Mastering Adobe Campaign Target Mapping
Every marketer knows that the key to effective campaigns lies in delivering personalized experiences that resonate with their audience. However, achieving this level of precision can often feel like a daunting task. Enter Adobe Campaign’s Target Mapping: a feature that enables marketers to align their audience segments with custom recipient tables, ensuring that the right message reaches the right person at the right time.
What is Target Mapping in Adobe Campaign
Target Mapping is a powerful tool that enables marketers to create meaningful connections between their audience data and campaign execution. It essentially allows the mapping of various recipient profiles to specific campaign targets, creating a seamless flow of personalized communication.
Out of the box, Adobe Campaign includes the following default target mappings:
- Recipients
- Subscriptions
- Operators
- External file
- Visitors
You can add as many custom target mappings as you need. For example, if your database contains separate tables for agents, healthcare providers, patients, or sales representatives, each audience type can have its own target mapping. This is essential when you want to send them emails or include them in workflows, since each audience must be associated with a specific target mapping to ensure correct delivery and personalization.
How to Set Up Target Mapping
Setting up Target Mapping involves several key steps, each critical to ensuring your campaigns are not only personalized but if wrong target mapping is used workflow will end up in error.
Step 1: Create a Custom Recipient Table
Before mapping can occur, you need to have a custom recipient table set up. This table will hold the profiles or audience data that you plan to target.
Step 2: Define Your Target Mapping
Once your custom recipient table is in place, you can proceed to define your target mapping in Adobe Campaign. This involves linking the specific fields in your recipient table to the relevant fields in your audience segment.
To create a new target mapping you need to navigate to:
Administration -> Campaign Management ->Target Mappings
Create a new target mapping and select the table, or a related table, from which you want to send emails from.
Next, you need to tell Adobe Campaign where to find the fields used for sending messages on a particular channel.
If necessary, you can use the expression builder to harmonize fields, transform values, or align data formats before they are used in deliveries.
Step 3: Amend denylisting mapping
The Denylisting section in a target mapping defines which fields Adobe Campaign should use to determine whether a profile is allowed to receive communications on each channel. For every channel (email, SMS, phone, fax, direct mail), you can map a specific denylist indicator, or use an expression to unify different blacklist fields. For example, the expression Iif(@blackList != 0, 1, @blackListEmail) ensures that if a profile is globally blacklisted, Adobe Campaign blocks all channels, otherwise it falls back to the channel-specific blacklist field. These settings help maintain compliance and prevent sending messages to profiles who opted out or must not be contacted.
Step 4 (Optional): Set the fields to store in the delivery tracking log
In this step, you can choose which additional fields from your target should be saved in the delivery tracking log. These fields become part of the permanent record for each message sent, allowing you to analyze results more effectively, enrich reporting, and troubleshoot delivery issues.
This feature is especially useful when you want to store contextual data such as client contract details, order IDs, customer segment identifiers, or any other business-specific attributes that help you understand the impact of your campaigns. By storing these values directly in the delivery log, you ensure that all relevant information is preserved even if the underlying profile data changes later.
Step 5: Test and Use the Target Mapping Feature
To use the target mapping in your marketing campaigns, navigate to the Target Mapping section within the delivery template To settings. Then select the appropriate target mapping for that template. When building queries or workflows, make sure your selection criteria use the correct targeting dimension associated with that target mapping. This ensures that Adobe Campaign selects the right audience and can correctly send emails or other channel messages.
You can easily test your configuration by sending proofs. If something is not set up correctly, the delivery activity will fail, allowing you to identify and fix issues before sending the final campaign.
Sources and References
- https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/campaign-classic/using/configuring-campaign-classic/use-a-custom-recipient-table/target-mapping
- https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/campaign/campaign-v8/audience/add-profiles/target-mappings
