If you look under the hood of a marketing tech stack for any brand, you’ll likely find Adobe in the mix. Adobe is a highly regarded global software company, offering over 50 various products and apps to support creative and marketing teams. Adobe particularly shines when it comes to arming teams with the tools they need for creativity and design. They’re most well-known for Creative Suite, a software bundle that encompasses popular tools like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and AfterEffects, commonly used by creative teams for design and collaboration. 

Adobe also offers various platforms in its Adobe Experience Cloud to create brand experiences, such as Adobe Experience Manager for building engaging web experiences and Adobe Target for personalizing those web experiences based on individual preferences. It also offers several tools for managing customer data and others for cross-channel campaign execution. We’ll focus on Experience Cloud in this article and dive more into the key platforms it's comprised of later.

The platforms within Experience Cloud are most commonly used by enterprise marketing teams with robust and complex marketing needs. However, due to the nature of the products and how customizable they are, these enterprise marketing teams also typically rely on extensive support packages and specialized technical talent to manage these platforms. While there are many benefits to having highly customized martech, it can lead to incurring a lot of technical debt and slows down critical marketing processes when marketing teams become dependent on technical resources to build and deploy campaigns.

For marketing teams looking for more control over their campaign development and execution process, Braze often comes up as a great option for enterprise brands to complement Adobe’s marketing suite. Braze is a customer engagement platform designed with the marketer in mind (not the developer) — built to easily ingest and activate customer data, integrate with other technologies, and offer comprehensive messaging capabilities across a variety of channels, including email, SMS, in-app, push, WhatsApp, and more. 

Understanding best practices for integrating Braze and Adobe and leveraging the best of both worlds is critical to deciding whether or not to extend your tech stack with Braze.

At Stitch, we spend a lot of time advising our customers on this exact topic. Given the prevalence of Braze and Adobe and how often they coexist, we have a strong point of view on how these two platforms can be used together to enable powerful customer engagement strategies. 

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Understanding Key Adobe Experience Cloud Components

First, let’s level-set on a few key products and features that are central to this complementary relationship, specifically those related to managing web experiences and customer data.

• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): A powerful collection of tools that help manage and deliver content across websites, including a content management system (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) platform.

• Adobe Target: A tool for web personalization, providing advanced features to tailor content to individual user preferences.

• Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP): Powered by an underlying data lake, Adobe’s real-time CDP aggregates customer data from various sources, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

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Understanding Key Braze Components

• Data Ingestion & Activation: Braze excels in its ability to import, process, and enable marketers to get insights from vast customer data. Through robust integrations, APIs, and SDKs, Braze facilitates seamless data flow from different sources, combining data from different platforms and unifying it in a central place, making it easy to create comprehensive customer profiles and track customer lifecycles. The insights gained from the data help marketers understand user behavior, preferences, and interactions.

• Journey Orchestration: Braze Canvas is a visual journey builder that empowers marketing teams to create personalized customer journeys — no coding or deep technical skills necessary. Through its easy-to-use interface, creating customer journeys is as simple as dragging and dropping elements into the Canvas. Add in Braze’s suite of AI features that help marketers experiment with copy, creative, promotions, channel mix, and delivery timing, and you’ve got a powerful, intuitive tool that reduces the complexity of journey orchestration and helps you create cohesive cross-channel customer experiences.

• Messaging: At its core, Braze is designed to help businesses engage with their customers through various messaging channels. The breadth of its messaging mix is where Braze really shines—spanning email, push notifications (web and mobile), SMS, WhatsApp, in-app messaging, and Content Cards. By offering all of these channels on a single platform, Braze is uniquely positioned to help marketers meet their customers where they are while maintaining a consistent experience across all channels.

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How can Braze complement Adobe?

Adobe is fantastic at powering personalized web experiences using customer data. It also offers messaging and journey orchestration tools through Adobe Journey Optimizer and Adobe Campaign.

However, mobile messaging isn’t Adobe’s strong suit—and it is often the first prompt for marketing teams using Adobe to look beyond the product to enhance their capabilities. This is often a great opportunity to start integrating Braze into a martech stack, leveraging Braze’s messaging capabilities across all channels—integrating its SDK into digital properties (e.g., a website) managed by Adobe Experience Manager. 

Not only does this approach immediately extend marketing teams’ capabilities and start driving ROI with Braze, but it also gives teams time to grow into the Braze platform to be thoughtful about process improvements and remove redundancies across platforms where applicable. 

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The Power of Braze + Adobe

When Adobe and Braze are used in tandem, they truly are better together. Here are a few examples where each platform's strengths are maximized:

• Unified Data Management: Adobe's CDP aggregates data from various sources, which can then be seamlessly fed into Braze. Whether it's through Snowflake via Adobe's experience platform or directly through Braze's customer data ingestion (CDI), the integration ensures that all relevant data is accessible for marketing activities.

• Enhanced Personalization: While Adobe Target provides sophisticated web personalization, Braze excels in multi-channel engagement. By using both, marketers can create highly personalized experiences that span web, mobile, email, and more.

• Streamlined Workflows: With data elements managed within Adobe and engagement tactics executed in Braze, marketers can focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down by technical challenges. The integration allows for a more streamlined workflow, reducing the need for constant switching between platforms.

• Feedback Loop: Data collected through Braze's engagement activities can be sent back to Adobe, closing the loop and enriching the customer profiles within the CDP. This feedback loop ensures that both platforms are continuously updated with the latest customer interactions, leading to more informed marketing decisions.

• Making the Most of Your Legacy Setup: Marketing teams that use legacy platforms like Adobe often face challenges when it comes to adding new channels and innovating at the speeds needed to keep up with the newest customer engagement strategies. However, their Adobe products are often so deeply ingrained in their processes and extensively integrated into their tech stacks that making a full platform change would be incredibly disruptive if not impossible. Braze sits alongside Adobe to extend its messaging and multi-channel capabilities, giving marketers the flexibility they need to adapt to changing strategies without changing existing functionality — allowing them to make the most of their legacy marketing cloud, while still having tools in place that allow them to experiment, deploy campaigns faster, and have more control over the campaign process.

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What does this look like in practice?

Consider a scenario where a company uses Adobe for managing its website content and personalization while leveraging Braze for mobile app engagement. Adobe's real-time CDP collects data from various touchpoints, including website interactions and CRM systems. This data is then fed into Braze, which uses it to trigger personalized push notifications and in-app messages based on user behavior.

For example, if a customer shows interest in a particular product category on the website, Adobe Target can personalize the website experience for that user. Simultaneously, Braze can send targeted notifications to the user's mobile device, encouraging them to revisit the site or complete a purchase. The interaction data from Braze can then be sent back to Adobe's CDP, updating the customer profile and allowing for even more refined personalization in future interactions.

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Final Thoughts

Using Adobe and Braze together creates a powerful solution for marketers looking to deploy seamless, personalized customer experiences across multiple channels. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, marketers can overcome the challenges of fragmentation, streamline their workflows, and drive more effective customer engagement.