Adobe announced a number of new capabilities for its Adobe Campaign email marketing tools. Most of these are available now (better dashboards, new email templates, better support for multilingual campaigns), but the most interesting new features the company showed me during a briefing earlier this week are still a while out.
It’s worth stressed that these upcoming features are currently in internal testing at Adobe Labs. They may see the light of day at some point, but Adobe may also decide to can them and move on to greener pastures.
For the last year or so, Adobe has been working on bringing machine learning-powered features to virtually all of its products thanks to its Sensei AI platform. Adobe Campaigns already allows its users to use machine intelligence to find the best subject lines for their emails and soon, it’ll also be able to suggest just the right image to show to the right person who opens a marketing email. As an image is displayed (and this works because most marketing emails are basically HTML pages that load their images from a company’s server), the service’s algorithm looks at a variety of signals to decide which image a customer is most likely to react to. Say you are a tent manufacturer. Some of your customers may react far better to an image of a two-person tent than a six-person tent, simply because of their demographics.
Another new predictive feature the company showed off is a new tool for predicting customer churn based on how users engage with emails. That’s some pretty standard machine-learning stuff, but like all of these projects, it’s only as good as the data you feed it. Because Adobe sits on a trove of data about your users (not just in Campaigns, but also Adobe Analytics and other services), it can create a pretty good profile of a business’ users.
Combined with data from Campaigns, this tool can predict when a customer is likely to unsubscribe from a service, for example. Indeed, as Adobe senior product marketing manager Bruce Swann told me, Adobe could use this tool internally to predict when a Creative Cloud user is likely to unsubscribe, for example.
In addition to these product announcements, Adobe also today released its latest email consumer survey, which highlights that no matter how annoyed you may be whenever you look at your overflowing inbox, email’s power endures. Adobe’s respondents in the U.S. said that they open 82 percent of work emails and 60 percent of personal emails. Most (61 percent) also say that email is their preferred way of being contacted by brands.
You can find a set of more detailed stats from the survey in the gallery below:
Comment