Come on, Get Happy: DMPs Drive Personalization and Long-Term Loyalty

Summit 2019 Online sessions to help you think outside traditional data management platform use cases.

Your customers expect a lot from you. To deliver, you need to create real-time experiences that are hyper-personalized — that surprise, delight, and keep the unspoken promise you are the ultimate brand partner.

Those real-time promises took center stage in the Personalization Track at Adobe Summit, and with good cause. By delivering on real-time customer expectations, your brand can effectively and efficiently create customer journeys that continually move people toward purchase — and keep them deeply engaged.

The first step: Combining audience data to build a rock-solid foundation in your data management platform (DMP).

Creating fit DMP synergies

Building the data in your DMP and leveraging it to engage and activate customers starts with bringing together your data assets to create a meaningful 360 view of your audience.

“There’s a ton of synergy between Adobe Analytics and Adobe’s DMP,” said Mike Ragusa, solutions consultant at Adobe. “One of the core benefits there is what we refer to as ‘server-side forwarding.’” This, he adds, was a central consideration in helping Equinox build their new and former customer campaigns.

“All of those rich signals were being captured in the mobile environment for Equinox and the desktop environment,” Mike said in his session “Delivering on the Real-Time Promise“. “Behavioral attributes that are being captured in real time are then server-side passed to the DMP in real time.” This, he added, includes browsing and behavioral data from Adobe Analytics, CRM, and offline data related to membership status, and second- and third-party data tied to lifestyle and fitness affinities.

Once everything is ingested in the DMP for Equinox, Mike explained, they can set an Experience Cloud ID that spans all touchpoints.

“Now that you’ve created all of these segments that have the same common denominator,” Mike said, “Equinox can take all of these segments and activate them in real time, with over 200 real-time partners we already have plugged in with Adobe’s DMP.” This enables the brand to activate experiences agnostically across different touchpoints, personalizing to individual customers.

With these capabilities, Equinox personalizes its digital experiences, not from just the real-time customer session but it’s based on all prior digital and human interactions. “For example, that they looked at our yoga page or personal training page in the past,” said Yu Yang Pei, analytics and technology at Equinox. In the past, he noted, Equinox used Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, focusing exclusively on leads.

In the past when a lead came in, the company immediately deployed a human sales rep to try and convert the customer. That’s not the case now — and that’s not only more efficient for Equinox, it’s a better experience for many would-be members. Now, their DMP — Adobe Audience Manager — enhances their current technology capabilities, using first-party data and visibility to track lifecycles. Equinox is now “meeting consumers where they are and providing digital touchpoints based on where they are in their purchasing journey,” Yu Yang said.

“We can personalize based on these life cycles now,” he said. “We believe many people want to come to Equinox and get a membership on their own terms,” and don’t want to hear from a “live” person. This, he added, has driven significant results. Most notably, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, former members who received digital outreach came back in droves. Equinox reports former member growth grew 80% year-ove-year (YOY) for those days alone.

Inspiring adventures by personalizing outside the DMP

Equinox isn’t the only enterprise driving personalized experiences using a DMP. In the travel industry, motivations to book are diverse — and those motivations dictate the kind of content and creative that resonates.

“The ability to look at [customers’] motivations and identify them is going to be the first step in how you evolve,” said Shoaib Alam, senior solutions consultant at Adobe, in his Summit session “Delivering on the Experience Promise: A DMP Roadmap Toward Maturity”. Once you can do this, he noted, look for the happiness quotient — this is where opportunity lies.

“Once they feel like they understand what you’re serving them and they know that as an organization you understand them,” he said, “that’s where an integrated 360 experience really comes into play.” And that’s when bookings happen, now and in the future. “There’s also a correlation between happiness and loyalty,” Shoaib said. “As long as the user is happy with the interaction that he or she has with you, they’re always going to keep coming back for that interaction.”

These were important considerations for Princess Cruises, as they moved from a very offline, travel agent-focused model to being more digital and more data-driven. Four years ago the company’s media was plateauing and Princess Cruises needed to reinvigorate their audience engagement and better personalize at scale. They invested in a DMP, with a focus on bringing together site data, third-party data, social data, and CRM data.

That wasn’t enough, though, according to Shelley Wise, Princess Cruises vice president of integrated marketing. The team wanted to break the traditional DMP mold and push beyond site improvement and media efficiencies. Shelley explained that Princess Cruises wanted to personalize all guest experiences.

“Our goal was simple — to deliver the right message through the creative to the right audience at the right time and place using our media agency, providing the audience with the right experience on the site.”

Using their DMP along with existing and real-time customer data, Princess Cruises was able to create actionable functionality across all channels, including direct mail, email, paid search, display, web, mobile, and social.

“We were able to create a range of addressable audiences from broad travel and cruise intenders to very niche audiences,” Shelley said. From there, they used look-alike modeling to expand their reach even further.

Ultimately, this shift was a success, with the DMP helping them better understand what works and what doesn’t — and, often, this has been counter to what the team anticipated.

“Our first use case was low-hanging fruit — suppression,” Shelley said. “We thought for sure our prospecting campaigns were reaching new audiences, but what our DMP told us was that they weren’t. We had a number of people who revisited the site and maybe weren’t known to our CRM because they booked through travel agents — but they were past guests or booked guests.”

Understanding this — and seeing that all of these leads weren’t true leads — drove Princess Cruises to reconfigure their lead generation campaigns. This led to higher ROI and a 20% campaign savings, which the team reinvested in a new prospecting campaign. In two months, Princess Cruises saw a 4.5x increase in unique reach and 6% increase in new sessions YOY.

Discover more about Adobe’s DMP plus more innovations and customer stories from the Adobe Summit Online Personalization Track and on the Adobe Blog.