Adobe Archives

Activating data for a flagship customer experience project for the RAC

Posted on: 14 April 2022

The RAC provides complete peace of mind to more than 12.7 million UK personal and business members, whatever their driving needs. They’re famous for breakdown assistance, but they also provide motor insurance and a range of other services, including buying a new or used car, vehicle inspections and checks, legal services and traffic and travel information.

The Challenge: stepping up from outdated campaign tools

The RAC had outgrown its relatively basic campaign tool. They needed something more flexible and efficient to transform the existing manual and time-intensive process for campaign delivery. Their on-premise SQL solution was hosted by a third-party agency. Poor access to the data constrained the RAC marketing team, which needed to be more self-sufficient in campaign operations.

The RAC’s Data and CRM Strategy Leader, Ian Ruffle, says: “Because the legacy technology wasn’t efficient, it took over 48 hours to refresh the data. If it fell over, as it often did, because we were at the limits of the solution’s capability, it could take up to ten days from a customer being acquired to reflect that in the marketing solution. This was becoming a real problem.”

The Solution: future-proof MarTech and a flexible data platform

The RAC and CACI worked together to implement a suite of tools to transform the RAC’s marketing capabilities and to create the efficiencies and flexibility they needed. The first step was to build a single customer view (SCV) database using Snowflake. The pay-by-consumption processing function made it scalable and cost effective as well as future-proof. This gave the RAC direct access and control over their own data, which was a key requirement. Within Snowflake, CACI built a secure, accurate and compliant dataset, in line with the new GDPR requirements.

The database is hosted in the MS Azure cloud, and is refreshed and managed using Azure Functions, event triggers and DBT models. CACI’s resolution identity product, ResolvID also plays a part in the solution. It’s hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and consumed in real time as event-triggered files are added into the database. This gives the RAC a complete view of each customer across multiple datasets and sources, allowing them to engage their customers in a more holistic way.

CACI implemented Adobe Campaign, Target and Analytics. The RAC and CACI worked together to migrate all their existing campaigns from their legacy solution into the new Adobe Campaign instance, automating everywhere that was possible.

The Benefits: self-sufficiency and an elevated customer experience

Ian explains:

This year we really have been enabled by the data activation project. We’re now self-sufficient to deliver campaigns and communications that meet the needs of our key business programmes. The solution has greatly reduced the time-consuming and manual tasks that the CRM team used to have to do, freeing them to work on more innovative projects. We’ve seen great results and are proud to have won the Data IQ Transformation with Data award.

Find out more

To find out more detail on how RAC approached its data and MarTech transformation, and more of the benefits the organisation has experienced as a result of the project, read the full case study here. If you’d like support in transforming your own MarTech stack do get in touch.

Learnings from CACI’s Activating Data event

Posted on: 18 February 2022

Back at the end of November 2021, during a small window of lockdown restrictions easing, CACI held an event in London for clients and prospects. After 20 months of not being able to meet in person, it felt great to be reunited to share insights and experience.

Given the time that has passed, we wanted to make this event memorable for all the right reasons. To do this we organised client speakers from the RAC, Laithwaites Wines and Domino’s Pizza Group. Recognising that many of you want to hear from your peers rather than us.

“Activating data to deliver seamless customer experiences” was the title of the event we decided on. Granted it’s a mouthful to say, but we felt that the topic of activating data into the customer experience is overlooked. Often falling between the IT, data, and marketing functions. When it comes to delivering a customer experience strategy that connects across all channels and is consistent it requires all these business areas to work together.

In this blog post I want to pick out some of the important client messages from that event. You can watch all the videos here.

Takeaway 1: Need for multi-disciplinary change teams

Ian Ruffle and Jenny Cann spoke about the RAC’s implementation of Adobe Campaign and Snowflake. The project has been a big success for the RAC, delivering new use cases and positive benefits (including a reduction in inbound calls).

To successfully deliver this type of change, Jenny showed how RAC and CACI formed a core decision making team across technical and marketing disciplines. This group provided clear direction for the project and united teams around a single vision for delivery.

Watch the RAC case study

Takeaway 2: Don’t forget the creative

Domino’s Pizza Group shared the ingredients of their journey to deliver personalised messages to every customer. Hayley Pryde of Domino’s introduced how this transformation has been delivered through good technology, having the right people, developing test & learn processes, and then selecting solid agency partners.

An added ingredient was the need for new creative assets that can be personalised in every channel. This required new imagery, a variety of copy options, and strong integration between creativity and technology. Assets needed to work in multiple channels and be relevant to the recipient. For example, if a customer always orders vegetarian options, it’s less effective to use “mighty meaty” imagery in the campaign.

As Domino’s Pizza Group have discovered, having the best technology and processes will only get you so far if the creative assets are all the same. For this reason, they are working with CACI’s creative studio to produce a wide range of personalisable assets for performance and direct channels.

Watch Domino’s Pizza Group talk about creative asset personalisation.

Takeaway 3: Get closer to the customer

Through lockdown Laithwaites Wines saw a change in their customer profile. Whilst their loyal base of wine buyers continued to purchase, new customer groups came to the brand looking for great wine that could be delivered to their home.

With a growing base of customers, Laithwaites Wines worked with CACI to understand the UK market for wine buyers. Using Laithwaites’ data, CACI’s demographics and lifestyle data, and market research we created a market segmentation that could be applied to Laithwaites’ business strategy.

Personas and market plans were built from the segmentation, enabling the business to understand the differences in customer buying habits and needs. For each segment, core value propositions were drawn out and applied to communications. Importantly for Laithwaites Wines, the segments provided a way to calculate addressable headroom for each segment to set very specific targets for growth.

To listen to James and Sophie talk-through Laithwaites Wines’ approach to segmentation, click here.

Adobe Campaign v8 – CACI achieves another first with Adobe

Posted on: 10 December 2021

CACI continues to stay at the cutting edge of marketing technology as they achieve an EMEA first for Telegraph Media Group.

Communicating with their subscribers and readers is an important objective for the Telegraph, with a need to stay relevant through fresh content and offers. To continue serving timely and personalised messaging, the Telegraph made the decision to upgrade to Adobe Campaign v8 and to implement Adobe’s Experience Platform.

Adobe Campaign v8 brings high speed performance for complex data selections and ensures that Telegraph are able to reflect the diverse interests of their readers in communications.

As a long-time partner of both Adobe and Telegraph Media Group, CACI were appointed to run the upgrade. Notably this was the first upgrade in EMEA to Campaign v8 and the second globally.

Speaking of the project, Dylan Jacques of Telegraph said “it is great to work with partners who understand our business so well and take a practical approach to delivery. Working with the teams at CACI and Adobe has been a pleasure and enabled us to deliver a complex upgrade.”

With an increasing array of options for marketing technology, CACI remain committed to our mission of assessing the best options for our clients and making value led decisions on what route to take. David Delbridge who leads CACI’s marketing technology practice said “every client situation is different which requires us to look at the use cases a client has and make decisions that deliver the greatest value for minimal effort & cost. Telegraph needed a powerful platform that could handle their complex data and Adobe Campaign V8 was the obvious choice. As longstanding partners of Adobe, we are proud to have implemented the first Adobe Campaign v8 outside of the US!”

Should you want to find out more about CACI’s work with Adobe and the support we can provide in selecting and optimising customer marketing technology, please get in contact.

Discover how we can help you with Adobe

Find out more about how we’re helping leading brands with Adobe in our case studies with Virgin Media, Bupa, and Legal and General.

How Virgin Media successfully met the new End of Contract Notification Regulation

Posted on: 16 June 2021

What is EoCN?

The new Ofcom regulation launched 15th February 2020 outlines that customers must be sent an End of Contract Notification 10-40 days before their contract ends. These should include details of the account such as current contract deal and associated offers. The regulation is designed to raise awareness to the customer that they’re out of contract and their price may change.

Our systems didn’t have anything which could produce this, and we hadn’t done this before. We had absolutely nothing in place that could do this, it would be starting from scratch

– Ben Gibson, Senior Campaign Delivery Manager

Creating an End-to-End Solution in Adobe Campaign

Virgin Media requested the support from a dedicated CACI Adobe Campaign Consultant to assist with the creation and the facilitation of the end to end solution. CACI’s Senior Consultant, Fraser Rallison joined the team to support Virgin Media with its EoCN campaign.

Resource and timelines were very very short, and it was a mandatory timeline with a big financial impact if this was missed. We needed someone very good. We needed that confidence that whoever came onboard could run with the project and Fraser’s prior experience was perfect.

– Ben Gibson, Senior Campaign Delivery Manager

Identifying the Most Appropriate Way to Contact Customers

The EoCN approach consisted of passing data through several different data systems. The process began by selecting all eligible customers using Virgin Media’s source billing system. This data is then released to be transformed into a more customer friendly format. Once complete, the customer specific offers are appended, and the data is delivered into Adobe Campaign.

Within Adobe Campaign, 6 individual workflows were created to release over 20 different data files. These workflows ensured that the data coming through was correct and accurate with no missing values which could cause confusion to the customer. The data is also checked to ensure all offers are correct and make sense to the consumer.

Once these steps are complete the data is reviewed to identify the most appropriate way to contact customers. This is identified by reviewing their previous email engagement, quality of email address and whether they require a notification in a special format (such as Audio or Braille).

Once these checks and classifications are complete a bespoke report is built from Adobe and shared with project stakeholders with a request to approve the counts should they match the project plan. Once sign off is agreed the data passes a final two stage quality assurance check before then being released to separate Email and Direct Mail agencies.

A Flexible and Dynamic Approach

The level of granularity within the workflows allowed Virgin Media to better understand the offering provided to customers. The flexible and dynamic approach has also lead to a significant amount of customers communicated to since 15th February 2020 when the regulation came into force. With the support of CACI, Virgin Media have kept within the EoCN regulations and avoid substantial fines.

I seriously don’t think that without CACI and other members of the project team that we would have hit that go live date

– Ben Gibson, Senior Campaign Delivery Manager

Read the full case study

You can view the full PDF of this case study here.

To discover more about how we’re supporting Virgin Media with their customer communications, read our next case study – Enabling Virgin Media to Implement Ofcom’s Annual Best Tariff Notification Regulation.

How Virgin Media successfully met the new Annual Best Tariff Notification Regulation

Posted on:

What is the Annual Best Tariff Notification regulation?

As part of a set of Ofcom regulations launched in February 2020, all customers who are out of contract are to be communicated to on an annual basis from when their contract ended or if they’ve never had a contract. These should include details of the account such as current contract deal, price & services, future premium as well as recommendations for alternative tariffs available based on customer usage and current services.

Implementing the Annual Best Tariff Notification (ABTN)

Following the success of the implementation of End of Contract Notification, Virgin Media approached CACI to assist with the implementation of Annual Best Tariff Notification (ABTN).

The impact of the ABTN regulation was an unknown to Virgin Media. Whilst initial tests had been put in place in 2019, the bulk of these customers were on complex product holdings, predominantly out of contract and disengaged with Virgin Media’s existing communications.

These customers are likely to be paying significantly more than those customers who have re-contracted in the last 18 months. For the business, we had zero idea of the impact, even after testing due to the restrictions we needed to put on the data

– Ben Gibson, Senior Campaign Delivery Manager

Designing a Flexible Solution within Adobe Campaign

Within Adobe Campaign 9 individual workflows were created to deliver the ABTN solution to customers. This involved an initial deep dive into the Virgin Media customer base to identify all eligible customers to be communicated to before the 15th February 2021. Once this was complete, this information was shared with the Virgin Media commercial team to design and map out the best strategy for communicating to these customers which would not only be effective but also ensure the lowest revenue hit would occur.

CACI supported in designing the solution to be flexible, which allowed Virgin Media’s commercial team to adapt to changes in the market and changes to customer behaviour as a result of COVID-19. Evolving tried and tested methods from EoCN, the workflows allowed Virgin Media’s commercial teams to specify which ‘cohorts’ they would like to target for that month and this was then implemented into the solution.

Launching Within Regulation

The project was launched within regulation and is already having an impact in clearing the required customers before the deadline in February 2021. With over three separate runs completed the project was handed over the Virgin Media Insight Operations team to continue the project.

Without CACI the impact of trying to achieve ABTN would have had a significant impact to the business involving taking colleagues off from pre-planned work and cancelling other activity such as sales, cross-sell, retention.

– Ben Gibson, Senior Campaign Delivery Manager

Read the full case study

You can view the PDF of this full case study here.

You can read more about how we’ve been supporting Virgin Media with Adobe Campaign in our additional case study – Enabling Virgin Media to Successfully Meet Ofcom’s End of Contract Notification Regulation.

Enabling Legal and General to become data led, technology enabled and customer experience-focused

Posted on: 15 June 2021

Legal & General is the UK’s largest provider of individual life assurance products and a top 20 global asset manager. Founded nearly 200 years ago, today the company aims to improve the lives of customers, build a better society for the long term and create value for shareholders through inclusive capitalism.

Data-led, technology enabled, and customer experience focused

James O’Keefe, Commercial Director and Transformation Lead, explains:

Legal & General had set out a clear strategy to drive growth in our direct sales business by being a data led, technology enabled and customer experience-focused digital business. It sounds a simple approach, but we had unique challenges to tackle in our disparate legacy systems and data. The post-GDPR landscape is a critical context too: like all responsible organisations, we’re committed to being compliant, but we’re also looking ahead to the future of global digital privacy.

Relevant and Useful Customer Journeys

James says “We needed a foundation of lawful and accessible first-party data that we could enrich with third-party data to provide meaningful customer insight at a sub-segment and attribute level. This would inform and enable customer and prospect engagement.”

Legal & General had already selected Adobe Campaign Standard for marketing campaign execution. James explains: “In any transformation programme, it’s worth looking for quick ways to deliver value early on, to prove the ROI and demonstrate results. We had a gap in our tech stack that Adobe Campaign filled. CACI worked with us to join data sources, create clean and enriched datasets and to launch the platform. It was an important proof point that delivered good campaign results, gaining buy in and further commitment from stakeholders as well as investment from sponsors.”

With the CACI Demographic Data API, Legal & General is getting even more value from their Acorn and Ocean datasets and CACI-built custom segmentation.

Using this real-time connection, CACI provides Legal & General with Ocean characteristics in real time, such as wealth, age and attitudes, to match with prospects and customers in a privacy safe and compliant manner. This means they can be assigned a best-fit persona and served the most relevant and useful customer journey immediately. It also informs and refreshes Legal & General’s models, for personalised customer experiences.

Leaving behind a one-size-fits all approach, for a segmented and customised conversion journey

CACI’s Ocean consumer data enriches Legal & General’s first-party data, giving a clearer picture of preferences, behaviours and motivations. The team can prioritise marketing spending and campaigns to make the biggest business impact. Legal & General customers and prospects now receive marketing communications that feel relevant to their life stage and priorities.

James says: The results are excellent. We have market-leading campaign deliverability rates. Compared to our legacy system, we have doubled open rates, trebled click-through rates and greatly improved the open-to-sale ratio. The big difference is that we’ve left behind our previous one-size-fits-all approach, replacing it with a far more segmented and customised conversion journey. We have multiple representations of customers and we’re able to optimise continually by balancing the commercial benefits against the cost and complexity of running more campaigns. We have transparency so we can see exactly what drives value. We can understand precisely how we’re influencing customer outcomes and adjust the approach to meet our business goals.

It’s testament to CACI’s breadth of skills that we were able to look to you for guidance and support in every aspect of the customer experience strategy and deployment. I call it your ‘bench strength’ – CACI’s consistent knowledge and capability across the board. There’s great account leadership: when we need to be connected to expertise in different parts of CACI you get us in front of the right person.

You can download a PDF copy of this case study here. If you’d like to discuss your consumer data or data science needs with our team of experts, please get in touch.

Transforming Bupa’s customer journeys

Posted on: 14 June 2021

Bupa was created in 1947 in the UK with the founding purpose to prevent, relieve and cure sickness and ill-health of every kind. The company is driven by a passion to provide high quality, affordable healthcare. Today, Bupa is an international healthcare company, providing health insurance, treatment in clinics, dental centres, hospitals and care homes.

The Challenge

Richard Glassborow is the Direct Distribution and Marketing Director for Bupa UK Insurance. He explains:

“Our challenge was no less than a marketing transformation. When I met with CACI a few months after taking up this role, I was looking for ways to transform our people, technology and data capabilities.

“Transforming our customer journeys was my top priority. We have a big customer base with many different journeys, from finding customers, bringing them into the funnel for conversion, on-boarding, renewing, retention and off-boarding, as well as managing claims. Customer expectations for personalised engagement are very high: they’re set by technology-led organisations like Amazon. In healthcare, we needed to raise our game.

The Solution

The end goal was to give Richard and his team a roadmap to transform customer journeys, alongside an assessment of current data and technology gaps.

Bupa had some challenges with lead conversion and retention, partly due to a lack of personalisation in their communications. For the transformation roadmap, CACI built a suite of private medical insurance (PMI) customer journeys for different life stages, then converted those into contact strategies which could be developed and activated through Bupa’s Adobe technology platform. They were designed to be engaging, timely and relevant.

CACI looked at the technology and data dependencies in context of Bupa’s existing and future resources, identifying the changes needed to give Bupa the customer experience capability it wanted. CACI’s consultants produced a recommended strategic solution to transform data and technology by upgrading Bupa’s IT architecture.

The Benefits

Richard Glassborow is very pleased with the report and recommendations made by CACI. “This work has created clarity instead of ambiguity. It has given us momentum and given our senior team the assurance to take the next step. The tactical steps we’ve identified are key to breaking down barriers to change: we now have a credible plan to address them, so everyone is confident that the transformation is feasible.”

CACI is a preferred partner to Bupa for technology and implementation. The teams are working together on several strategic projects, including the single customer view, marketing distribution technology, and this infrastructure solution.

Team CACI understands the tech, the data silos, the infrastructure, our operational ways of working and what’s realistically possible in the timeframes we have. Using their knowledge and intelligence, they have pieced together a strong and coherent roadmap and action plan for improved customer experience that will measurably uplift our KPIs. Because they understand us and the issues we face as an organisation, they are by our side as trusted advisors and partners.

Find out more about how we’re supporting Bupa with their customer marketing strategy in the full case study here.

Adobe Campaign Classic 8 and Adobe Workfront – Sometimes it’s the Little Things

Posted on: 26 May 2021

CACI is an Adobe partner with experience of implementing, optimising and running Adobe’s Experience Cloud for our clients. We’ve been following the developments in Adobe’s product development and will be sharing our insights here. In this post, David Moore shares his view of the integration between Adobe Workfront and the new version of Adobe Campaign.

Watching the introduction to Adobe Campaign Classic 8 in this year’s Adobe Summit I was taken by JJ Haglund’s top 10 innovations. Sitting at number 10 was the “close integration with Adobe Workfront”, a product Adobe acquired in 2020. It sparked an immediate interest. Why? Let’s go on a journey.

Marketing is no longer the free for all it was. You can no longer sell Snake Oil and get away with it (apart from hi-fi industry see footnote *). Especially in the UK, marketing is now closely regulated and in certain verticals such as financial services, energy, telecoms there are external bodies who have the authority to audit a company’s marketing and apply fines if they find inappropriate marketing practices.

As such for any marketing campaign, organisations in these sectors, must have an audit trail for a campaign including the assets that makes up that campaign and the audiences selected to receive the campaign. For example, in the retail finance sector the principles of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) include explicit and implicit guidance on the fair treatment of customers. This fair treatment defines six consumer outcomes that firms should strive to achieve. Three of these are: –

Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

So, the selection criteria for customers to be included in an email, SMS, DM, outbound or push marketing campaign needs to include a justification for the selection of the audience, including sign-off, to be recorded for audit purposes.

Also, all the assets chosen for a campaign such as the images and copy need to go through an audited approval process, passing through both the marketing management and legal teams to ensure that customers are being treated fairly. Every sign-off needs to be recorded in case the FCA come knocking and pick on some campaigns to audit. Also, we must remember that a campaign is not just email/SMS/push/DM, but also billboards, TV, YouTube, social media, radio, off the page. All the assets making up the overall campaign, across all distribution channels, need to go through the same process.

So, I’m really excited about Adobe Workfront integration into Adobe Campaign. For our regulated customers (and regulation across the marketing industry is only set to increase) Adobe Campaign and Adobe Workfront looks like a real winner. I’d certainly have ranked it higher than 10. And if you also have Adobe Experience Manager then Workfront integrates with that as well ensuring all assets have been built, reviewed, and tagged appropriately.

An interesting story. I was involved in a pitch to a large regional financial services organisation. We were invited to pitch the two best marcomms tools (Adobe Campaign and Unica) at the time, our presentation was to cover both the campaign management and asset audit management capabilities of the tools. At the time Adobe excelled in Campaign Management but was flawed in Asset Management, Unica was also good in Campaign Management (though poor in delivery integration) and we thought was OK in Asset Management but not a class leader. Which won?

Neither. Unica came close but could not handle radio, TV and social media assets. The company went purely with an audit asset management tool and to my knowledge have still to buy a campaign management tool.

(* cables that are directional: Really?)

If you are considering what the announcements from Adobe Summit mean for your business, please get in touch and we can arrange an initial consultation to help.

How to build a business case for Adobe Campaign

Posted on: 19 November 2018

There’s good reason for Adobe Campaign being recognised as the leading multi-channel campaign management tool by analysts. It’s packed with powerful features that enable marketers to orchestrate communications and experiences across multiple channels.

Given the power of the tool when compared to other products in the market, Adobe Campaign may appear aspirational. In reality, (and having done a number of business cases for investment in Adobe Campaign) the case can be easily made. Even when moving from a low-end email service provider.

Costs to consider when building your business case:

Licence cost of Adobe Campaign
Implementation cost to configure your instance of Adobe Campaign
Campaign migration costs for transitioning existing campaigns to Adobe Campaign (note, this may be a good chance to improve your campaigning rather than doing a “lift-and-shift”)
Training of your team
Ongoing user support for technical and campaign users of Adobe Campaign
Outsourcing of the Adobe Campaign function which is an increasingly popular option allowing you the best in market tool along with an expert team of users
Costs for integration with further channels (SMS, Push, WhatsApp, Programmatic Display)

What’s crucial is to calculate both the CapEx and OpEx costs to get you running with Adobe Campaign. Pulling together this list can be daunting, however, CACI and Adobe can help you build a full plan with costings.

What return can I expect from Adobe Campaign?

Now comes the other side of the equation. What return do you expect to achieve from moving to Adobe Campaign? This return may be an operational cost saving by moving suppliers or, the opportunity to improve marketing performance.

Operational cost savings can come from combining existing tools into one multi-functional tool. Multiple tools that are commonly combined include ESP, SMS, campaign selection tool, customer database, and mobile app messaging. Not only is there a potential cost benefit of doing this, there is also the added power and simplicity of managing everything through Adobe Campaign. Our client, The O2 invested in Adobe Campaign and Email Studio, and have reported a reduction in campaign production timelines by 80%. Watch the customer success story.

Personally, the more exciting element of investing in Adobe Campaign is the opportunity to produce more engaging, more coordinated, cross-channel direct marketing – to actually deploy customer journeys with personalised marketing messages. Journeys that drive a significant and measurable financial return to your business.

When calculating your opportunity to improve marketing performance consider:

What would an improved response rate to marketing communications mean?
How would reduced churn or unsubscribe rates influence CLTV?
If customers are more engaged with my brand, what difference would this make?
What would the financial benefit be of reactivating lapsed customers?
Through personalised comms, what improvement could we see to offer conversion?
By improving campaign selections how much could we improve cross-sell purchases?

The perfect business case for Adobe Campaign would be composed of both an efficiency factor and an improvement in marketing response. Especially given that improved efficiency should enable the team to launch more campaigns, do more testing, and give more time to consider strategy. Combining both areas together should give you the case to invest in market leading technology that will really take your marketing efforts forward.

If you’d like help compiling your business case for Adobe Campaign, get in touch.

Reporting in Adobe Campaign: Three tips from the experts

Posted on: 26 April 2018

Adobe Campaign’s cross-channel engagement abilities are beyond doubt – but the tool’s reporting functionality can do more than some users realise. Here are our hints, tips and tricks for reporting using Adobe Campaign.

As I work alongside organisations to implement, integrate and use Adobe Campaign, there’s one area that I’m often asked about. Reporting.

Generally, marketers using Adobe Campaign are well aware of the tool’s data management, campaign orchestration & automation capabilities. After all, it’s the main reason they invested in the software. However, in addition to sending campaigns, they want an easy way to report on results.

More often than not, I find marketers want help in three areas:

Advising on how to make the most of the out-of-the-box reports
Creating custom reports and dashboards tailored to their own particular needs, data and KPIs
Integrating data from Adobe Campaign into specialist reporting and analysis tools (e.g. Tableau, FastStats, PowerBI)

Adobe Campaign’s reporting capabilities are both powerful and flexible if you use them right. And in this short post, I’ll explore three ways to use Adobe Campaign reporting to help you get the information you need to track your KPIs and make smart decisions.

1. USING OUT-OF-THE-BOX REPORTS

For most operational uses, Adobe Campaign’s suite of out-of-the-box reports are great. The delivery reports in particular show a wide range of metrics, from reporting on non-deliverables and bounces through to providing a breakdown of opens by device and KPIs on all URLs clicked.

You can easily select a report showing the KPI you’re after, and all of the reports are easy to navigate. There’s no configuration required and they’re easily exportable – say as a PDF or XLS –providing a quick option when you need to share information with your colleagues.

Helpfully, you can also report on multiple deliveries at once through simply selecting them within the folder interface – the Delivery Summary report in particular is useful when comparing results across multiple campaigns.

TOP TIPS: Out-of-the-box reporting

Structure your campaign folders logically to help reporting on aggregate KPIs (useful when viewing reports via the dashboard)
Ensure opt-out and mirror page links are configured correctly so that their clicks are classified accordingly
Use the out-of-the box reports as a starting point for any custom reports you may want to create

2. TAKE YOUR REPORTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL WITH BESPOKE REPORTS

Once you’re comfortable with the out-of-the-box reports, you’ll want to take it to the next level and create bespoke reports.

The reporting interface within the platform allows you to create a range of reports and dashboards, with visualisations from tables through to pie charts, histograms, gauges and funnels. You can also add your own HTML containing commentary or explanatory information.

Importantly, the platform offers complete flexibility in terms of what data is reported on, including any custom attributes and even bespoke schemas. A useful tactic can be to build custom schemas to contain aggregated data that you wish to use within your report. You can then populate this data using scheduled workflows.

We used this exact approach with a recent client who was looking to have an aggregated month-by-month sales breakdown report, populated from the underlying transactional data already integrated into their data model.

In addition to being exportable, bespoke reports can be published and made accessible from the web, either open or behind a login.

TOP TIPS: Bespoke reports

Create reports using schemas storing aggregate KPIs – this is a great approach when looking to report on weekly/monthly snapshots
Schedule prompts to send alerts to users when data in reports has been updated
Use bespoke filters to help you navigate to the right view quickly

3. INTERROGATE DATA THROUGH CUBES

If your license includes the Marketing Analytics Module, cubes are a great way of presenting and interrogating data.

Similar to bespoke reports, they can be built from any schema, and there’s complete flexibility around configuration of dimensions and measures – useful if you have a wide range of custom attributes.

Usefully, you can also save a list directly from a cube by simply clicking on the shopping cart button once you have selected the required cells. If your cube is using recipient data then it is straightforward to then use this list as a target in a marketing campaign.

TOP TIPS: Cubes

Provide access to your analysts/business intelligence teams – they will appreciate being able to quickly interrogate and compare data sets within Adobe Campaign
Ensure dimensions and measures are configured to cover all your key attributes (e.g. segment code, lifetime value, etc)
As with any reporting, ensure you set up useful metadata on your campaigns

If you want no-nonsense reporting quickly, out-of-the-box reports offer a simple and intuitive way to make sense of your data. Adobe Campaign’s custom reporting abilities enable you to take things a step further, whilst cubes are great for quick interrogation of your data.

As with any reporting however, the key is to define the KPIs and structure you need considering the business decisions your organisation needs to make. We rely on our expert colleagues within our reporting and visualisation teams to make sure we get this right for our clients at CACI.

Because a report is only worthwhile if it helps you meet your business objectives.