Adobe Target is a tool that allows marketers and data teams to run A/B tests and personalize content. It’s often used to dynamically show personalized offers to users based on segment inclusion or to show different versions of pages or portions of pages to test new ideas. Adobe Target feeds on audiences and data, so the more audiences and data it has, the better it can personalize or run experiments.
The following will share some examples of how Adobe customers use Hightouch to improve their use of Adobe Target.
Improve audiences for targeting
User segments/audiences are critical to Adobe Target. Audiences determine which users are included or not in experiments and how content or offers are personalized. You can build audiences in Adobe Target or other Adobe Experience Cloud products and then share those with Adobe Target. While building audiences from Adobe’s Experience Cloud is possible, these audiences are often built on subsets of customer data. While all customer data typically resides in a cloud data warehouse, duplicating that data in Adobe Experience Cloud would be expensive and inefficient. Hightouch, which has access to all customer data in the warehouse, can be used to send additional audiences and user profile attributes into Adobe Target.
Hightouch’s Customer Studio excels at leveraging all customer data from the warehouse to create granular segments/audiences that can be pushed to hundreds of SaaS products, including Adobe Target.
Therefore, if your organization uses Hightouch, it can build comprehensive segments/audiences encompassing all warehouse data and then send these audiences to Adobe Target as needed.
Building audiences in Hightouch and sending them to Adobe Target allows you to have the best of both worlds - all-encompassing audiences in a world-class experimentation/personalization tool.
Ingest warehouse attributes for personalization
Another way to use Hightouch to improve the use of Adobe Target is to send Target additional user attribute data. Adobe Target builds a profile for each user, and user profiles can ingest data based on digital behavior. For example, if a user completes a form indicating they live in Chicago, that can be added to their Adobe Target user profile. The more data in the Adobe Target user profile, the more granular Target can be when personalizing experiments, content, and offers. Since Adobe Target is a first-party data tool, organizations can leverage Hightouch to pass any first-party data into Adobe Target.
Hightouch has access to the most information possible—all data from the warehouse! To update user profiles, Hightouch has pre-built syncs between cloud data warehouses and Adobe Target. Data syncs can be initiated manually, event-based, or run on a pre-set schedule.
To illustrate this concept, let’s look at a few examples.
eCommerce Example
Imagine you work for an online retailer (Supershoes) and want to optimize cross-sell offers for each user based on past purchase behavior. All purchase history resides in the data warehouse, and your data science team has used warehouse data to identify the user’s favorite brand for cross-selling and possibly a lead score that indicates propensity to purchase. Hightouch can push this favorite brand to Adobe Target so users will see the appropriate brand cross-sell the next time they visit the digital property.
Here you can see how Adobe Target can use both favorite brand and lead score data in an activity:
Hotel Example
Next, let’s look at a hotel example. Imagine you work at a hotel and want to personalize the experience in the app for each user. When they open the app, you may want Adobe Target to have access to things like:
- User’s home city/country
- Date/hotel of next reservation
- Current loyalty status
- Services they like at hotels (e.g., preferred car)
This customer data can be pushed from the data warehouse to Adobe Target for personalization and testing.
Here is an example of how Adobe Target could then be configured to take advantage of this data:
In addition, if your organization has built many audiences in Hightouch, you can pass the names/IDs of these audiences to Adobe Target as a user property. For example, if 100 users are part of Audience A in Hightouch, this can be added to each user’s Adobe Target profiles. Once this data is appended, you can build audiences in Adobe Target that leverage the Hightouch audiences without replicating all the customer data required to make the audience in Adobe Target.
Improve identity resolution (IDR)
Customers and prospects often use multiple browsers and devices. Sometimes, they are anonymous, and sometimes, they are authenticated (logged in). While Adobe Target can resolve identities when it receives specific IDs or recognizes past devices, Hightouch can improve this by resolving identities across all customer data in the warehouse. Hightouch’s intelligent identity resolution capabilities allow organizations to merge more users using all customer attributes in the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, Hightouch has access to any identifier, including email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and more.
These resolved identities can then be sent to Adobe Target to maximize the number of times customers and prospects see consistent experiences across all devices.
Deliver 1:1 personalization via AI Decisioning
Every organization dreams of personalizing content and offers at the 1:1 individual level, and martech has promised this for decades. Hightouch’s AI Decisioning uses data from the warehouse and reinforcement learning to test and then deliver personalized content. Once Hightouch’s AI Decisioning engine determines the optimal content for each user, this content can be delivered to users via Adobe Target.
For example, imagine you have twenty different offers to show customers when they arrive on your website, but you don’t know which offer is best for each person. Hightouch AI Decisioning could be used to experiment with all twenty offers by autonomously experimenting with a broad group of users, learning based on impression and engagement events, and then learning which clusters of customers are best responding to each offer.
Without AI Decisioning, you would need to build out experiments with segmentation and A/B testing carefully, find the best offer, and then you’d probably present the winning offer to all customers. With AI Decisioning, however, Hightouch could automate all of this and not only find the winning variant but also the winning variant for each customer. The ability to hone in on the right content for each person makes agentic AI and reinforcement learning so powerful.
Final thoughts
Adobe Target is a powerful tool that leverages user data and audiences to test different experiences and personalize content. Hightouch helps Adobe Target customers be more effective by passing better audiences and user profile data to Target. These improved audiences and data points are sourced from the data warehouse, which often contains more data than the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem. Hightouch streamlines the passage of audiences and data so marketers can maximize their investment in Adobe Target.
To learn more about how Hightouch can help you get the most out of your Adobe products, grab some time with our solutions team.
This blog is part of a series about getting more from your Adobe products by using Hightouch. To learn more, you can also read:
