A Thousand Points of Insight, Part Two

A Thou­sand Points of Insight, Part Two

Christo­pher Parkin, Direc­tor, Gen­e­sis Solu­tions, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Busi­ness Unit, Adobe

Part Two: How dig­i­tal mar­keters use the adobe gen­e­sis part­ner ecosys­tem today

In our last blog we looked at the lessons learned as we lis­tened to you—our customers—about what you needed and didn’t need when it came to tak­ing action on the insights you gained from your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts. We dis­cov­ered that an ele­gant and rel­a­tively sim­ple solu­tion, that doing fewer things extremely well, was much more impor­tant than hav­ing a solu­tion with too many fea­tures and too much com­plex­ity. After all, fig­ur­ing out how to com­bine your insights across sys­tems and reach cus­tomers across chan­nels and devices can be com­plex enough. Our job is to make it eas­ier and more effective.

Today, we’re still lis­ten­ing, and now work­ing even more closely with our cus­tomers to help them inte­grate all their insights so they can see the big pic­ture, not just parts of the whole. To sup­port this, orga­ni­za­tions in all kinds of indus­tries are lever­ag­ing Adobe Gen­e­sis. In fact, dig­i­tal mar­keters have deployed more than 1,300 Gen­e­sis inte­gra­tions to engage cus­tomers and boost sales.

Let me share a few examples:

As one of Australia’s lead­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies, Voda­fone, found that about 80% of web­site vis­i­tors aban­doned the check­out cart before com­plet­ing their pur­chases. But by using Adobe Gen­e­sis to reen­gage cus­tomers with tar­geted emails, the com­pany quickly recap­tured the atten­tion of 75% of those poten­tial cus­tomers (Voda­fone man­agers could tell because they knew that those cus­tomers at least opened the email). From there, 43% of the cus­tomers went back to the web­site and viewed more con­tent. In the end, 15% of the opened emails resulted in a recov­ered sale, help­ing the com­pany achieve a 7% net increase in online sales. Check out this brand new Voda­phone case study: http://​omni​ture​.com/​g​o​/​4​1​492 .

Like Voda­fone, DEMCO—the nation’s top online sup­plier of prod­ucts to libraries—uses Adobe Gen­e­sis to bring lost cus­tomers back to its web­site. By send­ing reminder emails (at one-day, three-day, and five-day inter­vals) to cus­tomers who stopped shop­ping mid-checkout, DEMCO achieved a 22% increase in con­ver­sion after its first cam­paign. At the same time, the com­pany used the insights gath­ered about how return vis­i­tors nav­i­gated web pages in order to fur­ther refine online expe­ri­ences, help­ing yield even greater returns. In con­trast to its pre­vi­ous email cam­paigns, DEMCO saw 97 times the rev­enue per thou­sand using this more tar­geted, informed approach. In less than a year these results were achieved through a one-person oper­a­tion which was imple­mented from the ground up using Adobe Site­Cat­a­lyst for Web ana­lyt­ics, a new email ser­vice provider and the Adobe Gen­e­sis integration.

In another exam­ple, Sprint­Nextel, serv­ing over 52 mil­lion cus­tomers at the end of 2Q11, imple­mented a Gen­e­sis inte­gra­tion with a lead­ing social media provider in sup­port of their Buz​z​AboutWire​less​.com ini­tia­tive. The inte­gra­tion pro­vided com­mu­nity man­agers with rich social dri­ven data allow­ing them to mea­sure the impact of social media on key busi­ness dri­vers such as cus­tomer acqui­si­tion and aver­age pur­chase value.

With an exten­sive net­work of accred­ited Adobe Gen­e­sis appli­ca­tion part­ners, cus­tomers world­wide are opt­ing to use a vari­ety of other pow­er­ful data inte­gra­tions to reach their online opti­miza­tion goals. For instance, with ad serv­ing inte­gra­tions, cus­tomers gain richer, more valu­able insight into the impact of their ad serv­ing at the cam­paign, dis­play ad, site, and place­ment levels.

In other imple­men­ta­tions for CRM and Sales­force Automa­tion (SFA), Adobe Gen­e­sis enables orga­ni­za­tions to directly mon­i­tor the impact of mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties on sales. For exam­ple, Lime­light Net­works imple­mented the Gen­e­sis Closed Loop Mar­ket­ing inte­gra­tion with Sales​force​.com in sup­port of their B2B mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives. On their first cam­paign, they increased sales qual­i­fied leads 139% by opti­miz­ing offers though side-by-side offer analy­sis made pos­si­ble through the integration.

Oppor­tu­ni­ties to dig­i­tally engage cus­tomers across chan­nels and devices are vir­tu­ally lim­it­less today. Yet for many, the chal­lenge of fig­ur­ing out the best approach for each chan­nel remains, as orga­ni­za­tions look to stand out from com­peti­tors, build cus­tomer loy­alty, and uncover or recover rev­enue. With the right mix of solu­tions, orga­ni­za­tions are dis­cov­er­ing they can engage cus­tomers with the prod­ucts and ser­vices they want at just the right time and then track the returns—regardless of the dig­i­tal chan­nel or device cus­tomers are using.

While many dig­i­tal mar­keters are deriv­ing value from Gen­e­sis, we con­tinue to make enhance­ments that make it even eas­ier to inte­grate part­ner tech­nolo­gies and get action­able insight. I’ll dis­cuss some of these new enhance­ments in my next post!