Enhancing automotive CRM with Knak and Adobe technologies: A two-workflow approach

Jay Proulx

Enhancing automotive CRM with Knak and Adobe technologies: A two-workflow approach

The automotive industry is rapidly evolving, and personalized customer communication is more important than ever. To meet these demands, leveraging the right combination of marketing technologies is crucial.

Adobe's powerful suite of tools can be integrated with Knak, an intuitive email and landing page creation platform, to deliver impactful customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns that speak directly to your customers—whether through scheduled push communications or hyper-personalized journeys.

This article explores how Knak and Adobe technologies can work together to optimize automotive CRM use cases, focusing on two types of creative production workflows:

Regular batch communications, such as model year changeover (MYCO) announcements, service reminders, or promotional campaigns.
Behavioral-based journeys, where customer actions trigger personalized responses.

Primary use cases and capabilities of Knak, AJO, Campaign, and Marketo

Knak, Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Marketo Engage each play a crucial role in driving effective CRM for automotive brands.

Knak: Knak is a complete creative platform that empowers marketing teams to quickly create high-quality, branded emails and landing pages. The user-friendly, drag-and-drop editor enables teams to produce sophisticated content without requiring extensive technical knowledge. Additionally, Knak allows users to build and customize emails and landing pages directly within the platform, eliminating the need to log in to separate automation tools.
AJO: AJO excels at orchestrating real-time, personalized journeys based on customer behaviors. It utilizes decision management to adapt content dynamically, allowing brands to respond to individual customer signals, such as online interactions or in-store activities.
Adobe Campaign: Adobe Campaign is designed for managing complex marketing campaigns, particularly those that involve large-scale email sends and other batch communications. It excels in segmentation, personalization, and automation, enabling marketers to deliver the right message to the right audience effectively.
Marketo: Marketo is a comprehensive marketing automation tool that not only supports large-scale targeted and personalized sends but also offers advanced nurturing and lead management processes. It excels in content personalization and marketing workflows, engaging customers across various stages of the buying journey with precision and efficiency.

Push communications: Leveraging Knak with Adobe Campaign and Marketo

When it comes to batch communications, automotive brands often use Adobe Campaign or Marketo to execute their CRM strategy. These campaigns include large-scale events like MYCO, seasonal offers, new car launches, and reminders for routine services. The goal is to reach a broad audience, ensuring customers receive timely information on the latest developments that matter to them.

In this workflow, Knak plays an integral role in simplifying the creative production process. It empowers marketing teams to quickly develop fully branded, engaging content that integrates seamlessly with Adobe Campaign or Marketo for deployment. Here’s how the process looks:

Content creation: Knak allows creative teams to build sophisticated email campaigns with no technical knowledge. Knak’s completely no-code, easy drag-and-drop capabilities, and predefined templates accelerate content creation while ensuring branding consistency. Focused on the entire creation process, including quality checks, collaboration, approvals and translations, Knak makes content creation streamlined and efficient, enabling teams to quickly produce and deliver high-quality content at scale without bottlenecks or delays.
Seamless integration: Once content is ready, it can be pushed into Adobe Campaign or Marketo. From there, it is distributed to segmented audiences—whether they are potential buyers awaiting new model announcements or existing customers due for service reminders.
Efficiency and scalability: The streamlined integration between Knak and Adobe solutions significantly reduces production time, allowing automotive brands to quickly react to key milestones like MYCO or annual sales events.

Journey orchestration: Knak and AJO for hyper-personalized experiences

In this customer-centric automotive market, it’s not enough to simply push content out—automotive brands need to create personalized journeys that adapt to individual customer behaviors. This is where Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) comes into play.

With AJO, you can build sophisticated, real-time customer journeys that are triggered by specific behaviors or events, such as a customer configuring a car online, browsing a dealership website, or completing a test drive. Knak enhances this workflow by providing creative assets that AJO can use to create tailored experiences.

Here’s how the creative production workflow unfolds:

Content development in Knak: As with batch messaging, Knak is used to develop high-quality content that aligns with brand standards. This content can be tailored to specific customer journey stages, ensuring messaging is both relevant and engaging.
Orchestration with AJO: Once the creative assets are ready, they are pushed to AJO, where they become part of an orchestrated journey. Here, AJO’s decision management capabilities shine, selecting offers based on customer preferences and behaviors. While Knak does not currently support direct offer placements, it provides email templates into which AJO can populate relevant offers, such as personalized promotions or localized content tailored to customer browsing history.
Dynamic decision management: A key differentiator is AJO’s ability to make real-time decisions based on incoming signals. While Knak provides the creative content, AJO’s decision engine enriches the journey by dynamically adapting elements like offers, imagery, and calls to action based on each customer's profile and behaviors. This means if a customer is interested in leasing rather than buying, the creative content populated into the journey will reflect that preference.

Automotive use cases: Bringing it all together

Consider the following examples of how Knak and Adobe technologies can enhance automotive CRM workflows:

MYCO campaigns: Every year, car manufacturers update their models, and MYCO is a critical touchpoint to announce these changes. Using Knak to create fully branded content and leveraging Adobe Campaign or Marketo for deployment ensures consistency and speed across markets.
Service reminders: Batch reminders can be set up for routine maintenance or recalls. With Knak providing pre-approved, tested, bulletproof templates, these reminders can be distributed through Adobe Campaign, ensuring a consistent look and feel while easily accommodating personalization fields for the customer’s vehicle model and service history.
Personalized offers triggered by digital behavior: If a customer has recently explored financing options on the brand’s website, AJO can trigger a personalized email, created in and enriched with content from Knak, that speaks directly to their interests—whether it’s a special lease offer or an invitation to schedule a test drive.
Test drive follow-up journeys: After a customer completes a test drive, AJO can initiate a journey that includes Knak-created emails, personalized to thank the customer, provide additional resources (e.g., brochures or videos), and even offer incentives for the next step, such as meeting with a sales advisor.

The bottom line

Integrating Knak with Adobe’s CRM technologies provides a powerful toolkit for automotive brands to elevate both push and journey-based customer communications. By leveraging Knak for seamless content creation and Adobe’s Campaign, Marketo, and Journey Optimizer for distribution and personalization, automotive marketers can ensure they deliver timely, relevant, and engaging messages at every customer touchpoint.

Whether it’s a mass communication like MYCO or a hyper-personalized journey triggered by customer behavior, this tech stack helps brands build meaningful relationships with customers while streamlining the creative and operational processes.

Ready to explore how Knak and Adobe can transform your automotive CRM strategy? Contact us to schedule a call—we’re excited to help you drive forward.