Frequently Asked Questions faq-oc

Campaign Orchestration is a feature of Journey Optimizer that supports single-step or multi-step workflows that leverage the Relational Datastore to build and segment audiences for the purpose of batch engagement.

It brings a new type of campaigns to Journey Optimizer: Orchestrated campaigns. Orchestrated campaigns help brands run complex, one-to-many marketing campaigns at scale. They are designed for brand-initiated engagement, such as promotions, seasonal campaigns, or account-based communications.

Compared with single-send/action campaigns, they bring orchestration and sequencing to outbound marketing: audiences move through a multi-step workflow together, rather than receiving a one-off blast.

Key capabilities include:

• On-Demand Audiences: Instantly build and refine target groups using relational queries.
• Multi-Entity Segmentation: Create precise audiences by connecting customer data with related entities (e.g., accounts, purchases, bookings).
• Pre-Send Visibility: See accurate audience counts before launching to optimize targeting.
• Multi-Step Workflows: Run sequenced campaigns such as seasonal promotions, product launches, or loyalty offers.

Best practices

• Define a clear campaign objective before designing workflows.
• Start with a pilot audience to validate counts and logic before scaling.
• Keep segmentation rules as simple as possible to optimize performance and transparency.
• Use consistent naming conventions for audiences and campaigns to make management easier.

To access Campaign Orchestration, your license must include either the Journey Optimizer – Campaigns & Journeys or the Journey Optimizer - Campaigns package. Contact your Adobe representative to confirm your license and update if needed.

Learn more about Campaign Orchestration licensing model in Adobe Journey Optimizer product description.

• Orchestrated campaigns: Best for batch, one-to-many campaigns. Audiences progress in bulk, on a schedule.
• Journeys: Best for real-time, one-to-one engagement. Each customer moves through the journey at their own pace, triggered by behavior or events.

Best practice: Use them together — Journeys for triggered, reactive experiences, and Orchestrated Campaigns for planned, calendar-based initiatives.

Campaign Orchestration in Adobe Journey Optimizer uses a relational database. This type of data model has separate schemas of data that are connected via 1:1 or 1:many relationships. This enables users to start a query on any schema – not just at recipient level- and then flip back and forth to other related schemas, such as purchases, products, bookings or recipient details providing great flexibility in how segments and audiences can be created and
refined.

Example - Target all recipients with subscriptions expiring in the next 30 days. In Campaign Orchestration the query can start with the Subscriptions schema, search just the expiry date column of that schema and return all subscriptions due to expire, then roll up to the recipient data that is related to those specific subscriptions IDs returning results faster and more efficiently than data models that begin each query at the recipient level.

Campaigns use a relational database. This allows you to query across different data sets (e.g., customers, products, subscriptions) and connect them flexibly for advanced segmentation.

Best practices

• Organize datasets so that relationships (joins) reflect business logic.
• Avoid unnecessary joins to keep queries performant.
• Validate sample results before running large-scale extractions.

Yes. In Campaign Orchestration a recipient profile known as the ‘People Entity’ can be updated and that data used for personalization. Additionally, enriched data from linked entities in the relational database can also be used for personalization. You can use customer profiles along with linked data (like purchases or subscriptions) to personalize content across all supported channels.

Recommendations

• Use transactional and behavioral data to make offers relevant.
• Combine static attributes (e.g., loyalty tier) with dynamic ones (e.g., last purchase date).
• Keep personalization concise—overloading messages with data can harm readability.

Permissions and consent for Orchestrated campaigns and journeys are managed centrally in Adobe Experience Platform. These settings are applied across both solutions for each recipient prior to send.

Best practices

• Apply centralized governance—avoid managing consent separately at campaign level.
• Periodically audit consent data to detect inconsistencies.
• Respect channel-specific opt-outs — do not assume global consent covers all channels.

In Campaign Orchestration, we refer to ad-hoc segmentation as ‘Live segmentation’ where you can access all the data available in the relational store in real time, build a complex query on top of it and get the result for instant activation through outbound channels (ex: Email + SMS).

Tips

• Use ad-hoc segmentation for time-sensitive needs (e.g., flash promotions).
• Save and document useful queries so they can be reused in future campaigns.
• Validate the audience count before activation to prevent under- or over-sending.

Objects created in Orchestrated campaigns (e.g., audiences, workflows) are tied to the sandbox in which they are built. Standard packaging and deployment workflows across environments (dev, stage, prod) are not currently available for Orchestrated campaigns.

Best practices

• Maintain separate sandboxes for experimentation, QA, and production.
• Document configurations thoroughly to enable manual replication if needed.
• Align with governance teams to reduce configuration drift between environments.

Segmentation is performed on Recipients while sending against the Adobe Experience Platform Profile. The Recipient target dimension extends the unified Profile with additional data that is used for segmentation within Orchestrated campaigns, while Recipient is reconciled with Profile at runtime for sending messages and check the consent policy and business rules. This reconciliation is useful for unifying business rules and consent application at profile level

Answering ‘Yes’ suggests the best data store - but always confirm the best approach based on your use case and constraints with your Adobe representative.