Email marketing is Adobe’s biggest demand-generation engine, reaching hundreds of millions of customers around the world. To manage all this content and meet demands for greater speed and relevance in their communications, Adobe marketers must constantly find new ways to scale campaigns and deliver more personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey.
That’s where Adobe Journey Optimizer comes in. Adopted by the Growth Marketing and Insights team, Journey Optimizer’s real-time approach to campaign orchestration has overhauled how Adobe's marketers work. The platform lets them push the envelope in how they create and roll out campaigns, and new personalization strategies drive deeper engagement and higher-quality leads — both of which have a direct impact on Adobe's revenue and bottom line.
A perfect blend of speed and control
For years, Adobe Campaign was the go-to solution for email communications. As audiences and ambitions grew, Adobe Journey Optimizer became the natural next step: purpose-built for larger-scale orchestration, real-time personalization and the expansive volume of communications Adobe's global customer base demands today.
Adobe chose email marketing as its first use case for Journey Optimizer because the solution allows marketers to roll-out customer journeys on-the-fly and at-scale. That means its teams can quickly spin up campaigns — including multiple versions of campaign assets — and test their performance.
Since upgrading to Journey Optimizer, the time required to test email journeys has dropped from 17 hours to just two. That enables a single marketer to run between 15 and 20 tests per quarter, up from just four or five previously. That’s a huge productivity boost.
In turn, the ability to create, test, and optimize campaigns at speed allowed Adobe to set clear, measurable goals for its ongoing adoption of Journey Optimizer including:
- Driving customer expansion by unlocking new cross-sell and upsell opportunities
- Accelerating content delivery by creating dynamic customer experiences
- Boosting campaign engagement with real-time email validation
- Optimizing cart abandonment workflows, following a period where Adobe could not offer cart abandonment as part of its customer journeys
Personalization at every turn
The upgrade to Journey Optimizer has fundamentally reshaped the way Adobe builds customer journeys. Instead of multi-month campaigns tailored to broad customer groups regardless of whether they’ve engaged with prior messages, Adobe’s marketing teams now deliver personalized microjourneys that segment customers after each round of emails based on real-time behavioral signals. This ensures every message they receive reflects their interests, priorities and stage in the purchasing journey.
For example, in a recent campaign to promote Adobe Firefly, marketers sent a comprehensive series of on-boarding emails to new customers who needed time to familiarize themselves with the technology, while simultaneously delivering deep-dive content for Adobe power-users who were primed to speak with sales and explore their purchasing options.
The opportunity is to make every customer interaction feel more relevant, timely and connected. Journey Optimizer gives marketing teams the ability to act on real-time signals and deliver experiences that better reflect each customer’s needs, interests and intent.
This microjourney approach has made Adobe’s email campaigns more targeted, efficient and relevant, boosting customer engagement across its product categories. For example, click-through-rates for Adobe Creative Cloud marketing emails have jumped 44 percent. Adobe’s marketers have also improved the quality of the leads they generate. B2B campaigns run through Journey Optimizer are three times more effective than before at nurturing leads into high-value customers.
Journey Optimizer has helped Adobe reimagine the way it sends emails by tapping into real-time behavioral data signals to deliver more relevant journeys to every customer. It also brings deeper personalization to content, giving audiences true one-to-one experiences throughout their journey.
Affirming email’s role as a revenue generator
Like many large businesses, Adobe has built customizations into its email marketing workflows and underlying IT infrastructure over the years. Thanks to strategic APIs and integrations with Journey Optimizer, marketing teams have been able to streamline the way they work without sacrificing the custom capabilities that allow them to perform their jobs at a high level.
Journey Optimizer allows marketers to act on customer signals in minutes, compared to days using previous platforms. Take cart abandonment as an example: Adobe has reintroduced reminder emails to customers who leave items in their cart, recovering revenue that had previously been left on the table.
Above all, Adobe’s migration to Journey Optimizer has been a source of empowerment. Email marketers across the business even use the solution to create their own cuts and views of email marketing tests.
Built for the next chapter
Adobe’s success with Journey Optimizer isn’t just the result of a platform upgrade. It reflects the operating model behind it: a strong Email Marketing COE, close partnership between marketing and IT, and a clear focus on helping teams adopt new capabilities with confidence.
These foundations have helped Adobe move from campaign execution to real-time customer engagement — giving marketers the speed, data and control to create more relevant experiences at scale.
Ultimately, the goal is not to send more emails. It’s to send better emails that inspire customers to act with more relevant, valuable experiences. Journey Optimizer is helping Adobe bring that vision to life at enterprise scale.
