Just in time for the holiday season, Adobe is introducing a highly targeted way to reach in-store shoppers through their mobile phones.
Here’s how it works. By installing Apple’s iBeacon devices in their stores, brands can beam messages to the mobile phones of the people visiting the store. Using Adobe Analytics, marketers can now target those in-store shoppers with customized in-app messages, based on all the unified data collected on them. This could include previous purchase history, store visits and item preferences.
Adobe calls this new feature Intelligent Location Marketing. The feature is a unique one among analytics platforms in that it allows the user to craft a targeted in-app message directly within Analytics.This means they don’t have to go to a content creation tool outside the platform to do it. Using simple HTML assets, the mobile message can be created directly within Analytics. In addition, the messages can be automated either as a response to an iBeacon trigger or scheduled throughout the day.
Here’s what the message creation tab within Analytics looks like:
“With Intelligent Location Marketing we are redefining digital marketing and delivering new, innovative ways for marketers to engage customers and prospects across mobile screens,” says Suresh Vittal, vice president, Digital Marketing at Adobe. “The tight integration of our six Marketing Cloud solutions gives Adobe the unique advantage to enable consistent, cross-channel experiences that keep the individual interests of customers in mind regardless of the device they are using.”
Adobe’s new capability is similiar in function to competitor Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder for Apps platform. Through Journey Builder, marketers can automate in-app messaging based on user-behavior triggers. The advantage Adobe has is that the message creation tool resides within the analytics platform. Pluse Adobe Analytics is a more robust data analysis platform that ExactTarget. Adobe has also indicated that it will start offering more integrations for the Intelligent Location marketing feature with Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager, which would allow testing and digital asset management for content creation.
In addition, Adobe announced several new updates for its other Marketing Cloud mobile solutions:
In-app messaging: Trigger for in-app messaging can come not just from iBeacons, but other data as well. This allows brand app owners to promote new content like videos or breaking news and cross promote apps, products, and services to users that have already launched the app.
Mobile App Management: New features within Adobe Experience Manager to create and test mobile experiences and performance.
Mobile Search Advertising: Through Adobe Media Optimizer, users can now programmatically bid for mobile ads that can be targeted by audience, time-of-day, location and device.
Mobile Campaign Management: Much like Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder, Adobe Campaign can send responsive-designed automated emails that can be triggered by data gathered from Analytics.
Adobe Social App: Adobe’s social media management platform Adobe Social has a newly updated mobile app that allows users to control their social channels through a mobile dashboard.
