Adobe Campaign (AC) is one of the most powerful cross-channel integrated marketing automation platforms on the market. Once you purchase Adobe Campaign and implement, your focus should be on customizing it as per your business requirements. Performance, usability, and scalability are three factors that need to be considered during the customization process.
Based on my cross-industry experience with enterprise-level clients, I have identified the 8 most important considerations for ensuring your instance stays scalable, so you are always in a position to evolve your instance, automate, create more complex campaigns , and/or start pulling in more marketing channels.
Strong Documentation around the implementation
The first advice I would provide is to have a strong documentation of all the implementation that you do on the platform. Tomorrow when someone new joins the team, this documentation will help the person get to speed with your Adobe Campaign customizations. Also, this will act as a bible for your team in future.
Every issue that your team faces and fixes, should be documented. This will be invaluable for your team in the future.
The reason I focus on this is that unlike other tools, Adobe Campaign has a huge learning curve, especially when you start from scratch. It took me almost 2 years to become an expert in Adobe Campaign.
Manage your campaign send outs and channels
In digital marketing, time is something that you cannot take for granted. Sending the campaigns at the right time can earn you millions.
The next important point is how much load you put on the campaign instance. Some of the factors that play a major role are:
- Total number of campaigns running on the instance simultaneously
- Number of deliveries running on the instance simultaneously
- Are SMS, Email and Push all delivering simultaneously
All the above 3 points will decrease the performance of your instance.
For example: All the if you do not have separate affinities and mta designated for SMS, PUSH and Email, your send outs will be extremely slow and it will take double the time to complete the send out.
Adopt a naming convention for consistency
The components/folders inside an Adobe Campaign can become very messy an hard to manage if you do not follow a standard naming convention. Some of the primary components you will want good naming standards for names of:
- Plans, programs, folders
- Delivery & Campaign Templates
- Typology rules
- Personalization Blocks, Dynamic Content Blocks
- Production Campaigns
- Testing campaigns and testing components
- New data fields
- Custom reports
- Channel designations
- Schema structures
- AC Packages
- Webforms
- APIs
A couple good conventions I follow are,
- Ensure no spaces are used
- Hyphens are utilized
- Appropriate casing is in place (e.g., capital letters are used for the first letter in a new word in the name).
- Defined date format
- Do not contain any special characters.
One simple example of a campaign-naming standard would be:
Plan-Program-CampaignName-Channel-Version-DateRange-CampaignID
Make sure that this naming convention is mentioned in your instance runbook. Also, every team member authorized to create components on the instance should follow this naming convention.
Grab the best talent out there in the market before others do
Adobe Campaign talent in the market is in high demand. There are very few in the market who have the perfect combination of Adobe Campaign and programming knowledge.
Look for Adobe Campaign Experts who are adobe certified in the below specializations. If you find someone like me who is certified in all three then you have the perfect candidate.
This person can work on your custom implementation, architect your campaign instance and also troubleshoot.
- Adobe Certified Expert – Campaign Developer
- Adobe Certified Expert – Campaign Architect
- Adobe Certified Expert – Campaign Business Practitioner
Understand the data stored in your underlying campaign database
Adobe Campaign is a completely data-driven application. Those end-users and marketers in your organization that understand the available data within your company will be invaluable to a successful Adobe Campaign implementation and to your on-going campaign deliveries. They should have a good understanding of:
- Data relationships
- Data access
- The basics of APIs and data joins
- Data enrichments
- Owned data & non-owned data
- Transactional and non-transactional data
Leverage dynamic campaign templates
Adobe Campaign’s dynamic content functionality enables your organization to tailor a campaign to serve multiple audiences with the right content (offers, images, messaging or calls to action). But building such campaigns from scratch can be extremely time-consuming to sort out the specifics of each iteration. However, when you leverage templates, you can achieve this level of granularity and specificity much easier.
There is an art and skill to developing AC dynamic campaign templates that have components that can be swapped in and out to be dynamic in nature. With dynamic campaign templates, you will need to balance the ability to control the dynamic messages, with the ability to scale the logic without adding undue complexity. It involves initially laying out your workflow design, and then seeing which areas of the workflow can be logically or functionally grouped into components. You will also want to determine if those components have variables or data elements that are good candidates for dynamicism (e.g., age, gender, location, income or any other contact data fields you have at your disposal). And finally, with your default content, you will need to identify the variations and your rules for handling the results.
Keep Experimenting
The best thing about Adobe campaign is that you can experiment a lot. This can be in terms of the delivery personalization, sending frequencies, template designs, attracting customers with your offers and thinking out of the box.
The strategy that you might be using is being used by 10 other companies as well. So, it is very important to experiment in digital marketing.
Perform your testing on a non-production Adobe Campaign instance
If you only have one instance of Adobe Campaign (e.g., PROD), then it’s difficult to design and test new campaigns without impacting the production environment.
If possible, ensure your license from Adobe provides you at least 2, optimally 3 separate instances (e.g., a DEV instance, a PROD instance and ideally a UAT instance).
This will be highly beneficial to allow you the flexibility of testing out new campaigns or business logic in a DEV or UAT instance without ever impacting your PROD environment.
With this in place, your team will have the ability to create, refine and adjust campaign logic until it is giving them the expected results or potential ROI that you need without disrupting other extremely important campaigns.
