Lab 2 - Journeys and Content

In this exercise you will:

WKND is a fictional adventure apparel brand with a paid subscription service for avid adventurers. WKND have built rich, real-time customer segments using Adobe Experience Platform. Now, the marketing team wants to orchestrate personalised, cross-channel journeys that respond to customer behavior in real time.

This lab will guide participants through designing and launching a trigger-based journey using Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Journey: “Nurture Journey”

Trigger: Customer visits the website and starts a signup process but doesn't complete it.

Journey Flow:

Your login credentials should be available on your desk including your lab participant number.

Login via https://platform.adobe.com 

Once authenticated switch to Adobe Journey Optimizer using the solution switcher:

Before you get started please confirm that you are in the right sandbox - it should be HOL2 (AUS5)

Let's first take a quick look through the menu options on the left hand side.

Journey Management is where you will find your Campaigns, Journeys and global Reporting. Campaigns are single channel bulk or recurring messages, while journeys are multi-step and multi-channel.

Use Case Playbooks provide a catalog of use cases to get you started faster.

Decisioning is where you'll find the next best offer catalog and strategies.

Content Management is where you'll manage all of your content, including your Asset Repository powered by Adobe Experience Manager Assets, re-usable multi-channel Content Templates, HTML and Expression Fragments, Landing pages and Translations for multi-lingual support. You'll also find your Brand guidelines here used to ensure all content is brand aligned (BETA feature).

Data Management, Connections and Customer is where you can access the same shared components as RT-CDP. The Unified Profile and Audience definitions are part of the core Adobe Experience Platform and are shared by both solutions which helps to reduce duplication and create consistent experiences across channels.

Administration is where you will find configuration items for journey triggers, custom actions, channels and business rules to control channel based frequency capping.

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

Give your journey a name, add your lab user number or name so you can recognise it from other lab participants. The journey properties are also where you can set up the re-entrance criteria, set re-entry wait period to every 60 days. Click Save.

Journeys can be triggered from individual events or when a customer enters or exits a segment. 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 StartSignup event into the panel as our journey trigger.

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.

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 2 days along the timeout path if the customer does not click the link in the email.

Next drag a Push action onto the timeout path and click Save

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 or audiences as exit criteria, for this example we'll use an event. Click the icon to select an event.

Select the FinishSignup event and click Save.

Click to Save the criteria.

Your journey should look like this.

Next we'll add content to our messages.

Click on the email activity in your journey, set the Email Configuration to 'email-marketing' and click to Edit Content.

Click to Edit email body

For this exercise we'll start with a pre-defined content template. Open the tab to see the Saved Templates, then select the WKND template.

Click to Use this Template

Now we'll use AI Assistant to help us generate variations of this content to use for AB testing. AI Assistant can be used to generate individual images or text components but in this case we're going to generate new variations of the full email. Make sure you have selected the Body of the email then click to open the AI Assistant.



Before generating content we need to select the Brand Guidelines and provide a prompt. Select WKND brand and add a prompt of your choosing. Select to generate subject line and Preheader also.

Update the Text settings to select the Tone, Language and Communication Strategy.

Once you're happy with the settings click to Generate. You will shortly see two new variations of the content generated.

Click to Preview a variation.

In this view you can review the content in detail, make updates to the prompt and regenerate if needed. It's also where you can review whether or not the content aligns to the Brand guidelines selected. Click on the Brand alignment

Here you'll see the score along with any warnings for content mis-alignments which you can review.

From here you can either select one of the variations to use as your email content or we can create an experiment and add the generated content as variations to test which performs the best. Click the Enable experimentation toggle.

Choose one or both of the variations to Add to Experiment

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

You can see the experiment configuration in the email properties from the journey canvas. Click to Save the email.

Click to Edit content again, you can see and edit the different variations. Click to Configure Experiment

Here you can update the success metric that will be used for determining the outcome of the experiment and set a holdout group if desired. Click the toggles to add a 10% holdout and distribute the rest of the target evenly over the variations.

Click to Save, and return back to the journey canvas clicking the arrow on the top left.

We can also enable predictive Send time optimization to send the messages at the most appropriate time for each profile that enters the journey based on their historical interactions. You can read more about Adobe's Send Time Optimization here .

Lastly we'll add some content to our push notification, we can use AI Assistant to help with this as well. Click on the push notification action in your journey, set the configuration and click to Edit Content.

Open the AI Assistant, add a text prompt and tick the elements you want to generate (title, message and/or image). Click to Generate

You can see the variations along with their brand alignment score, AI assistant has helped to generate a title a body and an image for the push. Click to Apply your chosen variation. Note: You may see a message saying "Error converting image to base64" - you can close and ignore this as it's just part of our shared demo environment testing.

Use the Expand View button at the bottom of the editor to show how the message will look when previewed before clicking through.

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

Click to Save the push action. Your journey is now complete.

Congratulations, you've successfully created a multi-channel triggered journey to nurture a customer towards a desired outcome. You've used AI Assistant to quickly generate variations without compromising on brand integrity.