Advantages of the New Adobe Target: Mobile

I have really enjoyed telling the optimization and personalization maturity journey of Rick Patterson, a fictitious manager at an expectant parents’ website, tasked with building their new optimization program. We were able to demonstrate each of our areas of Adobe Target redevelopment — Marketer Control & Governance, Sophisticated Profiles & Audiences, Customer Journey Optimization, and Automation — which support Rick as he matures and refines his optimization and personalization strategies moving forward. These are areas that are top of mind for all optimization leaders, and we continue to innovate and push the envelope with new algorithms, workflows, groundbreaking applications for automation and more. But there is one final area of focus in the new solution that is also at the top of optimization leaders’ lists, one which is definitely top of mind for Rick: Mobile Web and Mobile App Optimization.

Rick knows that parents are constantly on the go; he himself has experienced that emergency state when he’s run out of diapers on a road trip or his infant son is showing symptoms that are immediate and concerning. Parents need resources, advice and articles at their fingertips, and statistics show that many parents are reaching out for help or purchasing through Rick’s mobile website on a mobile device. First-time parents are even more likely to download Rick’s company’s mobile application to have even quicker access to what they need. Commerce over mobile web and apps has overtaken desktop commerce across a majority of industries, and each has very specific needs in terms of providing the best customer engagement.

With mobile web and apps, we receive much more contextual data that can be leveraged for audience segmentation, testing and targeting relative to a person’s location and his or her actions. Are they passing by one of our stores that are offering a sale or a temporary investment opportunity that they might be interested in? Are they comparison shopping within a store? Perhaps they’re in a remote location and are looking for the closest location or store? All of these contextual profile variables provided by mobile engagement allow us to better streamline and optimize the mobile web experience for their device and needs. It also allows for testing and targeting applicable push notifications or in-app messaging to provide better customer service and to be a better concierge to them based on their interests and preferences.

Adobe Target makes it easy for Rick to adapt his content to mobile web screens as well as to optimize his mobile app experiences — no matter the type of app his company builds. For mobile web, Rick can implement the same single line of code that he uses for the desktop-website pages and then utilize the three-step guided visual workflow for executing any type of Adobe Target activity: A/B/n or multivariate tests, experience targeting, optimized recommendations and machine-learning automated personalization.

Rick can democratize the building of these activities to a mobile-specific team, if applicable, while governing the entire program from within Adobe Target’s unified interface. For mobile app optimization, Rick can deploy a flexible mobile app software development kit (SDK). This SDK provides both Adobe Analytics and Target access with combined capabilities for tracking, testing and targeting within any type of mobile application, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, PhoneGap, and native apps of all kinds.

Responsive design can be leveraged and optimized within Adobe Target’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor — with its side-by-side code-editing capabilities — using a new feature called mobile viewports. We can apply the more common screen sizes or any custom mobile viewport to a responsive design website, allowing Rick to see what that experience will look like and to refine the experience as needed. He can even launch a test or targeted experience to make sure his content is being optimally delivered to his diverse mobile visitor base. This makes it easy to make several quick variations of his content for each of the devices where he sees mobile-visitor traffic to his sites. There is also the ability to test and target email to mobile web landing-page experiences, as visitors will often check and click through email from their mobile device, increasing the desire for a more relevant, personalized landing page based on the email offer.

Mobile app optimization is mostly geared toward customer loyalty and retention and providing basic functions that make it easier for customers to consume your products, content and services. Customers of Adobe Target or Adobe Analytics both have access to valuable lifecycle metrics, which give Rick valuable data on mobile app-specific behaviors such as downloads, crashes and more. Rick finds great benefit in this, as one of his key performance indicators (KPIs) for his mobile app is good reviews in the app store. With the lifecycle metrics he is collecting, Rick can target an in-app message prompting a user to leave a good review after they’ve had a positive experience using the app or based on frequency of successful usage. Moving forward, Rick can leverage all of this mobile-specific data for more distinct mobile-specific audience segments.

This highlights another great advantage of Adobe Target in mobile app optimization. Rick can test and target in-app messaging not only relative to in-app behavior, but also through geofencing. Rick can also test and target push notifications based on geofencing or a user’s proximity to points of interest. He can easily add and target these experiences using an intuitive drag-and-drop portion of the interface. If Rick’s company has partnerships with hospitals or pharmacies in an area where iBeacon technology is set up, Rick can target his mobile app users — based on iBeacons in these locations — to provide added levels of service such as awareness of special offers, store information or navigation.

There is much more to come in the next few months in terms of mobile web and app capabilities. We’ve made substantial investments — in everything from product management to engineering to data scientists and cross-solution and core-services engineering teams — so we can continue to evolve Adobe Target in all five of the key areas outlined within this blog series. We will continue to meet Rick’s needs as he scales and matures his efforts, making it even easier for him to react to changing trends, designs and marketing campaigns with an “optimization first” mentality. We’ll keep pace with innovations in digital channels and access and even push the envelope in these areas, as we’ve demonstrated in Adobe Target’s ability to extend into the “ Internet of Things.” We’ll help Rick enable all divisions of his company to get involved in testing and automation to ensure that they can see the benefits of validating the right rules for personalization to maximize customer engagement, conversion, loyalty and satisfaction moving forward.