Ex 1. Journeys + Content

12 min

In a fast-moving market, timing and relevance are everything. Adobe Journey Optimizer enables brands to deliver contextual, personalised experiences at scale by combining real-time triggers, intelligent decisioning, and dynamic content generation—all within a unified orchestration canvas.

We will first create the Journey flow using the AI Assistant, then add the content for each message using AI Assistant content generation. We've also included a tab to show you what the manual creation process looks like, but you won't be doing that during this lab. We've included it to highlight just how much work the Agent will do for you and how much time you will save ⏰

Create a Journey

Use the Agent

Create manually

Create a Journey With Adobe Agent

In this exerice, we will use Adobe Agent to create a draft of the journey. that will save us some time.

Click on the 9-dot menu at the top right, then Home. Then click on AI Assistant on the left.

Ensure the context is set correctly by clicking in the settings in the middle of the screen (next to Prompt Library):

Set the context as follows:

Enter the following prompt:

Create a new trigger based journey for people who've completed the signup. Wait 1 hour and send them an email, wait for 2 more days, check if they belong to the audience "Has mobile App". If yes, send them a push, if not, send them an SMS.

The agent will analyze you request, and propose a plan to create this journey.

When asked Would you like to proceed with this plan? type yes to start he process.

The agent will then go ahead with the plan and go to step 2, which is selecting the trigger.

Type yes to process

If there are multiple event option for your journey, the Agent may asked you to confirm.

We will select complete_signup event. Just type 1, then enter.

The agent should understand that there is no need to select audience, so it will not execute step 3. It will create create the journey, and ask you to approve.

Click on review , change the name of the journey by Signup Journey replace_with_your_name AI, and click on save.

Your journey flow is now ready.

Create a Journey Manually

Navigate to Journey Management -> Journeys and click on Create Journey.

Give your journey a name, add your initials so you can recognise it from other lab participants.

Measurement is critical to any journey, Adobe Journey Optimizer can use any of the metrics defined in Customer Journey Analytics as journey success metric. For this journey we are encouraging subscription, click on the Journey Metric drop down and select Paid Subscription (7d). The attribution in this case is pre-set to Last Touch 7 days, but you can modify this within Customer Journey Analytics or create different versions for different purposes.

The journey properties are also where you can set up the re-entrance criteria to ensure we're not fatiguing customers multiple entries into the same journey, scroll down and set re-entry wait period to every 30 days. Click Save.

Click to save the properties.

Journeys can be triggered from individual events or when a customer enters or exits a streaming audience. You can see the events that are configured as journey triggers in the left panel - this list is configurable and will depend on your implementation.

Drag the Start_Signup event into the panel as your journey trigger.

The orchestration panel is where we can find activites to control the pathing and flow of the journey. Drag a wait activity to pause the journey flow for a short duration to allow the customer time to complete the process they started before we start retargeting them. The wait period can be as long or short as you want.

The Actions panel is where you'll find the native messaging channels as well as any custom channels or actions that have been enabled in the sandbox. Drag an Email action onto the canvas and attach it to the trigger event. Set the Email Configuration to email-marketing.

Before we configure the email content we'll finish the journey flow. Returning to the events panel, drag a Reaction activity after the email and configure a Timeout of 2 days. This triggers the journey to continue after 1 day along the timeout path if the customer does not click the link in the email.

Click to Save the reaction.

If the customer does not click the email we'll continue to engage them on other available channels. We will prioritize push notification as a less invasive channel but there's no point sending a push if the customer doesn't have the app, so let's check first and route customers to the right channel.

Drag a Condition activity, from the orchestration panel, into the canvas and connect it to the timeout branch.

Rename the default path condition to Has Mobile App and tick the checkbox to show path for other cases. Then click into the Expression to configure the condition.

Then click into the Expression to configure the condition.

The expression editor let's you configure a boolean condition which if it evaluates to true will push the profile down the condition path. Expressions can use context from the journey triggering event, audiences or other data stored in Adobe Experience Platform.

Search for Mobile. Drag the pre-configured Has Mobile App audience into the expression then click Ok.

Click Ok again to store the condition.

Click to Save the condition.

Now drag a push notification and add it to the "Has mobile app" path. Drag an SMS action as the alternative channel, depending on your business you might choose Line or WhatsApp as an alternative.

Lastly, we'll add exit criteria to remove profiles from the journey once they complete the desired action, in this case completing their subscription. Click on the profile icon to the right of the journey to open the exit criteria panel. Click the button to add the exit criteria.

You can use events and/or audiences as exit criteria, for this example we'll use the Active Subscriber audience.

Click Save to complete your journey logic. Your journey flow should look like this:

Your journey flow is now ready

We now need to set up the content. Click on the link to the journey that the agent created and it should open in a new tab.

Add Email Content

For this exercise we'll start with a pre-defined content template. Select the email activity in your journey and set the Email Configuration to email-marketing and click to Edit Content.

Select the Email action in the canvas then click Configure Action.

Change Email Configuration to email-marketing there. Then click on Edit Content.

Click on Apply content template

Select the Frescopa Lab Template and click Confirm.

Now that the template is loaded click to Edit the email body.

Generate Variations with AI

Now we'll use AI Assistant to help us generate variations of this content to use for experimentation. AI Assistant can be used to generate individual images or text components but in this case we're going to generate new variations for a mixed content block.

Select the two column block from the center of the email then click to open the AI Assistant on the right side.

Add a text prompt for the message you want to convey - in this case, encouraging a My Barista subscription, for example:

Promote myBarista subscription benefits including cost savings and exclusive access to limited release blends.

Add text and image settings to influence the tone and colouring.

Click on Generate. After a short while, two new variations are generated. Each variation has been automatically scored against the brand guidelines.

What you see generated and the scores applied will be different from the screenshots below. You can follow the process as it applies to your generated content.

Click on the Preview button to take a closer look.

You can switch between each variation on the right, and use the brand guidelines tab on the left to review the reasons if low scores.

Let's add this guideline to our prompt and ask it to Generate again.

You can also ask it to refine specific pieces of the content and provide positive and negative feedback through the panel at the bottom.

From here you can choose to use one of the generated variations, or we can choose to use ALL of the variations and configure an experiment to test which content performs the best.

Just select the one you prefer and click Select. Then click Save.

Because the generated content includes imagery we need to tell AJO where in the asset repository to put the new images. Click Next to choose the folder.

Select the Frescopa folder and click to Import.

Your email is now configured. Click Save, then the back arrow on the top left to return to your journey.

Add Mobile Content (optional)

To complete the journey, we need to add content to the SMS and Push Notification activities. Scroll to the right of the canvas until you see the Push notification action.

Click Push > Configure Action, and change Push notification channel configuration to Push. Then click Edit content.

Once again you can either manually add content or use AI Assistant to generate it for you. Open the AI Assistant panel and reuse the prompt and text settings from your email to keep messaging consistent.

The generated content is again scored against the Brand Guidelines. Select the variation you prefer and click to Apply it to your message.

Click the arrow in the top left to return to your journey.

Note: the same process could be repeated for the SMS Activity.

Summary

Adobe Journey Optimizer enables brands to deliver contextual, personalised experiences at scale by combining real-time triggers, intelligent decisioning, and dynamic content generation—all within a unified orchestration canvas.

Adobe Journey Optimizer's integration with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Adobe Firefly has enabled:

Faster creative cycles: No need to manually design every variant.

Brand integrity: All content aligns with approved guidelines.

Higher engagement: Personalised, relevant content drives better results.

Cross-channel consistency: AEM assets and content fragments ensure that messaging in email, push, and web banners is aligned.

Congratulations you've completed the exercise on Adobe Journey Optimizer and successfully used the Adobe Agent to create your journey and populated content with the AI Assistant! 🤖👏🏻