Adobe adds email features in Campaign, releases survey vouching for the channel’s robust health

For Adobe, email is still a king.

The marketing tech giant is out today with a new survey showing email’s enduring appeal across generations, as well as some updated features to email in its Marketing Cloud’s Campaign tool.

The survey, based on responses from over 1,000 white-collar workers in the US, found that consumers spend a phenomenal average of 5.4 hours each weekday checking emails.

In a blog post, Campaign’s Director of Product Marketing Kristin Naragon crowed on behalf of email:

All of this suggests that, even though politicians and entertainers embrace staccato communication bursts, most consumers still prefer longer form, more intimate email messages when we reach out to colleagues, friends and family.

And it’s not just the older crowd. The survey found that it is “just as sticky with [consumers aged 18 to 34] as with consumers overall.”

In fact, the younger crowd appears to be better at it. Sixty-six percent of them claim to regularly reach the nirvana of Inbox Zero, that rare and blissful state when all emails in an inbox are either filed or deleted.

Adobe also announced a few new email-related features or soon-to-be features in Campaign, which also handles marketing campaigns for direct mail, mobile/SMS, landing pages and custom channels like ATMs.

There’s now dynamic reporting that presents visual insights in real time about which email campaigns are working and which aren’t.

Previously, Naragon told me, the data was real-time, but now the Analysis Workspace interface from Adobe Analytics Cloud has been ported to email campaigns, enabling a more granular drill-down on any dimension and drag-and-drop adjustments. Here’s a sample screen:

“No other [email service provider] has this type of drag-and-drop UI in the application itself,” she said.

Multilingual email campaigns can be developed more easily now, by creating a template in Adobe Experience Manager and then generating variations for other languages, which are then deployed in Campaign. Before, a different template and campaign had to be created for each language. And there are 18 newly designed email templates.

Adobe also mentioned two new features it is developing in its Labs. Powered by Adobe’s Sensei AI layer, predictive imaging can forecast how users will react to similar images, and it can make recommendations for better engagement or conversion. As an example, Adobe said, the capability might suggest to an outdoor gear retailer that a product might get better results when seen in the same photo as a blue two-person tent, instead of with an orange six-person tent.

The other Lab work-in-progress feature is a customer churn predictor, which could tell you whether fewer emails or even different contract terms might lose customers.

With this new skill, Naragon said, “Sensei [will be] generating the insights, instead of the marketer looking at the data.”