Item: Adobe Campaign
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Adobe Campaign is used by the 4 business units of the Global enterprise I worked for. It is the official marketing automation tool across the business used to send out email and SMS communications to its prospects, customers and stakeholders. It is also used as the platform backend for online website forms. The business problem it solves is that when it was rolled-out, the company's direction was to unify the 4 business units into a single marketing automation platform. The goal was to have a unified view of the prospect or customer so it will be easy for us to acquire net new business leads, and convert those leads into a closed/won sale. For existing customers, the goal was more efficient cross-sell and upsell.

Pros and Cons

Big transactional data (eCommerce Transactions)
Data segmentation and aggregation
Third-party data enrichment

B2B enterprise nurture marketing with long sales cycles (6 months - 18 months)
Artificial intellgence
User Interface

Return on Investment

Saved the three business units we have of huge marketing automation platform costs for three years
Streamlined and centralised our marketing automation operations
The downside is that due to the varying nature of businesses and sales cycles of the three business units of the enterprise I worked for, it became hard to tweak one platform into 3 varying, different needs and so many different business models and scenarios.

Alternatives Considered

Marketo, Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

As we tried to centralise the marketing automation platform within the enterprise, Adobe Campaign can plug into several instances of Salesforce.com for lead management queues. All other marketing automation platforms can only plug into one instance of Salesforce.com.

Adobe Campaign was also able to handle the complexity and challenges of our enterprise data which are a result of years of legacy, mergers and acquisitions and data aggregation.

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Campaign delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe Campaign's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Campaign live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Campaign go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Adobe Campaign again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Salesforce.com, Jira Software, Filmora

Usability

It does the job. The tool itself is not the problem.

You need to have a person with a strong marketing technology background to fully drive and maximise its capabilities. That person will largely drive the productivity and efficiency of this tool in the same way that a fast racing car is dependent on its driver and the rest of the mechanics that ensure that it performs at its peak levels.

If the marketing leader cannot articulate its business needs from a technology innovation requirements perspective, then they may get frustrated with the tool.

In the three years that I have managed it, the methodology (e.g. user enablement, technical support and digital innovation) that I implemented to use this tool helped the enterprise meet the company's business requirements.

Any enterprise organisation should be ready to invest MORE money on digital transformation initiatives to customise AC according to meet its business needs.

Support Rating

I wished they have standard technical support based in Sydney, Australia and they made it easy for us to access that support.

A lot of the complex technical support questions have to be coursed through Adobe consultants, who charge a premium. And sometimes the answers to some technical questions are not very straightforward. In the end, we contracted a local Adobe Campaign technical partner.

Likelihood to Recommend

Adobe Campaign is well suited for:
1.) Sending email marketing communications to big email lists (over a million records).
2.) Businesses with short sales cycle - 3 months or less. Businesses that are fast moving and transactional in nature. Examples of companies which may benefit from this platform are financial services, consumer businesses; pure eCommerce websites with direct online sales of fast moving goods and repeat buys.
3.) If you would like to activate email, SMS, direct mail campaign as well as social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one marketing automation platform.
4.) If you have a specialist Adobe Campaign developer/technical resource as an average/ non-technical marketing manager, [they] may struggle to maximise all its features as some programming is needed for data related activities; setting up API connections and building of templatised automated workflow journeys.

Less appropriate:
1.) Longer B2B sales cycle - if it takes more than 6-18 months for a lead to convert into a sale as its lead nurture capabilities where you build content tracks and streams are harder to setup
2.) If you'd like to track your prospect or customer behaviour through cookies on your website. It's not straightforward to setup.
3.) If you like to keep changing your email templates (as the AC email is sometimes not easily rendered on Microsoft Outlook and other email platforms)

Users and Roles

20 - Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing Operations, Sales, Management

Do a thorough business requirement analysis before using Adobe Campaign

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Campaign