In this article, we’ll discuss how to optimize the customer journey with the help of Adobe solutions. You’ll discover specific takeaways from one of our 2022 Experience Makers, Emily Primavera, of the South Australia Tourism Commission and learn how they were able to achieve over $3 million in incremental revenue.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to optimize the customer journey with the help of Adobe solutions. You’ll discover specific takeaways from one of our 2022 Experience Makers, Emily Primavera, of South Australia Tourism Commission.

When it comes to optimization, there are several challenges any team will face. Not only are you tasked with engaging hundreds, even thousands of customers, on top of that, your customers display a variety of unique behaviors and preferences that will change over time, and it is up to you to not only keep up with those changes, but anticipate them and execute your strategies efficiently and accurately.

Background on South Australia Tourism Commission (SATC)

Founded in 1908, the South Australia Tourism Commission was organized by the Government of Australia to promote tourism throughout South Australia. They are committed to growing the state’s visitor economy to $12.8 billion by 2030.

The Challenge

SATC wanted a way to encourage more people to travel to South Australia. Among the many challenges, the biggest perhaps was COVID-19 and its drastic effect on consumer travel behavior. “We needed to understand how the consumer was making travel decisions, specifically how they plan a trip and how they consume trip planning content, what would engage them and how we could persuade them to choose South Australia,” explains Emily Primavera, SATC’s Marketing & Optimization Manager. Emily and her team turned to Adobe solutions to optimize and personalize the customer journey in order to achieve company objectives and positively impact business growth across South Australia.

Why Optimize the Customer Journey?

Optimization is the most efficient way to ensure that you have qualitative data that will prove that the changes you are making are valuable. To truly optimize, you must be able to measure the impact and value of your efforts. Otherwise, the changes you make will result in higher cost, with minimal gain. In order to achieve this effectively and efficiently, you must begin with strategic planning. Without including a strategic plan in your optimization, you would simply be guessing.

6 Essentials of Optimization:

1. Set Goals – Identify opportunities for activities that are aligned with business objectives and which are based on data.
2. Review Customer Data – Understand what data is being collected, build personas and use cases, and Identify gaps of knowledge. SATC created a Tourism Path to Purchase which included milestones “Inspire, Plan, Book and Travel.”
3. Map the Value of Leads – For example, you might review the number of leads versus expenditure as SATC did in Graph 1 below.
4. Build and Run – Build your customer journey decide your custom engagement measurement, and launch your campaign.
5. Analyze – Leverage Adobe Target to monitor performance for the duration of the campaign.
6. Act and iterate – Develop recommendations based on testing or personalization activity performance.

Best Practices for Managing Transformation & Supporting Your Team

• Offer ongoing training – Build your team’s knowledge in consumer experience mapping, customer journey mapping, and any areas of weakness you can identify.
• Leverage third party vendors / agencies – don’t be afraid to ask for assistance or fill knowledge gaps e.g. implementing engagement scores or setting up analytics.
• Look at the big picture – maintain a flexible approach, looking at what you’re doing now, and what you want to do in the future, to see how you can innovate.
• Get excited – “Be really positive,” Emily advises, “get excited about trying something new and pushing the envelope.”

SATC’s Results & Next Steps

When SATC optimized and measured back to their original objectives they saw an increase in engagement and leads for audiences who received that personalized experience. Specific results include:

• 65.4% average engagement score uplift
• 104.2% ATDW leads to unique visitors uplift
• Over $3m incremental revenue

So what’s in the future for SATC? What are the next steps they plan to take to further their efforts in optimization? “We’re actively focused on scaling,” says Emily, “we’re looking at new technological innovation such as our website Chat Bot, focusing on building authenticated data, and continuing our personalization strategies to drive email sign ups.”

Final Thoughts

“Looking back, there is not a lot I would do differently, fortunately,” Emily explains. “You can always try to react quicker to what’s happening in the industry or have more authenticated data. Ultimately, it’s important to make sure you understand your site, your position, and what you’re trying to do for consumers, so you know where you need to invest. Also, stay future-focused.”