Meet the 2019 Adobe Experience Makers

At Adobe Summit, these eight brands were recognized for creating the ultimate customer experiences.

Last night, an elite group of marketers earned the right to tell their clients, their co-workers, and even their moms, “I’m THE Experience Maker.”

Held at Adobe Summit 2019, the Adobe Experience Maker Awards ceremony marked the culmination of a rigorous nomination and evaluation process — and, of course, outstanding customer experience creation and delivery over the last year.

For the first time, Adobe also hosted the annual Revvie Awards for Marketo customers at the Adobe Experience Maker Awards gala. These awards honor B2B marketers leveraging Marketo technology to drive business growth and customer loyalty. See the full list of 2019 Revvie Award recipients here.

With so many entries representing the very best in digital experience innovation, execution, and results, selecting eight winners from such a distinguished group was, needless to say, difficult. At the end of the day, though, these diverse brands all delivered exceptional experiences to delight customers and surpass expectations. The winners are (drum roll, please)…

Best Audience-Driven Experience: Velocity Frequent Flyer, Loyalty Program of Virgin Australia (with CHE Proximity)

To encourage members to move credit card and grocery loyalty points to Velocity Frequent Flyer loyalty program, the company staged “The World’s Biggest Points Exchange Expo” event. The event was promoted with “Antiques Roadshows”-style videos, outdoor media, and personalized journeys, stitched together in Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Campaign, with an Adobe Experience Manager-based chatbot named Brenda providing real-time, online expert consultations along the way. The audience framework drove a 46-percent reduction in overall CPA and high levels of member engagement.

Best Commerce Experience: Accent Group (with eWave)

Platypus Shoes (an Accent Group Ltd company) innovated the customer experience it delivers with Adobe Commerce Cloud to integrate and centralize stock inventory, and connect national warehouses and stores into one multichannel system. This provides customers substantially more inventory availability online and faster delivery options and services. Between 2016 and 2019, this solution drove a 330-percent revenue increase, a 123-percent increase in conversion rate, and a 424-percent increase in transactions.

Best Data-Driven Experience: NVIDIA

To better understand the impact and effectiveness of its marketing campaigns, NVIDIA integrated Adobe Sensei Experience Intelligence Services (Attribution AI, Journey AI, Customer AI) into its workflows, leveraging its machine learning capabilities. Attribution AI enabled NVIDIA to determine the incremental impact on sales of affiliate-, email-, and paid-marketing channels, and to use its data to determine what’s working and what’s not by region, sub-channel, and campaign. Journey AI predicted best email send time per customer to improve open and click rates. Customer AI was used to identify key loyalty drivers. NVIDIA and Adobe are also technical partners, working together to accelerate Sensei innovation with NVIDIA’s AI platforms. It’s a collaboration that aims to drive a growing set of Sensei services that are even more intelligent, faster and cost-effective.

Best Digital Experience: T-Mobile (with TCS Interactive)

To boost the customer satisfaction ratings for its website, T-Mobile integrated Adobe Experience Manager 6.1 content management system, AngularJS, and its associated library to create a better customer experience. The massive overhaul consisted of 645 new web pages, 1,400 user stories, and a new end-to-end cart checkout production flow to optimize the customer shopping journey into a simple single-page application that boosted engagement and conversion. These changes contributed to T-Mobile receiving first place in the 2018 J.D. Power Wireless Purchase Experience Study.

Best Experience-Driven Campaign: Hilti (with EPAM Systems)

Because of its legacy email marketing platform, before May 2018 Hilti Corporation was unable to effectively engage customers through its campaigns. To address this, Hilti integrated Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager with other tools in their ecosystem to build and implement a unified, multi-channel campaign management platform. Using agile methodology, the team rolled out the platform across 61 markets for email and SMS channels — a platform that resulted in a 30 percent accelerated time-to-market with a 55 percent increase in team productivity. Customer acquisition grew by 18 percent as email volume expanded to 6,000,000, all with 50 percent decreased platform costs.

Best Integrated Ad Campaign: Dollar Shave Club

To reframe its brand in the minds of consumers as a “grooming company,” Dollar Shave Club’s marketing and programmatic ad departments capitalized on the deeper Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud integrations to drive home their new brand focus while delivering better customer experiences. The result: conversions skyrocketed while the average CPA dropped from $269 to $9 — shaving off 98 percent.

Best Personalized Experience: AARP

Facing a demographic with varying levels of digital savvy, declining direct mail response rates, and burgeoning online advertising costs, AARP turned to Adobe Target. The goal was to test the hundreds of touchpoints in the AARP membership journey and, from there, automate personalization for a more targeted, relevant user experience. Since the start of the program in 2015, the company’s online conversion rate has tripled, and just in the last year, conversion rates have increased by nearly 59 percent.

Audience Choice Award Winner: Xero

Under the new Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative, 1.1 million business owners across the UK will be required to keep digital records and submit their value-added tax (VAT) returns online using compatible software. To help business owners navigate this transition, Xero used Adobe Target to build five pretrial homepage experiences, each surfacing at a different time to different visitors depending on their lifecycle, segment, and real-time behavioral signals. These signals fed into Adobe Audience Manager, connecting relevant content to each user on their next visit. Over the course of three months, this experience reached more than 300,000 users, increased web sign-ups by 4.65 percent, and converted an additional 6 percent of trial customers to paid plans.

Winning at the digital experience

The finalists and winners in this year’s Experience Maker Awards highlight the incredible work Adobe customers are doing right now — and how that work is driving their businesses forward.

Even better, we know these levels of creativity, passion, and commitment aren’t just reserved for winners. We continually hear and experience first-hand the brilliant campaigns executed by a diverse audience of customers and partners. It’s inspiring to see organizations — and their experience makers — embrace the transition from customer-centric business transformation to true customer experience management.

Until next year, keep iterating, keep innovating, and keep pushing ahead.

See more stories from Adobe Summit and get inspired to become an exceptional experience maker.