Adobe unleashes Marketing Cloud updates focused on customer engagement

Adobe has unveiled a series of updates to its Marketing Cloud aimed at giving retail marketers more muscle for customer engagement.

The updates come to life within Adobe Campaign, one of the six services that fall into the Marketing Cloud suite.

In many ways, the new features can be thought of as connective tissues to better fuse Adobe Campaign with Adobe Experience Manager, which is the platform's content asset repository.

Kerry Reilly, director of product for Adobe Campaign, said the new Shared Audiences functionality drastically improves a marketing team's muscle by sharing data between Campaign and the rest of Marketing Cloud's six core services. For instance, a marketer can now trigger an email in Adobe Campaign based on web or physical location based behaviors captured by Adobe Analytics.

"Sharing audiences between solutions is like building pipes that enable the sharing of target groups between campaigns," Reilly said.

Adobe has also made an attempt to modernize email marketing with tweaks that make the messaging system more real time. More specifically, the behavior of the email recipient becomes a factor when driving content. For instance, if a promotional email message is sent to a shopper with a discount that expires in two days, but that shopper doesn't open the email for five days, the email offer will change while it's in the inbox to meet the time and place that matches that of the recipient.

Adobe also added some features to embedded rich media that make an image more interactive and more likely to drive sales. In retail, rich media typically refers to an image with hot spots over certain items that, when activated via swipe over, advertise a similar product to the consumer. Adobe says it has made it easier for marketers to create the shoppable media with new drag-and-drop functionality. And to make the shopper more likely to complete a purchase, Adobe says the shopping cart now pops up after the consumer's first click on a hot spot.

Overall, Reilly said the new features are designed with ease-of-use in mind, but she conceded that there's a slight learning curve for many marketers.

"This is a complex problem for a marketer to figure out how to control and manage all of the streams and data," she said. "There is a learning curve, but our goal is to make it as easy as possible."