Core Concepts
۶Ƶ Journey Optimizer (AJO) includes several key functional areas that work together seamlessly. This guide explains each area and describes how these areas combine to create impactful customer experiences. Understanding these functional areas ensures that you can leverage AJO to deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences efficiently.
Overview of Functional Areas
Detailed Functional Areas
Data Management: The Foundation
Purpose: Ingest, structure, and manage the data that powers personalization. This process includes defining data structures (Schemas), creating storage containers (Datasets), and importing data from various systems.
Treat Data Management as the groundwork for all customer engagement. A well-structured data foundation ensures that every decision, message, and journey uses accurate and organized information.
Key Components:
- Schema creation and management: Define the structure of customer data.
- Example: Create a Schema outlining fields like “First Name,” “Email Address,” and “Purchase History.”
- Dataset configuration: Organize data into logical containers.
- Example: Group transaction data into a “Sales Transactions” dataset for easier analysis.
- Data ingestion workflows: Import data into the platform efficiently.
- Example: Use pre-built Source Connectors to import customer data from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
- Data quality tools: Maintain data accuracy and completeness.
Benefit: Ensures that customer data is reliable, organized, and accessible, forming the foundation for all AJO activities. Pre-built Source Connectors streamline data ingestion from common platforms.
Customer Management: Know Your Audience
Purpose: Build and maintain a deep understanding of each customer. This involves using ۶Ƶ Experience Platform’s (AEP) Real-time Customer Profile to merge data from all touchpoints into a unified view. It also manages identities across devices and channels, enabling the grouping of individuals into targetable Audiences based on shared attributes or behaviors.
Customer Management tools connect disparate data points to provide a cohesive picture of each customer. This understanding ensures that you can deliver relevant and personalized experiences.
Key Components:
- Real-time Customer Profile: Unified view of each customer.
- Example: Combine web browsing history, app interactions, and offline purchases into a single profile.
- Identity resolution: Link customer data across devices and channels.
- Example: Match a customer’s email address with their app usage data using Identity Graph.
- Audience creation and management: Define groups based on attributes and behaviors.
- Example: Create an audience for “Loyal Customers” who have made more than five purchases in the last year.
- Segmentation: Apply rules for dynamic audience membership.
- Example: Set up a segment for “High-Value Shoppers” that updates automatically when customers spend over $500.
Benefit: Enables precise targeting and personalization through a dynamic understanding of individual preferences, history, and segment memberships.
Content Management: Craft Your Message
Purpose: Create, manage, personalize, and reuse marketing content across multiple channels. This includes managing digital assets, building messages with visual editors or code, leveraging reusable Content Templates and Fragments, creating Landing Pages, and using artificial intelligence (AI) for content generation.
Content Management tools ensure that teams efficiently create and deliver tailored messages, maintaining consistency and relevance at every touchpoint.
Key Components:
- Content editors: Create and format messages visually or with code.
- Example: Use the visual editor to design an email campaign promoting holiday sales.
- Digital asset management: Organize and use images and other media.
- Example: Store product images in a centralized library for easy reuse in campaigns.
- Templates and fragments: Create reusable content components.
- Example: Build a “Welcome Message” template that dynamically inserts customer names.
- Personalization tools: Tailor content dynamically for individuals.
- Example: Show personalized product recommendations based on browsing history.
- Landing page builder: Create web destinations for campaigns.
Benefit: Streamlines content creation, ensures brand consistency, and facilitates the efficient delivery of highly personalized messages.
Decision Management: The Brains of Personalization
Purpose: Select the best message or offer for each customer at the right moment, based on their real-time profile, context, and predefined business rules or AI models. Decision Management involves managing a central library of offers, defining eligibility rules, applying constraints (like frequency capping), and establishing ranking logic.
Decision Management ensures that personalization operates at scale by delivering maximum value through intelligent automation.
Key Components:
- Offer library: Central repository of marketing offers.
- Example: Store offers like “20% Off Coupon” or “Free Shipping” in a shared library.
- Decision rules: Logic for selecting optimal content.
- Example: Show a “Loyalty Discount” only to customers in the “Loyal Customers” segment.
- Constraints and eligibility: Control who receives what and when.
- Example: Apply frequency capping to prevent a customer from receiving the same offer twice in one week.
- Ranking strategies: Prioritize offers based on business goals or AI.
- Example: Rank offers by profitability, showing high-margin products first.
- Simulation tools: Test and validate decision strategies.
Benefit: Automates and optimizes personalization, ensuring that relevant and impactful experiences are delivered at every touchpoint.
Journey Management: The Orchestra Conductor
Purpose: Design, orchestrate, and automate customer experiences across multiple steps and channels. Journeys react to real-time customer behaviors and events, guiding individuals through personalized paths. AJO also supports Campaigns for delivering scheduled, one-time messages to specific audiences.
Journey Management ensures that experiences feel adaptive and seamless, guiding individuals based on their preferences and actions.
Key Components:
- Journey designer: Visual canvas for creating customer paths.
- Example: Design a journey that sends a welcome email when a customer signs up.
- Journey triggers: Events that initiate or advance journeys.
- Example: Trigger a follow-up SMS after a customer abandons their cart.
- Condition steps: Use logic-based branching.
- Example: Send a different message depending on whether a customer opens an email.
- Wait activities: Control progression with time delays.
- Example: Wait three days before sending a reminder email.
- Campaign management: Tools for scheduled, one-time messaging.
Benefit: Creates seamless, connected experiences that adapt to individual interactions, nurturing relationships and driving desired outcomes.
Connections: The Pipes
Purpose: Manage data flow into AJO (Sources) and message or data delivery out of AJO (Channels and Destinations). Sources bring data into ۶Ƶ Experience Platform (AEP). Channels deliver messages (via Email, SMS, Push, Web, etc.). Destinations allow audience or dataset information to flow to external platforms.
Connections ensure that data enters AJO effectively and reaches customers reliably through the right touchpoints.
Key Components:
- Source connectors: Import data into the platform.
- Example: Use a connector to bring purchase data from an e-commerce platform.
- Channel configuration: Set up and manage delivery mechanisms.
- Example: Configure SMS delivery for promotional messages.
- Destination setup: Connect to external activation systems.
- Example: Share audience data with a social media advertising platform.
- Data flow management: Control information movement.
Benefit: Ensures efficient data ingestion and reliable message delivery across channels, while enabling activation in external systems.
Administration & Privacy: The Rulebook
Purpose: Configure system settings, manage user access and permissions, set up communication channels, define journey parameters, and ensure compliance with data privacy and governance policies. This includes managing consent, applying data usage rules, and handling data access or deletion requests.
Administration and Privacy tools ensure that data integrity is protected and all legal and organizational policies are followed.
Key Components:
- User and access management: Control access and permissions.
- Example: Assign specific permissions to marketing and IT teams.
- Sandbox configuration: Separate environments for development and testing.
- Example: Use a sandbox to test new journey designs before deploying them live.
- Channel setup: Configure technical settings for delivery.
- Example: Set up email server details for campaign messaging.
- Privacy tools: Manage consent and privacy preferences.
- Example: Handle GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requests for data deletion efficiently.
- Governance controls: Enforce data usage policies.
Benefit: Ensures secure platform operation, compliance with regulations, and alignment with organizational policies.
Connecting the Dots: How It All Works Together
These functional areas operate in a continuous cycle to deliver and optimize personalized customer experiences:
- Data Ingestion: Data flows into AEP, structured by Data Management.
- Customer Understanding: Real-time Customer Profiles unify this data, while Customer Management refines insights through Profiles and Audiences.
- Content & Offer Strategy: Content Management creates messages and assets. Decision Management defines the offers and logic for selecting the best one.
- Orchestration: Journey Management maps out interactions across channels, leveraging customer understanding, content, and decisions.
- Delivery: Connections facilitate message delivery via chosen channels or share data with external systems.
- Measurement & Optimization: Performance data and customer interactions feed insights back into the system to refine audiences, content, decisions, and journeys.
- Governance: Administration and Privacy controls ensure compliance and proper system configuration.
This iterative process enables organizations to continuously learn and improve their customer engagement strategies.