to marketing activation, Adobe Real-Time CDP provides key features related to data management and usage, such as data governance across consent collection, data labeling, policy creation, and data usage enforcement, as well as capabilities for sophisticated machine learning models to analyze customer behavior patterns, enabling predictive analytics and proactive engagement strategies.
Adobe Real-Time CDP is available in three versions:
- Business to Consumer (B2C) – for organizations focused purely on B2C marketing
- Business to Business (B2B) – for organizations focused purely on B2B marketing
- Business to Person (B2P) - for organizations focused on marketing to both business and consumer audiences
Adobe Mix Modeler
In an omnichannel world with ever-increasing technical and regulatory challenges to comprehensive data collection, attributing purchases or other conversions to marketing channels and campaigns proves consistently challenging. Tools like Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics can capture a picture of marketing touchpoints that precede conversions, but the data provided is not necessarily sufficient to make optimal decisions about marketing budgets and effectiveness.
Enter marketing mix modeling, a methodology used to estimate marketing tactics’ influence on ROI, overcoming technical limitations to understand the relationships between channels and conversions. Due to the complexity of creating and managing these models, organizations that invest in them are typically only able to refresh them annually and are challenged in scaling them to multiple brands or lines of business. Adobe Mix Modeler combines measurement and marketing tactic planning into a single application to facilitate scalability. As marketers face increasing pressures to maximize marketing budgets and demonstrate the impact of their efforts, this unification helps users efficiently forecast plans and better understand campaign performance across paid, owned, and earned channels.
Adobe Mix Modeler is powered by Adobe Sensei, an AI-as-a-service framework, specifically geared toward maximizing marketing results through training and advanced analytics modeling. The offering components include:
- Unified Marketing Mix and Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling – ability to unify modeling data for consistent results and align outcomes on shared learnings at individual touchpoint levels, and overall marketing allocation levels
- Budget Optimizer – informs budget allocations needed across activities to meet defined goals
- Scenario Planner – simulates the impacts & trade-offs of results across different budget allocation options
Customer Journeys
Adobe Campaign
At its core, Adobe Campaign is a cross-channel campaign management platform that primarily supports batched messaging to known customers across email, SMS, and mobile push channels. It provides real-time transactional messaging via API calls for messages like order confirmations, password resets, and more. The platform provides deep segmentation and audience enrichment capabilities and is best used to deploy outbound, batched-and-scheduled, audience-based, personalized campaigns in alignment with a set marketing calendar. The platform can also support standard segment-based, multi-touch journeys.
In general, Adobe Campaign has robust capabilities for segment-based activities, where entire groups of recipients receive the same experience or messaging at the same time along the same path.
Adobe Journey Optimizer
Adobe Journey Optimizer is a journey orchestration platform that focuses on activating and managing personalized customer journey experiences at scale. Adobe Journey Optimizer stands out in the market by combining capabilities typically found in separate platforms. It supports batch campaigning commonly associated with cross-channel campaign management, and enables real-time omnichannel customer experiences and offer decisioning, characteristic of journey orchestration and decisioning platforms—all within a single, unified tool.
Adobe Journey Optimizer is an open and extensible platform. While native activation channels include email, SMS, Mobile Push, In-App, Direct Mail and Web, the activation possibilities are now endless using Adobe Journey Optimizer’s “Custom Actions” to integrate with systems that support API integrations, including call centers or kiosks. Adobe Journey Optimizer Offer Decisioning also allows for the creation of a centralized offer library that serves up personalized offers and content across native Adobe Journey Optimizer channels using the platform interface and across external third-party systems using the Adobe Offer Decisioning APIs.
Adobe Journey Optimizer is one of many Adobe tools built natively on Adobe Experience Platform. Adobe Journey Optimizer itself has data management and reporting capabilities, but powerful integrations with Adobe Real-Time CDP and Customer Journey Analytics (also built natively on Adobe Experience Platform) extend Adobe Journey Optimizer capabilities to provide robust 360-degree profile management, identity management, audience management, and full-funnel journey insights in support of marketing activation and optimization initiatives.
Marketo Engage
Adobe acquired Marketo in the fall of 2018 and renamed it Marketo Engage, adding B2B-specific marketing capabilities to Adobe Experience Cloud. Marketo is essentially the B2B counterpart to Adobe Campaign. The platform has excelled in the business-to-business space, supporting email, social, web, event, and webinar marketing initiatives for roughly two decades, emphasizing lead management and account-based marketing.
Clients typically glean the most value from Marketo when integrated with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, such as Salesforce CRM, so marketing and sales teams can take advantage of the interaction capabilities, like Lead Scoring, Target Account Management, and other add-ons like Sales Insights.
For example, with Lead Scoring, Marketo provides the ability to automate personalized marketing messages and track user activity so leads and contacts can be scored and moved from “marketing-qualified leads” to “sales-qualified leads” for further nurturing.
With Target Account Management, Marketo identifies and manages target accounts, automates personalized Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns, and measures account engagement alongside the impact of sales and marketing activity. With Sales Insights, key information about lead and contact engagement is visible to sales teams within the CRM via a real-time dashboard highlighting the most qualified leads and opportunities, along with their recent interactions with the brand.
While initial investments after the acquisition were minimal, Adobe has shown renewed investments in all things B2B, with optimizations planned for the Marketo UI and Adobe Experience Cloud stack integrations, along with the introduction of Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B (see below) to infuse Marketo with more advanced B2B capabilities.
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition (AJO B2B) is the most recent addition to the Adobe Experience Cloud. It brings the journey canvas from Adobe Journey Optimizer into the B2B realm to support marketing maturity across lead and account-based marketing communication efforts. With this release, Adobe is a leader in a new platform category called B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms. B2B Revenue Marketing Platforms help bridge lead-centric strategies (narrowly focused on the individual contact/lead), with account-based marketing strategies (broadly focused on an account as a whole), through advanced buying group capabilities (focused on the right intersection of people, account, and product-specific interest). This includes related B2B data management, identity resolution, and omnichannel orchestration capabilities, all of which are key capabilities found in Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition.
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is an extension of Marketo, designed to cater specifically to the unique journey orchestration demands of the B2B market. The platform aims to harmonize lead and account-based marketing efforts by defining decision-maker roles, outlining their functions within a buying group, scoring buying groups, and enabling optimal strategies to engage various groups within target accounts through AI-generated content and well-orchestrated omnichannel journeys.
As an extension of Marketo, efficiencies can be gained through out-of-the-box integrations that allow marketers to leverage current campaigns, workflows, and assets that are already set up within Adobe Marketo Engage as part of their Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B journey activations.
Adobe Target
Adobe Target is Adobe Experience Cloud’s go-to tool for activating web personalization. Target enables businesses to tailor digital experiences to individual users by allowing easy content testing and optimization. Through its advanced A/B and multivariate testing capabilities, Adobe Target facilitates a thorough understanding of customer preferences and engagement, helping ensure highly relevant and personalized experiences. Moreover, it integrates seamlessly with other Adobe Experience Cloud products, like Adobe Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe Experience Manager, to deliver coordinated, cross-channel content and leverage data-driven insights for continual experience optimization.
By harnessing machine learning and AI through Adobe Sensei, Adobe Target automates decision-making processes to enhance user engagement and conversion rates, rendering it invaluable for marketers striving to create impactful and personalized customer journeys across digital properties.
Adobe Journey Optimizer does offer some web personalization capabilities, but it is not a replacement for Adobe Target and is best used for “last-mile personalization.” Last-mile personalization is where content is personalized within a single web page, or a single content zone on a page, to ensure continuity of web or app messaging in alignment with content and offerings a known user has seen across other channels.
Adobe Target not only enables the personalization of single pages or content zones, but it also enables the personalization of multi-page experiences for known and anonymous users when the experiences begin as inbound traffic to a site or app. In addition, Target easily supports A/B and multi-variate testing to optimize experiences. It can also be configured to integrate directly with Adobe Experience Manager for content and Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics for performance analysis when activating personalized experiences at scale.
Is That All?
Navigating the intricacies of the Adobe Experience Cloud can initially seem challenging due to the breadth and depth of the tools available. However, their powerful capabilities offer transformative potential for businesses desiring to deliver personalized, seamless, and engaging digital experiences at scale. From managing digital content and commerce workflows to gaining deep customer insights and orchestrating complex customer journeys, Adobe provides comprehensive solutions tailored to diverse business needs.
Whether beginning your journey with a single product or integrating multiple tools from Adobe's product suite, staying informed about new features and capabilities is essential. The comprehensive solutions provided by Adobe Experience Cloud not only help meet the growing demands of modern consumers but also contribute to accelerated revenue and profit growth, as evidenced by leading customer-obsessed organizations.
