ajo-academy

home

Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) is your one stop shop for creating seamless, 1:1 omnichannel experiences. By listening to real-time customer interaction or location events you can now orchestrate 1:1 journeys, leveraging the Real-time Customer Profile along with optional external data sources to deliver the right message within the right channel at the right time.

Let’s begin first with a quick tour of the AJO user interface

---

The Journey Optimizer User Interface

AJO menu gives access to everything you need to power your customer experiences: Marketing Campaigns, User Journeys, Offer Engine, Landing Pages, Audiences and much more. Menu items are configurable based on access rights, here you can see (almost) all the menu entries. You can also access all the items through the quick search bar

AJO also comes with a conversational agent called AI Assistant you can use by clicking on the icon in the top right hand corner . There you can ask many questions related to the product itself (eg: What are the best practices for testing and publishing a landing page?) or to get insights about your data (eg: identify the most used journey and assess any performance indicators)

In this chapter, you are going to build your own version of the Luma Purchase Journey where we’ll provide the logic to listen and react to Luma customer interactions during the checkout process.

• Under Journey management menu, click on Journeys
• In the Browse tab, click Create Journey
• Name your journey Purchase Journey, please prefix it with the email address you used when creating your account on Luma website, like: delaland+p1@adobetest.com - Purchase Journey
• Click Save

The Journey Canvas

The customer journey canvas is the central point for creating a real-time customer experience. The interface allows you to drag and drop three types of activities:

Events: These are user actions (or actions generated by a third-party system) that arrive in real time in AEP, that you are willing to listen and react.

Orchestration: Useful to apply filtering condition on the incoming population and to delay steps in a journey. The Read Audience activity lets you target an audience previously built, such as the Luma - Blue Luma+ Members audience your profile automatically qualified previously.

Actions: These are the different activities you can leverage to react and send communication to your customer. AJO comes with native activities to send personalized communications through inbound channels (website, in-app, kiosk, connected tvs) as well as outbound channels (email, sms, push notif). Of course you can build your own action if you have specific needs, like interacting with a proprietary channel (like exotic channels, ATM, call center, CRM systems etc).

We will now personalize the Luma conversion path using a journey which will be composed of 2 branches, each one having its own business objective:

• The Order Confirmation Branch to send a confirmation message to users who have complete their purchase.
• The Abandoned Cart Branch to retarget Luma website users who have abandoned the purchase process.

---

Create the Order Confirmation Branch

First, we’re going to focus on the standard path, from checkout to purchase, that is the path customers are going to follow when they make an online purchase. Basically it consists in:

• Listen to Checkout Event from the Luma website: This is the first page of the checkout process, where we ask Luma customer to validate their payment method and shipping details.
• Listen to Purchase Event from Luma website: This is the second page of the checkout process, where we ask Luma customers to confirm their order.
• Get Information from Luma Loyalty System: This activity invokes an external API to retrieve offers based on the purchase value of the order.
• Send an order confirmation email: We’ll craft the order from scratch leveraging AJO Digital Asset Manager, contextual information (like our promo code), content fragments and conditional content to make it even more relevant.

Our first branch will then look like this:

• The first event we are going to use to start the journey is triggered from the checkout page, when the user clicks on Continue button. The event has been configured by the martech team and basically carries the information from the visitors session. You’ll find in this event a json object representing the cart content (product name, price, quantity etc) as well as the customers details. Select the LumaCheckoutEvent_Email from the EVENTS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas.

• The second event is triggered by the order summary, when the user clicks on Confirm Order button. The event is also pre configured and ready to use. Select the LumaPurchaseEvent_Email from the EVENTS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas, right after the first event.

• Select the LoyaltyService from the ACTIONS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas, right after the second event. Custom actions are very powerful in AJO, they let you send any data from your customer journey, wether it is context or profile related data, you can seamlessly share them to send. Of course, you also have the option to use the response from the custom action as condition criteria in your journey and you can also use it to personalize downstream communications.

  • Let’s configure the request parameters of our custom action that will retrieve a promo code based on the order value. We have to send to the LoyaltyService API the customerId as well as the order value:

    • In the loyaltyId input, select the email attribute under Context > LumaPurchaseEvent_Email > _aeppartner1 > identification > core (or juste copy paste @event{LumaPurchaseEvent_Email._aeppartner1.identification.core.email})

    • In the orderValue input, click the Advanced mode button then select the priceTotal attribute under Context > LumaPurchaseEvent_Email > productListItems (or juste copy paste @event{LumaPurchaseEvent_Email.productListItems.at(0).priceTotal})

  • Click the Save button

• Select the Email activity from the ACTIONS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas. Notice Tracking setting (clicks on email, email opens) is automatically enabled to enable feedback events in AEP real time customer profile

  • Label the email Order Confirmation Email. It gives a name to your email delivery and will help you track its performance in the report
  • Under Email Configuration, select the EmailMarketing value. It applies deliverability settings and email metadata (from, header fields, tracking parameters) to the delivery

Build the Order Confirmation Email

• Click Edit Content button. It opens the email editor where you can customize the content of the email

Personalize the subject

Let’s configure the subject line with our profile first name as personalisation token.

• Click the icon and fetch the first name attribute of the real time customer profile (available at Profile attribute > Person > Full name), then click the icon to add it to the subject line, and append ` , your order confirmation`

• Click Save

Email Content

Let’s author the email body now. In the body section:

• Click Edit email body. There are multiple options to build your communications, like using a template or create your own content. Here we are going to start from scratch

• Select Design from scratch

• The Email editor opens up, you’ll notice on the left rail a menu with sections to select pre-defined components, use AJO Assets, select fragments and conditional content. There are plenty of helper you can leverage to speed up the email creation process.

• From the Components menu icon (), under Structures > Select a 1:1 column and drag’n drop it to the canvas.

Use Assets from AJO Digital Assets Manager

Adobe Journey Optimizer’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) makes it easy to manage and optimize your content. You can upload images, remove backgrounds, and resize them using Adobe Express—all within the platform. Smart Tagging helps you find assets quickly, while version control keeps everything organized. Tasks streamline collaboration, and Renditions ensure assets are perfectly formatted for every channel. It’s a simple, efficient way to keep your creative work on track.

• From the Asset Selector menu icon () , click on Collection, double click the Luma collection and drag’n’drop the Luma logo in the 1:1 column component added
• Click on the image, notice the right rail getting updated with the image properties. There under Styles tab, set the image size to 60% and center-align the picture.

To play more with DAM feature, you can access it by clicking the 3 dots in the Asset selector menu and select Manage Assets.

Reuse with Fragments

Fragments are reusable, modular content pieces that can be incorporated into personalized messages. Fragments allow marketers to create content once and then reuse or adapt it across multiple campaigns and journeys without having to rebuild it each time. Let’s use some previously created fragments to display the items that have been purchased. The fragment will leverage contextual data coming from the Luma Purchase Event that we added to the journey.

• From the Fragment menu icon (), select the Order Confirmation Text and drag’n drop it below the image.
• From the Components menu icon (), under Contents, select the Text content and drag’n drop it to the canvas.
• Double click on the default text and replace it with Here are the details of your order and click Add Personalization icon (). In the Edit Personalization screen, you’ll be able to set placeholders like variables that will represent the purchased items. We are going to use AJO Helper functions to help you loop through the collections of purchased items.
• Under Helper functions (), select Helpers > each, then click + sign
• Replace someArray with the productListItems collection from the contextual attributes of your Luma_CheckoutEvent_Email.
• Remove the curly brace surrounding the inserted value.
• We are going to use a prebuilt fragment to display the item name, price and purchased quantity. In the each block, select Fragments then click on the 3 dots besides Order Content and select Paste Fragment
• Click Save

Enhance with External Data

AJO custom actions are great to communicate with the outside world, whether it is to query external data sources and use its output to determine what do to next (like a condition in the journey to determine the next best path for our customer) or to contact an external system to push some personalized message (like creating a task to the shipping company). The capabilities are endless. In our Luma Purchase journey, we’d like to also incent our customers with an offer from our Loyalty System. It serves personalized Promo Code trough a REST API that we can query directly from the journey and use its response to personnalize further the email content based on the customer order value. The martech team prepared a content fragment that makes it very easy to consume promo code. The content fragment is preconfigured to accept 2 placeholders from the loyalty service: the offer name and the promo code.

• From the Fragment menu icon (), select the Promo Code Fragment and drag’n drop it in the canvas.
• Click on it in the canvas and under the Settings tab:
  • replace the LoyaltyOffer input with the response from the custom action. Select the default text, delete it and then click on icon and under Contextual Attributes > Journey Orchestration > Actions > Loyalty Service, select the LoyaltyOffer attribute.
  • replace the default OfferCode input with the response from the custom action. Select the default text, delete it and click on icon and under Contextual Attributes > Journey Orchestration > Actions > Loyalty Service, select the PromoCode attribute.
• Click Save.

Make it Relevant with Conditional Content

Conditional content allows marketers to deliver highly personalized and dynamic messaging based on specific conditions or rules. Here, We want to invite customers who haven’t the Luma Mobile App installed to do so. For the other, we’d like to promote the Luma+ Loyalty Program. We are going to leverage previously built platform audiences to manage this logic. With AJO conditional content, you can create as many variants as needed. We are going to use the default variant to promote the Luma Loyalty+ Program and a second variant to incent Luma customers to install the mobile app.

• First, let’s drag and drop a new container. From the Components menu icon (), under Contents, select the Container content and drag’n drop it to the canvas.
• In Asset Selector > Collection > Select the Luma Collection, and choose the Luma Loyalty + banner
• Click on the image, then add conditional content by clicking the icon and create another variant.
• Select the Variant - 1 and rename it: Not Mobile App Users and click select condition icon to choose the Not Luma Mobile App Users one, then validate by clicking Select
• Select the luma-mobile-app.png banner by clicking the edit image icon then select an asset. Click on button to access the Luma collection.

Import the Footer Fragment

Time to finish our email with additional links which are embedded in every footer of Luma email communications. Let’s add the Luma - Footer Fragment. Fragments are very powerful in AJO as they let you reference previously built content with different degree of locking, to allow for specific customization or inline updates.

• From the Fragment menu icon (), select the Luma - Footer Fragment and drag’n drop it below the image.

And you’re done with the Order Confirmation email! Of course, as a marketer you can do much more, such as simulate content, check spam score, test its renditions, generate variants with genAI, send a proof etc. But so far you should have an email which looks like this, where personalization token will automatically be replaced during the email sendout.

What we have so far is great, it covers the standard checkout process. Now AJO can do much more than that, let’s spice the journey with a bit more intelligence to seamlessly reengage our cart abandoners if they stopped during the checkout process.

• Click the back arrow on the top left hand corner to leave the email editor, then click again on the back arrow to return to the canvas.

---

Build the Abandoned Cart Branch

We’d also like to retarget profiles who started the checkout process, but did not complete. Here what we’re going to do:

• Add a transition in case the Purchase Event did not arrive after a certain time
• Verify the customer preferred channel of communication
• Send a Push Notification through the mobile app to invite profile to resume his purchase or
• Send an Email with the content of the pending cart

Let’s enhance the journey so it looks like this:

Manage Event Timeout

The first thing to do is to detect when a customer dropped in the conversion process. AJO has a very neat way of managing profiles who did not move forward in the journey after a certain time. This is done through the Timeout setting of the Event. You can define how long you want to wait for the event to occur, and if nothing happens you can direct your profiles to an alternate path, called the timeout path

• Click on the LumaPurchaseEvent_Email, set a timeout for let’s say, 1 minute (of course, it would be much longer outside of this lab) and click Set a timeout path

  

• Select the Condition activity from the ORCHESTRATION menu and drag and drop it to the canvas.

  • Label the activity Preferred Channel and select Type Data source condition
  • The first path will be for Luma users who have consented to receive Mobile Push. Click on the icon to edit the expression. Here let’s select under Audiences Luma - Mobile App Users then Click Ok.
  • Label this Path Push

  • Select the Show path for other cases than the one(s) above and label it Others for profiles who want to be targeted throuh other channels.

    

Be friend with Content Templates

Content Template is a nice addition in AJO, it makes it easy for marketers and content managers to build highly-reusable content, outside of any campaign or journeys. It offers neat features such as the ability to lock certain area of the template to prevent unintentional edits or deletions, giving you greater control over template customization, and improving the efficiency and reliability of your email campaigns.

• Select the Push activity from the ACTIONS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas and connect it to the Push transition of your condition activity
  • Label the push Abandoned Cart Push. It gives a name to your push notification delivery and will help you track its performance in the report
  • Under Push Configuration, select DXDemoApp Click Edit content button
  • Let’s use a predefined Push template that has been configured previously: Click Apply content template from the button
    • In the Content Template window, Select Luma - Abandoned Push content template and click Confirm
    • Notice how the iOS and Android content get automatically applied from the template. You can still edit them to match your specific purpose.

  

• Lets go back to the journey by clicking the back arrow next to your journey name () and save your push notification.
• Select the Email activity from the ACTIONS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas and connect it to the Others transition of your condition activity.
  • Label the email Abandoned Cart Email. It gives a name to your email delivery and will help you track its performance in the report.
  • Under Email Configuration, select the EmailMarketing value.
  • Click Edit content button
  • Let’s use a predefined Email template that has been configured previously: Click Apply content template from the button
  • In the Content template window, Select Luma - Cart Abandoned Email content template and click Confirm. We are not going to edit the email body as it is the same process as for the Order Confirmation Email we’ve done before.

  

Use Automated Translations in your messages

We’d like this email to be automatically translated based on the preferred language of the profile. We are going to use Microsoft automatic translation service to provide Spanish and French version of the email content.

• Click button, select Luma_Language_Settings, then click Select
• Notice 3 locales loaded
• Click button, the translation is in progress. It usually takes a couple of minutes to complete. You can monitor the translation process in the Translation project tab

Feel free to reload the browser tab to refresh the variant.

Apply Frequency Capping

Email retargeting can be quickly overwhelming for customers. To avoid over solicitation over our Luma customers with too many communications, we should apply business rules that limit the number of communication to send over a specific period of time. In our case, we want to enforce a cross channel rule that limits the number of emails and pushs to 3 retargeting message per week. The rule has already been created as follow.

What you’ll have to do is to apply this rule to your message. AJO will then fully manage pressure rule based on the ruleset selected above. Under the hood, AJO uses sending logs of the real time customer profile to decide whether the communication should be delivered. When an exclusion occurs, the information is tracking in AJO reporting wich the exclusion reason.

• Click button, select Luma Marketing - Outgoing messages Rue Set, then click Save

---

Finalize the Journey

We’re almost done with the journey, just a couple of steps more to tie the abandoned branch back to the order confirmation branch. Once our profile receives the retargeting message, he is invited to resume its purchase. When doing so, he will generate a new Purchase Event that AJO is going to listen in order to complete the purchase process

• Select the LumaPurchaseEvent_Email from the EVENTS menu and drag and drop it to the canvas, right after the Abandoned Cart Push outgoing path.
• Move the Email outgoing path to the above event to connect them altogether.
• Link the outgoing path of the LumaPurchaseEvent_Email1 to the LoyaltyService action

Your journey should now look like this:

Test the journey

Whether you completed the whole journey or not, you can test the end to end customer experience by yourself. There is a published Luma - Purchase Journey, where you can track the entries.

• Return to the Luma website, add an item to your cart, and click the Shopping Cart button in the top right corner of the interface. Click the Checkout button, then Continue.
• Do not confirm the order yet. The journey is configured to send the cart abandonment email after one minute of inactivity.
• In the meantime, return to Journey Optimizer and view your user’s progress through the customer journey.

The profile abandoned its cart, and AJO routes him to the abandoned cart branch:

After a given period of inactivity, the user is considered to have abandoned the purchase process, and the email you previously configured is sent with a link to revalidate their cart. Go to your email client and click on the link in the new email received. This will take you back to the cart, where you can complete your purchase online.

The Abandoned Cart Email:

The Order Confirmation Email:

Journey Reporting

As a marketer, we want to keep track of the Luma - Purchase Journey performance. The AJO reporting UI displays essential metrics associated with your journey. This encompasses details such as the count of entered profiles and instances of failed individual journeys, offering a comprehensive insight into your journey’s effectiveness and level of engagement. Journey report can be accessed directly from your journey with the button.

What’s great about AJO reporting is the ability to take actions from insights. For example, if you’d like to create an audience containing profiles who clicks on a specific link of your email delivery, you just have to right click on the corresponding cell of the table.

Of course, there’s much more you can do as Customer Journey Analytics dashboards (another AEP module that is embedded for this reporting view) can be fully customized, we’ll keep that for another lab :wink:

Package your journey and share it

Our journey is complete and live, it works so well that we want to reuse it in another context. Rolling out AJO objets (journeys, campaigns, content template, audiences etc) is easy thanks to AEP packages.
You can seamlessly export and import AJO configurations between AEP environments, whether it is across different sandboxes or across different organisation. With packages, you reduce the time to value for the implementation process and move successful configurations in a few clicks.

A package can consist of a single object or multiple objects, for this lab, we are going to package the journey you built so you can reuse it in your own partner organisation.

• Go back to the journey browse screen by clicking the menu entry.
• Click on the 3 dots besides your journey, then Add to package
• Select Create new package, name it Purchase Journey Package, please prefix it with the email address you used when creating your account on Luma website, like: delaland+p1@adobetest.com - Purchase Journey Package
• Click Add button
• Go to Administration > Sandboxes > Packages and click on your newly created package, click Publish and confirm. The publication process takes a few seconds.
• Once published, click on 3 dots beside your package and select the option Update to public package and Confirm
• Click again on the 3 dots beside your package and select Copy package payload
• You can now switch to your partner instance and import the package using this payload !

---

Congratulations! You have completed the second chapter of the lab 👍 ✨ 🎉, go to the next step or return to the home