Adobe Lightroom Team Racing Down the Mobile Lane with Journey Orchestration

Mobile apps are one of the most effective ways for brands today to connect with their customers, promote advocacy and even encourage repeat usage.

In fact, for many businesses, mobile is rapidly becoming the most important channel for Customer Experience Management (CXM). It’s often the first stop many consumers make en route to learning more about a brand, what it stands for and how it can be a part of their shopping lives. That is undoubtedly part of the reason why spending on mobile apps through Apple Store and Google play is expected to rise 120 percent to $156 billion by 2020, according to Sensor Tower forecasts.

The mobile version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a complete system for photo editing, offers the perfect illustration of this trend’s validity.

As recently as 2017, whenever the Lightroom team engaged in marketing campaigns to promote various photo editing features of its app, it had to pull user data from numerous divisions of the company in order to deliver personalized messages to customers. This tended to be a time-consuming and tedious process that didn’t always deliver the desired results.

Then came a possible solution: a new application service built on Adobe Experience Platform called Journey Orchestration which automatically collects, aggregates and analyzes data to identify opportunities – or events – where some customer activity indicates an opportunity to engage with them in real time. Maybe you’re an airline, for example, and the moment your customers step off an airplane you want to send a text letting them know how long it will be to pick up their luggage, where they can go to get local transportation or what offers your nearby partner hotels and restaurants have waiting for them that evening. Or perhaps you are a retailer with geofences set up throughout your outlets. As customers stroll through various parts of your stores, you could shoot them a string of product suggestions and offers based solely on previous buying habits.

In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s case, Journey Orchestration offered a special opportunity to orchestrate sophisticated mobile marketing campaigns aimed at hooking hobbyist photographers into using various aspects of the free mobile app in hopes of enticing them to become fulltime subscribers.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom mobile app is already a rapidly growing part of the company’s business. In fact, they recently reported the product’s Q3 monthly active users grew 130 percent year-over-year and that Adobe IDs created from mobile apps rose more than 40 percent during that time. It’s a huge channel for Adobe and serves as a key channel that helps bring more value to customers.

“Mobile is the biggest front door for Lightroom right now,” agrees Randy Ang, Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Lightroom. “We’re seeing millions and millions of new Adobe IDs being created through mobile. It used to take several months to set up our mobile campaigns. But Journey Orchestration makes our lead times much shorter, and we’re able to execute more complex campaigns and tests than we could in the past.”

One of those tests, Ang says, has to do with activation. Adobe essentially uses its own data and analytics technology to identify new users who have downloaded the Lightroom mobile app but have not used it. His team then uses Journey Orchestration to target those users with specific in-app content encouraging potential customers to try some nifty editing feature they may not have known about.

“Basically, we’re giving them the tools to educate themselves within the product, to understand how to use it and hopefully drive them to be more engaged with it since they now have the tools and knowhow to start editing their photos like a pro,” Ang says.

Another test Ang’s team is running involves conversion. When faced with a paywall – the point where a user cannot access a specific premium feature, customers typically might just explore a different feature of the app. The Lightroom team encourages additional exploration of the feature instead. For example, if a customer clicks on the app’s Selective Edit tool and is met with a paywall, they might receive a push notification asking them to try Selective Edit through an in-product tutorial. Thus, giving the user, an opportunity to engage more deeply with the feature they were initially curious about, ultimately driving more opportunities for conversion.

“If they hit that paywall, then they’re dropped into this journey where we send them a message one day later with more information – specifically a guided tutorial – showing them how to use the premium feature,” Ang says. “At the end of the tutorial, there’s an up-sell message for those users.”

The Lightroom team has already seen a positive impact from leveraging Journey Orchestration including a 13% lift in new user engagement. In the not-too-distant future, Ang says the Lightroom team will try other similar activation and conversion tests with Journey Orchestration to generate more interest and adoption for its mobile app.

“We’re going to continue using Journey Orchestration, as well as other strategic measures, to keep driving toward our end goals,” he says. “This has enabled us to focus more specifically on mobile with push (notifications) and to reach more consumers with personalized messages wherever they may be.”