Executive guide to success with Adobe Target
As a marketing leader, you placed your trust in Adobe Target. Whether you’re focused on omnichannel personalization, A/B testing, or AI-assisted personalization, you’ll find resources to help you start strong on your journey with Target.
While your team is hard at work customizing Target to strengthen your marketing strategy, you can help them succeed by giving them guidance and support. This guide was created to help you do just that.
Let’s get started.
Share Your Vision
As a leader, you are responsible for driving the success of your program by fostering an optimization and personalization culture. To ensure a successful Target rollout, you will need to share your vision for personalization across your organization.
Ensure that your program is aligned with all areas that touch the digital customer experience in your organization. Communicate with stakeholders to ensure goals, processes, workflows, and governance are aligned. This will accelerate your personalization activities. Success comes when all teams are part of the personalization process. Answering some of these questions will help you structure Target to support your business needs.
- What areas of your organization (like web, social, email, or mobile) touch personalization within the customer journey?
- How can Target help support their goals?
- Is the program scalable to other teams?
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ACTION: Write 2-4 sentences about how Target will support organizational and individual team goals through optimization and personalization. This could include improving conversion and revenue goals. Share this with your team during departmental and staff meetings.
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Assemble the Team
Successful Target teams have several key members.
A program lead. They’re the primary point of contact for Adobe Target. The program lead defines the strategic vision for the product and aligns the business’s goals and KPIs to optimization activities. They champion an optimization-driven team culture. They also oversee execution by managing the Target team. The best program leads have project management experience and can manage and communicate with team of diverse skillsets.
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ACTION: Identify one of your employees to be the program lead. If they haven’t worked with Target before, enroll them in an Adobe Digital Learning Services course to learn about the product.
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Technical staff. They manage the implementation of Target, including integrating with other Adobe products you use, like Analytics, Experience Manager, or Audience Manager. You can leverage your existing IT department that manages tags. Additional training for your entire staff is available through Adobe Digital Learning Services.
Analyst(s). They use data to come up with ideas for testing of visitor experiences across web, mobile, app environments. They do research before testing and analyze the results after testing.
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ACTION: Meet with your program lead to identify an analyst(s) and technical staff to be on the team.
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Center of Excellence. The Center of Excellence (COE) will focus on the people, process, and technology to better enable your optimization and personalization program throughout your organization. Engage all teams who have digital touch-points early on when establishing your COE. They will provide thoughtful input to the use and scalability of Target. This includes:
- User roles, permissions, and enablement
- Communicating testing campaigns throughout the organization
- Process management
- Training and onboarding of new team resources
- Campaign request intake and SLAs
- Governance
- Metrics and reporting
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ACTION: Establish a COE with some of your Target experts. Be a sponsor of this team and support their efforts to ensure an optimization and personalization culture.
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Keys to Your Success
Now that you’ve reinforced your strategy with all teams that touch the digital customer experience, let’s talk about what else you can do to keep them on track as they stand up Target. In our experience, the most successful teams do these four things from the start:
- Define program goals. Create short and long-term goals to grow your program. Create maturity milestones for specific personalization tactics to advance and grow the organization’s path along the maturity curve.
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ACTION: Communicate KBOs and KPIs to the Target team who defines the tactical roadmap. Ensure they include activity-level goals and KPIs that roll-up to the program-level goals that accomplish your key business objectives.
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2. Be data driven. Your organization is no longer constrained by assumptions, but old habits can be hard to break. Acknowledge the shift in your organization’s capacity. Conduct proactive and reactive analysis by developing checklists for testing and personalization opportunities. Identify segments and audiences conducive to and relevant for testing and personalization.
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ACTION: Have the program lead work with an analyst to create a research plan that defines the data
they’ll collect and how it will be used to improve the product.
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3. Document your processes. Establish a document repository as part of the COE. This will house and share valuable information about the testing program and helps in knowledge transfer and onboarding. Creating repeatable processes based on documentation is efficient and scalable. This promotes the long-term viability and success of the program throughout your organization.
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ACTION: Task the program lead and Target team with developing foundational materials like a program details document, roadmap, test and communication plans, and activity results templates early in your Target implementation.
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4. Measure success. Being able to interpret and execute on winning and losing activities is key to a successful program. Losing activities can also be learning opportunities to iterate on. Have a plan and specify a timeline within your release cycle to code winning activity experiences in production.
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ACTION: Have the Target team define how they will use and define winning and losing results.
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Emphasize Operational Excellence
You’ve assembled a team of rock-stars and a COE. You’ve shared your vision and objectives with other business lines and teams within your organization. There are still some best practices you need to ensure the team follows before running your first set of activities.
Program communication. Inform key stakeholders about your launch plan activities. Misaligned expectations can drag down an optimization and personalization program, potentially pausing the activity and release. Use your test plan template, which explains the details of the test, to formally notify all key stakeholders about the initial launch date and what to expect visually.
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ACTION: Define with the product lead when and to whom test plans will be sent to the organization.
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Test velocity. The program lead should always have a steady queue of tests on the roadmap to keep the momentum going. Create iterative test ideas or tests that complement recent activities so each test builds on each other. For example, if you test a homepage hero conversion click, ensure the next page also converts towards the end goal.
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ACTION: Have the Target team list the first five tests they’ll run, including a brief description of what data each test will use.
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Reporting. Standardized reporting for tests and ongoing personalization activities will create a simplified and repeatable process that is important to the growth and sustainability of the program. One way you can do this is by integrating your Target instance with Adobe Analytics. This will allow you to immediately capitalize on insights uncovered in the data
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ACTION: Get an integration roadmap from the Target technical staff that details how and when Target will connect with other analytics products you use. If you don’t have any, explore if Adobe Analytics is a good fit for you organization.
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Your Role in Success
One of the keys to getting the most value out of your Adobe investment lies with setting up a common technical and organizational foundation. Ensuring that all parts of the organization operate with a common strategy and purpose is crucial for success.
We also understand that leading through change can be daunting for transformational leaders. The journey involves several critical steps: communicating your vision, gaining buy-in, enabling people on new technologies, and instilling new ways of working.
For more detailed guidance on managing the human aspects of change, refer to our guide on Change Management essentials for success. This resource offers valuable insights, practical strategies and even a change toolkit to help you understand the scope and complexities of organizational transformation.