New Adobe Target Mobile Capabilities Enable Always-on Personalization

Your company stands apart from the crowd or gets lost in it depending on the types of experiences you offer your customers—no matter where and when they connect with your brand. In a previous blog post, my colleague described some of the more advanced technologies, such as server-side optimization and Node.js, that brands are using in their testing and personalization programs to drive those critical customer experiences.

Now, let’s take a look at our newest features in Adobe Target that allow your brand to personalize beyond the web.

New Visual Experience Composer for Mobile Apps

Mobile apps play a critical role in the customer experience. For many brands, they’re as important to the experience as the product itself. By downloading your app, customers essentially express their intent to have a relationship with you—to engage with you no matter where they are or what they’re doing. As a result, they also expect you to treat them as though they’re special from the moment they download the app, with mobile experiences customized for them. Any digital marketer can tell you that personalizing mobile app experiences based on how a customer engages with the app is no easy feat to accomplish at scale.

What makes personalizing mobile app experiences so challenging? Zeroing in on what works by running personalization experiments is time consuming. First, you have to have a developer code any change you want to make. Next you have to submit the change to the app store, and then you run your test. Need to iterate on that experiment? Start the cycle again. This can take weeks to accomplish and the lengthy development effort can overshadow the benefits of testing.

Adobe Target’s new visual experience composer for mobile apps makes running personalization experiments on your mobile apps a lot easier. With it (and without asking your developers for help), you can easily swap text and images in your native mobile app and quickly run A/B/n tests on those changes. Essentially, the visual experience composer for mobile apps removes friction and lets you take charge of optimizing your mobile app experiences. Ultimately, this allows you to drive more value to your customers—and your business—faster. Adobe Target’s new visual experience composer for mobile apps will be available in beta this spring.

New Batch Experience Prefetch

According to Adobe’s 2017 Mobile Maturity Study, mobile apps now account for almost 60 percent of our total digital time. That’s huge, but not surprising given that mobile devices offer you the convenience to connect with a brand anytime, anywhere. Except wait a minute, maybe that anytime, anywhere bit is not entirely true. Let me explain.

Most weekdays, I commute by train into work to avoid the crazy San Francisco traffic. To pass the time, I read LinkedIn news, maybe catch up on Top Chef, check out new travel deals, and read my emails—all from my favorite apps on my mobile phone. When my train goes through one of the many tunnels or walled sections on the route, my network connection cuts out, interrupting my experience. It’s frustrating. What if I was interacting with your brand when that connection dropped? You’ve just lost the opportunity to deliver me a personalized experience. There’s a good chance I won’t come back to whatever it was I was doing. You need an always-on personalization solution capable of personalizing the experience whether your visitors are online or off.

Adobe Target’s batch experience prefetch for mobile apps solves this interrupted connectivity issue while improving speed and performance. Using the latest Adobe Mobile SDK, you simply set up your app so that each app launch makes a single call to Adobe Target that requests all experience variations from live optimization activities and a snapshot of the visitor profile. Target then caches those variations and the profile snapshot either on the EDGE network, locally, or both. Anytime a visitor interacts with your app, Target quickly determines and delivers the relevant experiences at the activity locations throughout your app. That means that no matter where your visitors are—and with no effort on their part—they can always enjoy a personalized experience from your brand.

Batch prefetch for mobile apps in Adobe Target ensures that your visitors enjoy a personalized experience anytime, anywhere—even when their device loses connection.

Optimize your Node.js websites and applications server-side with the Node.js SDK

More companies are building Node.js websites and mobile apps. That’s because whether they’re developing client- or server-side, they need only one language—JavaScript—to port the website or application code between the two. On top of that, Node.js is an open source environment, so developers can reuse the numerous libraries contributed by other developers to speed up their development cycle.

Our new Node.js SDK opens the door for you to optimize your Node.js website or application server-side. In addition, the unified Visitor ID service is built in, so you can leverage our native integration with Adobe Analytics for a single source of data truth in your server-side deployment.

Want to give our Node.js SDK a try? Just install it from here.

Leverage the Adobe Target Node.js SDK to deploy server-side optimization in your Node.js websites and applications.

Visually QA mobile app experiences

Let’s say you’re a global brand that wants to test and personalize the experiences for your mobile app visitors based on their regional preferences. The new mobile experience preview lets you easily perform end-to-end quality assurance (QA) on your mobile app activities without having to activate them. You can view the regional variations right on your device.

Using mobile experience preview is super easy. You just generate a preview link and send it to your mobile device. When you’re ready, click or paste that link into the browser to see the experiences. Share it with key stakeholders for review and approval. They’ll be able to preview those experiences—individually or in combinations that they choose—in the applicable apps before you launch the activity live.

Mobile experience preview lets you visually QA the experiences in your A/B testing and experience targeting activities before you launch them.

Adobe Target never stops innovating

In the personalization era, experience matters. Our product team understands that. That’s why we keep adding innovative features to Adobe Target that let you deliver the personalized experiences that keep your customers coming back and help your business reach new levels of success. For example, our one-click personalization capability in Adobe Target powered by Adobe Sensei lets you tap into artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver each visitor the experience that wins for them. That feature, Auto-Target, recently won the DMA innovative award for personalization. It’s that type of industry recognition that gives me confidence that we’re headed down the right path.