Transform customer Experience with Adobe AEP, AWS, and Merkle’s BYOM Solution

By Lorenzo Valmasoni, Data Solutions Manager, Merkle,
By Jiri Luzny, Data Solutions Technology Director, Merkle,
By Ranjith Raman, Principal Partner SA, AWS,
By Dilin Joy, Senior Partner SA, AWS

In today’s digital landscape, delivering personalized experiences at scale is no longer optional – it’s essential for business success. While companies recognize the need for omni-channel strategies and data-driven personalization, many struggle to effectively leverage their domain expertise and unique data within machine learning models that can deliver accurate, personalized customer experiences at scale.

The collaboration between Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), HAQM Web Services (AWS), and Merkle’s Bring Your Own Model (BYOM)accelerator is transforming how companies approach personalization. This integration combines the strengths of three industry leaders:

Adobe Experience Platform: The Foundation for Connected Experiences

AEP provides the centralized data foundation necessary for next-generation customer experiences. With native applications for insights, engagement, audience creation, and journey optimization, AEP empowers organizations to craft high-quality datasets through its Data Distiller Features Pipeline. This allows data scientists to enhance AI/ML models built outside AEP using rich customer datasets.

AWS: Enterprise-Grade AI Innovation

With enterprise-grade security and privacy, a choice of leading foundation models, a data-first approach, and the most performant, low-cost infrastructure, organizations trust AWS to deliver everything they need to accelerate generative AI powered innovation. From startups to enterprises, organizations of all sizes are getting started with generative AI. They want to capitalize on it, and translate the momentum from betas, prototypes, and demos to real-world innovations and productivity gains.

But what do organizations need to bring generative AI into the enterprise and make it real? When we talk to customers, they tell us they need security and privacy, scale and price-performance, and most importantly solutions that are relevant to their business. With enterprise-grade security and privacy, a choice of leading foundation models, a data-first approach, and the most performant, low-cost infrastructure, organizations trust AWS to deliver everything they need to accelerate generative AI powered innovation. AWS is putting generative AI at the fingertips of every business so organizations of all sizes can build new applications that enhance employee productivity, transform customer experiences, and open up new business opportunities.

Merkle’s BYOM Accelerator: Integrating Custom ML Models into AEP Workflows

The BYOM accelerator seamlessly integrates AEP with custom ML models built on AWS services like HAQM SageMaker, HAQM S3, and HAQM Redshift and provides the infrastructure and tools needed for successful ML model implementation. This integration allows organizations to leverage their domain expertise and unique data, resulting in more accurate and personalized outcomes.

Merkle’s AEP Accelerators cut your build and deployment time with purpose-built cloud frameworks that help brands:

• Optimize AEP performance
• Accelerate use case enablement
• Improve customer acquisition and growth
• Reduce data risks
• Set a strong foundation for future scale and growth
• Reduce time to value on your platform investment

High Level Architecture

Figure 1. Merkle’s BYOM Accelerator High Level Architecture

The Merkle’s BYOM Accelerator follows these key steps:

1. Data collection: Configuring AEP with SDKs to gather data from various sources, such as web and mobile analytics, digital media performance, and online sales.
2. Data optimization: Utilizing AWS services to query different data sources, transform the data as needed, and store the optimized data in HAQM S3.
3. Model training and tuning: Preparing datasets, training and experimenting with various ML models (e.g., propensity models), and tuning the hyper parameters to optimize model performance.
4. Model deployment: Deploying the optimized model to production, generating insights (e.g., propensity scores) that are then sent back to AEP.
5. Audience segmentation and campaign optimization: Using the insights from the deployed models, digital marketing teams can create customer segments and generate lookalike audiences for targeted digital advertising. Campaign data is then ingested back into AEP, creating an ongoing feedback loop.

Merkle’s BYOM Accelerator bridges the technology gap by seamlessly integrating AEP with custom ML models built on AWS services unlocking real-time insights and personalization while enabling custom model deployment, streamlining implementation processes, and accelerating time-to-market.

Generative AI for Streamlined, Compliant Marketing Campaigns

The combination of Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) and Generative AI creates personalized, engaging customer experiences. Merkle has extended BYOM accelerator for AEP with Generative AI to automate creative content generation. Thanks to the integration of AWS-powered BYOM accelerator with Generative AI and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), marketers can create advanced customer segments, delivering targeted content that improves satisfaction and conversions.

Generative AI automates content creation at scale, producing personalized emails, subject lines, body copy, and images, driving higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Using audience data from AEP, Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) delivers highly relevant content, maximizing email marketing KPIs.

In a loyalty campaign test, HAQM Titan, integrated via HAQM SageMaker, Jupyter Notebook, and HAQM Bedrock, generated contextually relevant email content. Titan’s capabilities ensure tone, style, and intent alignment, while HAQM Bedrock Guardrails enforce compliance, brand standards, and legal requirements—ideal for regulated industries.

Merkle’s intuitive interface simplifies control over content creation while ensuring brand compliance and consistency. Content is generated in segments, passed to AJO, and compiled into final emails. AJO then delivers personalized emails, boosting campaign effectiveness by encouraging more customers to upgrade loyalty tiers and earn additional points.

Figure 2. Merkle’s BYOM accelerator for AEP with Generative AI

Enhanced Personalization in Action

BYOM’s seamless data preparation capabilities, accelerated time-to-market, and enhanced personalization features empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data and AI investments. By seamlessly integrating custom ML models into AEP, organizations can leverage their domain expertise and unique data, resulting in more accurate and personalized customer experiences.

The combined solution enables powerful use cases:

1. Targeted Audience Creation: Marketing teams can leverage propensity scores to build precise audience segments
2. AI-Driven Win-Back Campaigns: Personalized product recommendations help re-engage at-risk customers
3. Automated Content Generation: Integration with generative AI enables scalable content personalization
4. Real-Time Optimization: Continuous model updates ensure relevance and effectiveness

This powerful integration enables marketers to deliver highly targeted content, automate content creation, and scale personalization efforts, driving increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A typical application case concerns high churn rates in industries like credit cards and mobile carriers hurt profitability, with wireless carriers potentially increasing earnings by 10% by reducing churn (ref: A Lemmens, & S Gupta – Managing churn to maximize profits – Marketing Science – 39(5), 956-973). To improve retention, businesses use personalized offers, discounts, and targeted communication. Insights from CRM systems, transactional databases, and analytics platforms help predict and manage churn. Merkle’s BYOM accelerator prioritizes high customer lifetime value (CLV) customers through churn prediction, while actionable insights drive targeted campaigns to reduce churn and boost profitability.

With the BYOM Accelerator, companies can significantly reduce churn rates, leading to substantial improvements in revenue and marketing efficiency while cutting implementation costs of ML models by approximately 60% compared to most common time & material approach.

The Future of Personalization

As the technology continues to evolve, the integration of BYOM and Generative AI will bring even more sophisticated ML models, improved data integration capabilities, and enhanced automation tools. These advancements will empower marketers to create highly personalized experiences, further strengthening customer engagement and driving sustainable growth.

Conclusion

The partnership between Adobe, AWS, and Merkle provides organizations with a comprehensive solution for delivering personalized experiences at scale. By combining enterprise-grade AI, robust data management, and seamless integration capabilities, businesses can:

• Accelerate digital transformation
• Enhance customer engagement
• Drive sustainable growth
• Maintain competitive advantage

In an era where personalization defines success, this powerful combination enables organizations to turn their customer data into meaningful, actionable insights that drive business results.

Looking for more? Watch AEP Accelerator Video Blog from Merkle

*Ready to transform your customer experiences? Contact Merkle to learn about this accelerator that can power your personalization strategy.*

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Merkle – AWS Partner Spotlight

Merkle is a leading global technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company. Merkle is a CX transformation business partner to the Fortune 1000, bridging the gap between Marketing & IT. We empower the world’s leading brands to transform their data, technology, and organizational capabilities to deliver differentiated customer experiences. With more than 16,000 experts in 30+ countries around the world, we drive competitive advantage for our clients.

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