9 ways to boost customer loyalty with Marketing Automation

I'm not a big fan of the lists, but it makes it convenient to talk about a few of the concepts.  Marketing automation is a very important tool for the digital marketer.  I will even go as far as saying it should be the center of the digital marketing universe.  Because digital marketing grew up as being web, this is not a popular view among digital marketers, but that doesn't mean it's not true.  

Gathering knowledge allows to build relationship: the more you know about customers, the more relevant offers you can address. Personalization is impossible without advanced behavioral and transactional analytics.

Marketing automation starts and ends with data.  Data is the basis for running any marketing automation tool.  Without a good data collection and architecture strategy, marketing automation will be hampered to a degree.  It also ends with data because the capturing of the behavior driven informs the next decision.  It is cyclical as far as data collection is concerned.

1:1 Marketing. Dynamic content and e-mails are the base of long-lasting bond with customer, because they show that you treat him individually and adjust offers to his/her particular needs. Also find opportunities to say thank you to them, ask for opinions and suggest complementary products

1-to-1 marketing is the dream.  To cost effectively do this is still farther out, but we are getting close.  The problem becomes content.  To effectively market to each person in the database is unrealistic, but start at the top.  What would it take to market to the top 10% of the database on a 1-to-1 basis.  Start from there and then try to go farther into the customer base.  

Use analytics to improve content quality: with content marketing you can not only educate your customers, but also discuss values you share, what is crucial for establishing loyalty. 30% of customers say that shared values are one of 3 top reasons for being loyal to a brand. Hence invest in content and optimize it. Read more about content marketing and marketing automation synergy.

Good content can be scary for marketers.  The time and effort to create such content is time consuming and costly, especially in the form of man hours.  It is also hard to quantify the results, which normally don't start to materialize for many months.  However, great content builds a relationship with the brand.  Storytelling and guides for customers help them relate to the brand better than most advertising.  Let the analytics guide the decision.  If customers are buying bathroom products from Home Depot, don't send them content about building a fence.  A great timed "how to" on bathroom design could go a long way to loyalty and upsell opportunities.

Measure: don’t just repeat common knowledge that making actual user buy is 7 times cheaper that bringing new one. Use advanced analytics offered by Marketing Automation Systems to measure ROI of your loyalty improving actions, and optimize them.

The crucial part to any marketing automation strategy, how are you going to measure the results?  This thought process usually comes at the end, but it should start at the beginning of your marketing automation journey.  The first thing your boss will ask after the marketing automation system goes live is "how are we doing"?  You need to not only be able to answer his questions, but you need to answer that question for yourself.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and they need to continually evolve.  The only way to determine the evolution is by understanding the results.  

How Not To Use Marketing Automation

Normally I would never suggest not using a marketing automation for anything, but it is a funny title so I'll let this slide.  I would even argue that bad marketing automation is better than no marketing automation, but not by much.

Generic Broadcasting – The time that you save with marketing automation should be used to not only improve your content in the first place, but also to personalise through segmentation. Consumers in all market places are becoming more and more sophisticated, and can spot poorly executed marketing automation. And their perception is likely to be that you don’t care about the communication.

This is the first step of marketing automation.  So many times the implementation strategy of the marketers installing the new system is to do what they are currently doing, but in a new fancy tool.  I think this is an okay step if the desired outcome is to QA the output to make sure all the data is correctly hooked up.  Other than that, marketers should have an understanding of what the new capabilities of the tool they have purchased and at least start with a few general segments to make sure there are some differentiation in the messaging.

My advice is to bring in a group that has experience in the tool who focuses on the strategy behind utilizing the tool to help build a roadmap.  It's okay to start broad, in fact I recommend it.  But don't tart from scratch.  Start implementing the "low hanging fruit" opportunities in your business right away.  This will be your baseline and then you start to grow from there.

Being A Spammer – Automated emails are a great way of engaging with recipients who have shown an interest in your email, but you should still spend time focusing on the quality of your communication. Avoid the usual spam trigger words and don’t go sending an email to thousands of people all at the same time. Marketing automation can increase the risk of spam, but a good email provider will help you with this.

All the good Email Service Providers (ESP) will provide services to assist you in "warming up" your domain to the Internet Service Providers (ISP).  This is a necessary first step to make sure everyone can see your emails when you send them (deliverability %).  

However, this does not mean your job is over.  If you decide automation will allow you to send emails to your customers everyday with messages which do not resonate with most of them, you will quickly be flagged as spam.  If this happens too many times, the ISP's will block your emails.  When I started at one property, Yahoo was blocking all the emails and the deliverability rating was in the high 60% range.  It took a long time to get unblocked, so make sure your content is relevant and you stop sending to customers that are not opening your email.

Bad Time Automating – Automated communications are tricky: you’re writing them at a time where the context of how the communication will be received isn’t known. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine as you are only scheduling a few hours ahead, but beware of shifting events. 

Most of the time your emails will not be "set it and forget it".  You may run with an automated email blast for customers that signed up today with an offer to engage further, and that is fine in most cases.  In a lot of the cases the automation is used to increase the segmentation capabilities, not to create a generic email blast to all your customers over and over again.  

If you run into this problem of timing, then forget about scheduling too far in advance.  Take your time and make sure the message is relevant to the customer at the time the email is sent.  This will save you from looking like someone that doesn't understand the customer at all.  That is the worst thing that could happen.

Communicating Constantly – With marketing automation, communications with your audience should become a lot easier. But don’t get carried away. If it is easier, then the temptation will be to communicate more often, but this is as off-putting for a recipient as communicating poorly. It can also have a detrimental effect on the size of your audience.

The quickest way to being marked as spam or unsubscribed is to over communicate through email.  Just because its easier to do, doesn't mean you should.  Make sure you are communicating a little more than your customer is engaging with your brand.  Its okay to communicate everyday if your customer is buying something everyday, but this is usually not the case.  If your customer purchases a product once a month, maybe every other week is a good cadence to start.  Remember, the beauty of a marketing automation tool is your customers don't have to all be on the same communication cadence, they can be on their own, as long a you have enough content to make that strategy make sense.

Send And Forget – One of the objectives of most communications is to elicit a response. Whether that is an open from an email, a click on an advert or a reply / share from a social media post. So when you are automating, you should always have a process in place for monitoring their impact – you should be able to set this up as an email or smart phone notification. Ignoring this can result in recipients not talking (positively or negatively) to anyone, something to avoid at all costs.

As I said above, this strategy can be detrimental to having a marketing automation tool.  Never send without analyzing the results.  All marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities, they need to be changed and enhanced constantly, because as you change behaviors the communication cadence and the offers need to change with it.  There are also segments of customers in the campaign who are not getting what you are throwing out, so constantly look for opportunities to enhance the campaigns taking these customers into account.  Analyzing is the most important step of the process.

Study: 80% of Companies Will Increase Digital Marketing Budgets

Woohoo!!!  I think this is a wise move as we move into the golden age of digital marketing.  Until now I believe the many companies viewed this area as media buying and website analytics.  Digital marketing is the force that will bring the customer experience to fruition by combining online and offline behavior.  Creating consistent content and messaging from one channel to the next will be key in the coming years.

"One challenge that has been very prominent for digital marketers is the hiring of great talent, and companies are finally getting the budget to do that," said Laura McGarrity, VP-digital marketing strategy at Mondo, a technology and digital-marketing resource provider.

According to the study, the top hiring barriers are finding skilled talent (cited by 65% of respondents); the cost of quality staff (30%); attracting top talent (21%); retaining top talent (16%); and culture fit (26%).

Talent is in high demand and I think what companies have to realize is the talent they are looking for do not necessarily have many years experience in the field.  In fact, there is very little experience in the new age of digital.  Finding talent will be harder than looking at a resume and seeing if the applicant has X number of years and X degree.  These are not the metrics companies should be aspiring to hire.  The metrics should include applicants that have expressed their thoughts about digital marketing and whether their thought leadership is the direction the company is trying to go.  

"Turnover has been a really big issue," Ms. Garrity said, noting that the average tenure for digital marketing professionals is 12 months to 18 months. By comparison, average CMO tenure is 45 months, according to executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a March 2014 report.

"There is such high demand and it's such a new space -- people are hopping around to find the best jobs," she added. "It is a candidate's market, particularly in digital marketing."

The top skill sets companies are hiring for this year are digital/social (54%), content creation (44%), big data/analytics (33%) and mobile strategy (30%), Mondo found.

There should also be a questioning of why there is so much turnover.  Even though it is a talent market, there should be less turnover if the work is rewarding and CMO's are really bought into the innovation.  Too many times CMO's tend to be brand focused and the digital marketer will get frustrated in that environment.  

The study also asked marketers which digital platforms will drive customer engagement in the future. It found that today, mobile is seen as a key driver of customer engagement by only 24% of respondents, but in the next three to five years, that will increase to 70%.

The 24% number is too low for mobile as a key driver.  Today is the age of mobile and if companies aren't focusing on mobile, they will be behind in three to five years.  Mobile strategy takes time to implement and companies need to start now.  

The next 12 - 18 months will be very interesting in the digital space as technology vendors are building platforms that can support the wants and needs of marketers.  Upcoming technology will push the boundaries of what is possible.  Many companies will want to leapfrog steps to get to the end goal quicker, but it is important to realize to take advantage of the next low hanging fruit before jumping too fast.  That is why it is imperative to start now on the digital strategy.

Keeping Up With Today’s Loyalty Demands

Originally posted on IBM’s Smarter Commerce blog:

Loyalty marketing is more and more prominent in today’s retail landscape. It is becoming common knowledge that customer acquisition costs are increasingly rising, and data-driven customer retention is a key area filled with untapped growth potential. But loyalty marketing is evolving and is more intricate than just offering discounts to existing customers. As many marketers realize, there are three common problems that they run into when trying to implement an effective loyalty program:

1. They often feel stuck offering dollars-off discounts and are losing their margins without sustainably changing their customer behavior.

2. Personalization is not going further than using much more than a first and last name, and is not connecting to the customer and building customer relationships.

3. Their loyalty members are not actively participating and being engaged, and consequently not influencing long term results.

It is a buyers market as they would say in the real-estate business.  Customers have the ability to buy from a multitude of companies with fairly frictionless transactions.  Years ago, a customer would be limited to their location to buy many of the items they can now purchase online, which makes loyalty marketing a much harder task today.  If the customer does not like an experience they have with your company, the friction to switch providers is much easier than in the past.

This has led to a race to the bottom with most companies.  Instead of competing on differentiation, companies rely on sales and discounting to compete in this new world.  Relying on discounts is not differentiated at all.  Any competitor can match a price or beat the price if they are willing to decrease their margins for the business.  As I wrote in Busy is Not a Strategy, many of your competitors will look at metrics like volume as their key metric which will force them to decrease margins and hurt your business.  

Increasing Self-Identification

Loyalty incentivizes customers to provide more information about themselves and engage across channels, which leads to a richer understanding of your customers and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised how many of them are open to providing information about themselves in order to receive more relevant communications and offers.

Spending most of my time in the casino industry has shown me that consumers willingly give away information in return for a richer experience.  In the case of the casinos this comes in the form of comps, but in other industries this does not have to be a giveaway.  This could be access to sales, in the case of grocery stores.  Find out what your version of the comp is to increase customer self-identification.  It may start off as a giveaway, but don't let it drive the future customer experiences with that customer.  

Taking Personalization to the Next Level

In addition to increasing customer self-identification, you should track and analyze metrics such as order frequency, average order value, and from which channels customers are purchasing. Modern loyalty programs gather this customer data and provide a centralized hub which is used to personalize meaningful incentives and rewards for higher customer redemption and satisfaction, and also to send personalized messages. These messages can be targeted towards specific actions and customer segments, and are used to maintain relevance and build upon customer-brand relationships by making customers feel like you are paying attention to what they want.

If you aren't tracking the purchases of your customers then you aren't going to be successful in loyalty marketing.  Creating meaningful customer experiences relies on gaining insight to the behavior of the customer.  By getting the customer to opt-in, it allows the business to create the true value from the loyalty program as I wrote here.  Targeted content will create meaningful customer experiences and this rich data is at the core.  

Cohesive Omni-Channel Capabilities

With today’s consumer having the ability to interact with your brand across all channels, it is essential to have cohesive communication, connectivity of data, and customer access to your program and rewards at all touch points. Different consumers like to interact with brands through different channels – whether in-store, social media, or email – and your program should be available in their preferred channel.

Providing the same experience for the customer, no matter what channel they are using, is the key to creating meaningful customer experiences.  This is the hard part of the new customer experience paradigm.  Keeping the content and messaging across channels in an online and offline world can be complex, but is very rewarding.  Customers don't care that different divisions in the company have different responsibilities and the online team doesn't communicate effectively with the operations team.  Customers expect their experience to be seamless across channels and it is imperative that businesses adjust to create this seamless customer experience. 

The Content Marketing Paradox - TrackMaven

TrackMaven has put out a white paper documenting 13.8 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands.  With the massive amount of options to post content, are organizations providing relevant content to their users.  The key to digital marketing is providing relevant (targeted) content to customers to provide great customer experiences.  With that in mind, have marketers been using relevant content or is there still a shotgun approach.  

TrackMaven documents Pottery Barn on an initiative they had to increase their "engagement" on Pinterest.  The mistake they made, which a lot of marketers make when it comes to social media channels, is to increase the amount of content.  Increased content = increased impressions = increased engagement, right?  Not so fast.

Pottery Barn Engagement and Posts

What is happening in this example is the number of pins are increasing, however the average interactions per pin is decreasing at about the same rate.  So in effect, they are working much harder to engage the same amount of customers.  I love this chart, because it shows that more is not necessarily better.  In the database marketing world, my push is to always increase frequency, whether that be purchases or trips to a casino, etc.  But the key metric to look when frequency starts to increase, is does the worth of the customer per transaction decrease and at what rate.  

In this case, frequency of pins is increasing, but the engagement is not, so the content is not relevant, there's just more of it.  Pottery Barn isn't the only guilty party when it comes to this tactic.  As TrackMaven saw, a lot of brands were implementing the same tactics.

The good news is Potter Barn (using TrackMaven software of course) was able to identify this and change tactics.  Instead of focusing on content designed to sell certain items, more like an advertisement, Pottery Barn started to pin content that helped their customers make their home better.  Of course Pottery Barn goods were front and center in this approach, but they posted less and focused on relevancy to their customer to change the engagement equation.  So the new equation is:

More relevant content = increased engagement

Pottery Barn results with new relevant content strategy

Much better content has resulted in the end goal, more engagement through Pinterest.    

DIB Digital Trends Report 2015_EMEA Part 2

In part 2 of reading through the Digital Trends Report for 2015, The next part has to deal with the areas of digital related business.  The big surprise to me is how high social media engagement ranks on this list.  Multichannel campaign management is still not receiving its rightful mindshare in organizations.  At 22%, this area should be right up there with targeting and personalization, it is that important.

I find these next responses fascinating.  The difference in this year and the next 5 years, especially in the area of multichannel campaign management is perplexing to me.  This is the age of campaign management and the respondents are thinking 5 years out.  That boggles my mind.  I do like that respondents are thinking customer experience is the most important item, but that is more of a culture change compared to the other items.  All the other items support the customer experience.  The fact that customer experience is viewed as a tactic or strategy is why I think this item will be talked about for years to come.  Multichannel campaign management, personalization, big data and content marketing are items that will enhance the customer experience, so these items are all striving for the same goal, to deliver relevant content to customers to enhance their experience.

This part of the study is a little perplexing to me.  Organizations want to enhance the customer experience, but there very little is being done in the area of geo-targeting.  Only 24% have this in their 2015 plan or are already using this technology.  For brick and mortar operations, this is the most exciting technology to me.  Using this in conjunction with multichannel campaign management is the ultimate targeted marketing.  

Even if the uses of this technology are just to enhance the data about customers, organizations should be implementing this technology sooner rather than later.  The ability to understand the behaviors of your customers in store and communicate with them if they exhibit certain behaviors is no different than how a customer behaves on a website.  Digital marketers have been enhancing their strategies on customer buying funnels on the web for years now, but not enough are jumping at the opportunity to do the same thing in brick and mortar operations.  

A good sign is importance organizations are putting in the cross channel journey of their customers.  The top 2 answers are what make up a big part of the customer experience.  The clear, concise message, regardless of the channel is the key to the ultimate customer experience. 

This is probably the most concerning part of this survey.  Most companies want to make customer experience across channels their number 1 priority, however the data is still an issue with most companies.  Only 37% of the companies feel they have the ability and the infrastructure to capture and act on the data.  

In the new age of marketing, data is the first and most important step in the marketing strategy.  Without laying a data framework to capture and properly analyze, the ultimate customer experience will be nearly impossible to implement.  Companies to focus on the data as much as the culture of being customer centric.  These two items go hand in hand.    

Agile is the Key to Digital Marketing Success

Another key topic coming out of the Adobe Summit 2015 is this idea of structuring the organization properly.  Now this is an age old problem and doesn't necessarily just revolve around digital marketing, many organizations fight the structure issue.  I had a mentor that preached to be a successful organization its 80% structure, 10% people and 10% process.  Now that made the people really mad when he said this, because people always want it to be about them.  In reality, it is about them, what he was trying to say is without the proper structure, it doesn't matter how good your people and processes are, they can't thrive if they are always being stifled.

So a day in the life of a digital marketer is too reliant on other individuals for them to be a success, they are stifled by the system.  Now they may produce content and delivering good results, but if the structure of the organization is not optimal, it is preventing these outstanding individuals from being great.  Once the marketer has to jump through so many hoops to achieve the end goal, they are already making compromises.  It may be they are making compromises on the content because they know the content creators will give them push back, or have too long of a timeline, so the request becomes watered down.  The landing page may need a little extra something to up conversion, however that may need a new set of requirements for the web team to build, so to keep things moving the marketer doesn't add that piece.

To be great a digital marketing organization needs to be agile.  Things are changing constantly and the digital marketer needs to move at the same pace, if not faster, than the consumer.  Today the digital marketer is 10 steps behind the pace of the consumer.  The organization tends to be divided into marketer, technical and creative.  These all need to live under the same umbrella.  The second a marketer is waiting on IT or a creative agency, the marketer is not fast enough.

The marketer needs to have those departments set them up for success.  So IT needs to set up the hardware and get the marketer the tools to be self reliant.  IT should not try to control the content being moved and updates that need to be made to websites, landing pages or apps.  Creative agencies need to set up multiple templates and ensure there is enough creative content to fill those templates, but they should not be a roadblock to any content that is released.  If a new email and landing page needs to be created for a real-time need, the agency or brand should not be involved in slowing this process down, the digital marketer should have all the tools and messaging already at their disposal.

If the organization is set up so the digital marketer can see the opportunity (data), glean insight from the data (analysts), create an audience (technical), create a new email marketing campaign (database marketer), create a landing page for the email (creative and technical), create a cross channel ad campaign for that audience (media and creative) and then measure the results (data and analysis), then the organization is set up correctly.  The digital marketer should be enabled to go through this entire process without needing IT tickets, agency or brand approvals or pro-forms to be created and approved from the executive team.  Allow your digital marketing team the freedom to be successful.  Measure their success, give them a budget and guidelines, but empower the digital marketer to drive revenue and jump on opportunities.  The results will speak for themselves.  

Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015

Upon returning from Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015 I've had some time to digest the experience fully.  The Summit is a great weak of digital marketing discussions.  Of course since this is an Adobe event, the discussions are around the products Adobe is selling with the marketing cloud.  Fortunately for me, and Adobe, the overarching strategy Adobe is putting together with their products is extremely compelling.  

Just five short years ago Adobe had $0 of revenue from digital marketing products.  I believe in 2014 the amount of revenue was over $1.2 billion, but I didn't write the number down, it's not important.  What is important is Adobe, through mostly acquisitions, has created the most compelling digital marketing hub/cloud in the industry.  Adobe rates highest on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and it is in its infancy.

Having come from a software product background also, it is impressive they have been able to start to integrate most of these products together.  What Adobe is setting out to accomplish is no small feat.  Creating a singular platform from many disparate products is what marketers have to do on a daily basis with their own systems, but Adobe is attempting to make that life a whole lot easier.

Last year we were introduced to the marketing cloud strategy, a set of 6 products with 6 core services that support all the products.  I was very bullish on what was being layed out by Adobe.  The idea of taking a customer through their lifecycle with the company from anonymous to known, from new to dormant, all in one platform is very appealing to me as a marketer.  Adobe is trying in essence, to let marketers control their own destiny.

Today marketers have to fight to get things done.  Marketers destiny is in the hands of many other groups, from website developers, IT, database engineers and creative agencies.  Sometimes it amazes me that we as marketers are able to get an email out the door, or target an individual on a website.  The amount of effort sometimes makes a campaign not worth doing at all.  

There are three main thoughts I came away from the Summit with this year.

1. Audiences are the key to digital marketing
2. Adobe has a messaging issue
3. AEM should be the center of the marketing cloud universe

Audiences

I have always firmly believed the customer is the center of all businesses, yet I never believed they were the center of the marketing universe.  My belief is that everything starts with the customer and they are all different in their various ways.  Advertising tended to lump all the customers into one bucket and make the product the center of the universe.  Digital has come along and helped marketing become more targeted, but the hardest part of targeting is creating the single customer database.

Marketers have had to deal with a plethora of disparate databases of customers, which has made targeting especially difficult.  The need for database engineers to create a data warehouse bringing all the different customer databases together with each individuals spend slows the process of driving behavior through targeted experiences down to a crawl.  

Adobe audiences are referred to as a Core Service.  What that basically means is that all of the applications of the marketing cloud can use this customer database.  This makes audiences the key to allowing the marketing cloud to be the most targeted customer solution I have seen to date.  

Adobe tracks a customer from their first anonymous visit, to authentication, through the entire customer lifecycle.  The applications then allow marketers to target those customers in so many different ways.  From purchasing of ads, to email marketing, to push notifications for mobile apps, through retargeting campaigns, audiences can be used in all of these ways.  Same database.  No need for database engineers.  Hallelujah.

For example, a customer may come into the website, authenticate and reach a certain part of the purchasing funnel.  Through Analytics, this group of customers can be identified and a custom audience can be created.  Through AEM, email creative and a landing page can be created, by marketers, with approved assets from the brand team, to be used to create an email campaign for these guests.  With Target, different messages can be tested to determine what is the most effective message and offer for a customer to create the conversion.  Through Campaign, this audience can be used to send an email, measure the results, and a new audience can be created with all of the customers that didn't convert to create retargeting campaigns.  That's pretty powerful stuff right there.

Adobe Messaging

One of the concerning parts of the conference was the introduction of 2 new products for the marketing cloud.  The idea of having 6 products is already a little overwhelming.  The constant comments I was hearing from other attendees was confusion on what products they need and why.  This is a problem for Adobe.  I believe they have 1 product, the Marketing Cloud, with many features inside the product.  By keeping the multiple product structures, it is showing some infighting within Adobe.  As I said earlier, these products were purchased by Adobe to then be integrated into the cloud.  It seems those product owners are fighting for their power, which is making it confusing to develop the strategy with Adobe as a partner.

I also believe this product strategy makes the cloud more cost prohibitive.  Because so many products have to be purchased, it becomes more expensive than turning on features.  There also tends to be salespeople dedicated to the certain products, so there is a loss of 1 dedicated resource.  

I'd like to see Adobe move away from products an into features.  This will simplify the messaging and allow customers to purchase based on what they need, instead of what Adobe is trying to package.  It will allow more customers to be locked into the ecosystem of Adobe, instead of keeping their current products that aren't as integrated.  They should take some lessons from Apple.  The ecosystem is the most important play for Adobe right now and they should have a longterm vision for this strategy.  Once customers start crossing over into different products within the marketing could it will make it impossible to leave, because the customer database and all the processes are driven by Adobe.  

AEM is the Center of the Cloud

The digital marketing platform all started with the purchase of Omniture which turned into Adobe Analytics.  Analytics is the heart and soul of the Marketing Cloud and I believe has the largest  user base by far.  Analytics may be the soul, but I don't believe it should be the heart of the solution.  

Adobe Experience Manager is the heart of this solution.  It is the product that puts the marketers destiny into their own hands.  The ability to manage assets, create approved templates, change website messaging, create emails and create landing pages with variable content is so powerful.  It even can build mobile applications across platforms and manage all those apps in realtime.  

This is the heart.  Analytics allows the identification of opportunities to enhance conversion and make more money, but without AEM a marketer is stuck waiting for many other departments to help them take advantage of the opportunity.  Campaign allows for great multi-channel marketing, but without email creative and dedicated landing pages, the marketer is in a waiting game.  Target allows offers to be measured in real-time and a winner is chosen, but to get to that point, AEM has to manage all of the content and messaging.

Content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  Let me say that again, content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  The faster a marketer can deliver that content, through whichever channel, be it mobile app, website, email, social or ad, the bigger a competitive advantage that company will have over its competition.  This is why AEM is the heart of the marketing cloud/hub.  AEM will ultimately create the competitive advantage, because without it, the content will not be delivered at the speed in which customers will not only demand, but will also change their behavior.  

Bravo to another great Summit from Adobe.  Adobe is truly the leader in this nascent category and they are continuing to push the envelope with their vision.  I am super bullish on Adobe and what the future holds for the Marketing Cloud  Plus, having Imagine Dragons play at the bash was super awesome!!!