Adobe Campaign, the cross-channel campaign management solution within the Adobe Experience Cloud, just got some brand-new capabilities:
- A user-friendly “drag and drop email designer” allows marketers to build email templates from scratch — no HTML knowledge required. “This cuts out the fact of marketers having to rely on external agencies or freelance designers to actually build out their templates, which is the way that it was done previously,” explained Matt Rawding, Consulting Manager, Adobe. The email designer boasts integrations with Adobe Experience Manager and the Creative Cloud — including basic Photoshop functionality regardless of whether you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber. Rawding said integration with Dropbox was likely on the agenda for later this year.
- Enhanced email reporting integrates Adobe Analytics functionality which allows users to build custom profile attributes and easily distribute campaign reports among members of your marketing team. Again, no Adobe Analytics subscription needed. Per Adobe, “Enhancements also include the ability to automatically distribute visual, digestible reports on campaign insights to inform marketers, as well as data scientists and CRM directors.”
- Multilingual push messages enables marketers to automatically send and segment campaigns by language. “As a marketer, you can look at the effectiveness of your push message overall across all languages,” Rawding said. “Or, you can splice it down and look at the effectiveness by specific language, or, of course, any other dimensions that you wanted to see.
The product enhancements accompanied the release of Adobe’s annual consumer survey, as well as details about features still being tested that have not been released to customers. Of those more innovative features still in testing, are time-predictive email campaigns based on individual engagement data. Per Adobe, the functionality is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI division, and allows brands to “automatically determine the most effective time to send an email for each customer to increase open rates and maximize the impact of their campaigns.” Marketers define a start and end window for the campaign, and Adobe automatically sends the email to each recipient at the best time for them, based on Adobe’s first-party customer engagement data. — Nick Ciccone
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How does the phrase “Back to School” make you feel? Exuberant, nostalgic, anxious? Persado, the marketing language cloud which applies math to understand emotion, has been poring over the new school year email marketing campaigns to identify the sentiments which lead to clicks. Here are some results:
- Hysteria doesn’t help. Persado found that expressions of excitement and urgency were two of the lowest performing emotions in email subject lines. Messages like “Awesome!” only had a 50 percent success rate, and messages like “Time’s running out” performed even worse
- Reassurance did much better, with expressions like “We’ve got you covered” showing 70 percent success, while the appearance of offers (“We’re giving you”) pushed it up to an average 90 percent
- Emojis were winners too, especially when they communicated the subject of the email at a glance. — Kim Davis
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Speaking of email marketing, over to Campaign Monitor for some data from their second annual Email Marketing Industry Report, a survey of 200 leading marketers and 25 experts. Here are the highlights:
- Email is still king, with 59 percent of respondents citing it as their biggest source of ROI, with other channels trailing (DMN note: of course, email is much less expensive than some of those other channels)
- Personalization is aspirational. Fully 96 percent believe in it, although significant portions of respondents said they didn’t personalize (39 percent) or even segment (21 percent)
- Most are still not on the AI or live video bandwagons; they’re working with what they’ve got. — Kim Davis
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And finally, let’s applaud email deliverability experts Return Path for re-affirming its commitment to a People First culture (see its return to work program, Path Forward) by scheduling a series of initatives around Women’s Equality Day, August 26. The program includes “bias busting” workshops for managers, and discussions around the Pioneers in Skirts documentary, which Return Path is supporting.
Content for Women’s Equality Day is headed your way at DMN too. Stay tuned. — Kim Davis
