The 2021 Adobe Experience Maker Award winners

The Adobe Experience Maker Awards take submissions from every corner of the globe and pick a single winner in each category, which is exactly as brutal as it sounds. The 2021 winners were honoured at two regional virtual galas — and one of them was a site we built. Topps Tiles took The Mastermind, nominated by Tom&Co.

Here is the full list, and what each of them actually did.

The global winners

The Advocate: Center Parcs. In hospitality the experience is the product. Center Parcs used Adobe Experience Cloud applications — Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target — to build far better customer experiences, increasing bookings and lifting revenue by £1.6m.

The Ambassador: Jessica Kao, Senior Director of Demand Operations, F5. A six-time Adobe Marketo Engage Champion, 2018 Adobe Marketo Engage Champion of the Year and an Experience Maker 50 marketer, Jess helps her peers at F5 and across the industry succeed. She helped increase MQLs from key accounts by 30 percent.

The Analyzer: RS Components. The global distributor of electronics and maintenance products uses Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Target to find customer pain points, then test and refine every experience against them. The result: 32 percent year-over-year revenue growth and a 64 percent increase in revenue per unique visitor.

The Architect: Bose. Bose brought several teams together to rethink the customer journey on Adobe Experience Cloud, using Adobe Sensei alongside in-house models to analyse data and work out what a customer is actually interested in. That produced a $2 million increase in revenue from email campaigns and up to $4.4 million more from homepage traffic.

The Changemaker: American Red Cross. Lifesaving services need to move quickly. The American Red Cross uses Adobe Experience Cloud to run email campaigns, promote blood drives and stand up microsites for donations when disaster strikes.

The Closer: NWEA. A research-based not-for-profit organisation creating academic assessments for pre-K-12 students, NWEA uses Adobe Marketo Engage for detailed buyer journey tracking. In under a year it achieved a 200 percent improvement in its Engaged to Closed/Won rate and a 3X increase in average deal size.

The Illuminator: U.S. Census Bureau. When COVID-19 stopped field operations, the Bureau used Adobe Experience Cloud to create landing pages in 59 languages. It reached more than 67 percent of U.S. households online, and set a new digital standard for future surveys.

The Magnifier: Sky. Europe's leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company runs personalised, multichannel marketing at enormous scale. Using Adobe Campaign with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Target and Adobe Workfront, Sky got a click-through rate on a 1:1 email campaign more than three times the average.

The Mastermind: Topps Tiles, nominated by Tom&Co. Topps Tiles is the UK's leading tile specialist, with 1,500 specialist experts and more than 300 stores. It re-platformed onto Adobe Commerce (Magento) in a headless set-up that connects the digital shopping experience to personalised help from those 300 retail locations. The progressive web app-enabled site moved the numbers that count: shoppers report an 80 percent satisfaction level, and trade sales have seen a 100 percent uplift.

The Maverick: Doorstep Market. Doorstep Market helps small businesses compete globally through a multi-site, multi-vendor platform built on Adobe Commerce Cloud Pro and supported by Adobe Sensei, sharing granular regional knowledge across connected regional markets.

The Orchestrator: Workday. Workday built a dashboard on Adobe Experience Cloud that analyses audience interests across channels. Better data, smarter targeting: website visits from target audiences went up 10x, with 74 percent reach across its defined target market.

The Transformer: Fiserv. The global fintech and payments company moved to Adobe Experience Cloud and cut its online presence from more than 500 sites to 200 — more relevant content, consistent branding, and 37 percent faster updates, with about $1M a year saved on web maintenance.

Congratulations to every one of them. Reading the list back, the pattern is hard to miss: not one of these was won by buying a bigger stack. They were won by knowing what the customer was trying to do, and clearing the way.