If you are familiar with or are using one or more of Adobe Marketing Cloud products such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign or Target, you know that they are independent products and require integrations to work.
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have become popular in the marketing industry with a promise to bring relevant data together in real time to action with the goal of instant personalization.
AEP, short for Adobe Experience Platform, is Adobe’s answer to the market demand for a real time customer data platform and a solution for all of Adobe marketing products to write and share data from a central place. AEP has been purpose built from the ground up. It is an open and extensible platform that allows for data, segmentation, and activation. AEP can be your foundation that sits at the center of your marketing technology stack. Let us show you why and how.
How can AEP help to Deliver Customer Experience?
First, what is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is every interaction a consumer has with your brand. Marketers desire to provide an optimal experience to their customers; experiences that are delivered seamlessly and consistently in every channel. Sounds great, right? To deliver this seamless in real time is hard due to many challenges, like bringing all the consumer data, both offline and online, past and present, together and having it available to act on.
Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform (Real-time CDP) provides you with a platform that allows you to bring in and manage data:
a. To bring previously known and anonymous data from disparate sources
b. To bring data as transactions and digital behaviors like current website visits for identity management and to create unified customer profiles
c. Perform advanced segmentation and build audiences
d. For data science and machine learning to build and run models
Second, Real-time CDP provides a way to seamlessly activate audiences to large ecosystems of partners:
a. Adobe Experience Cloud like Advertising cloud, Audience Manager, Campaign, Target, Marketo
b. The walled gardens of Facebook and Google
c. Third-party or applications like call center, connected devices, etc.
All of this is done in REAL TIME!
With Adobe’s Real-time CDP, you can bring data from various sources, achieve a single view of your customer, deliver personalized experiences in real-time across all channels and destinations.
What is AEP vs. Real-time CDP?
Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is Adobe’s overall offering that can be thought as foundation + services + applications. AEP provides the foundational platform to centralize and standardize customer data from any system with tools to apply data science and machine learnings with the goal of providing the best personalized experience based on the latest data.
Real-time-CDP is an application that is built on top of the base AEP that is focused on bringing together known and unknown customer data to create real-time dynamic customer profiles for activation to destinations. It leverages many platform services to deliver various functionalities. Built-in connectors allow an easy way to connect to Adobe products and other third-party systems.
Where does AEP fit?
At the heart of Adobe is AEP, which sits in the center to provide a central view of your customers with connectors to and from applications in analytics, advertising, commerce, and marketing clouds. AEP provides native connections, so you don’t have to develop custom integrations.
The objective is to have data from Adobe’s marketing cloud products and other sources in real time to a central system where the customer profiles can be dynamically updated. This helps to solve for the challenge of inconsistent experiences due to delays in data.
The first advantage of this is real-time utilization of streaming and behavior customer data. The second advantage is by centralizing segmentation, you can create seamless cross channel customer journeys across all your activation tools.
Why is AEP important?
As marketers, you want to provide the best experiences possible, and AEP and Real-time CDP provide the technology foundation that will enable you to do just that. AEP removes the barriers and solves for such challenges.
On the topic of Modernizing the Existing Tech Stack, Barry Latimer wrote in “Companies are looking at how technology can help them drive efficiencies and scale their marketing efforts at a lower cost. This is leading to 90 percent of companies looking at purchasing more marketing technology to help fill perceived gaps and to modernize their existing technology stack.”
AEP is important as it combines analytics & operational capabilities into a single platform that reduces latency. It provides data science ability to work on data directly without spending time and effort moving between systems. In AEP, data scientists can now run custom models and marketers can utilize intelligent services to configure prebuilt models to calculate scores and enrich customer profiles.
In conclusion, Adobe’s AEP is the solution to bring data together in real time and provide instant personalization.
It can be the foundational platform to centralize and standardize customer data from any system, with tools to apply data science and machine learnings, with the goal of providing the best personalized experience based on latest data. It helps marketers provide the best experiences at the right time.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out part two in this series: How Adobe Experience Platform Drives Data Transformation.
