Our marketing team is debating the best approach for sending personalized email campaigns in Adobe Experience Cloud 2022. We’re currently using scheduled batch processing that runs every 4 hours to check customer behavior triggers and send targeted emails. It works, but there’s obvious latency between customer actions and email delivery.
We’re considering switching to custom event triggers using Adobe Campaign’s real-time event processing. The promise of immediate response is appealing, especially for cart abandonment and browse behavior emails. However, I’m concerned about system resource management and whether event-driven architecture can handle our volume of 500K+ active customers.
What are others’ experiences with event-driven versus batch processing for email campaigns? Does the improved personalization and speed justify the infrastructure complexity? Curious about real-world performance trade-offs.
The resource management aspect is real. Event-driven systems consume more database connections and processing threads because they’re always listening and responding. With 500K customers, you’ll need to architect carefully. Consider implementing event queuing with Adobe Campaign’s message center to buffer spikes. Also, not every email needs real-time delivery. We segment our campaigns into immediate triggers for time-sensitive actions and scheduled batches for newsletters and promotional content. This balances performance with resource efficiency.
Duplicate events happen when the same customer action triggers multiple event registrations or when there are network retries. Adobe Campaign has built-in deduplication based on event IDs, but you need to ensure your event sources are generating unique IDs consistently. We implement a 15-minute suppression window where if the same event type fires for the same customer within that timeframe, it gets filtered out. This prevents the dreaded double-send scenario while still maintaining near-real-time responsiveness.
From a personalization capabilities standpoint, event-driven wins hands down. Real-time triggers let you access customer context at the moment of action, which means your email content can reference exactly what they were looking at or doing. Batch processing relies on stale data from hours ago. That said, the infrastructure overhead is significant. You need robust monitoring, proper error handling for failed events, and a strategy for handling duplicate events. Factor in the operational complexity before committing.
Thanks for the insights. The engagement lift James mentioned is compelling. Priya’s point about hybrid approaches makes sense - we probably don’t need real-time for everything. Robert, can you elaborate on the duplicate event handling? Is that a common issue with Adobe Campaign’s event processing? We definitely want to avoid sending multiple identical emails to the same customer.