Guided campaign builder for non-technical email marketers

The moment someone realizes they have a problem is when they've been handed an Adobe Campaign or similar enterprise tool by IT and are expected to run campaigns — but every action requires knowing which menu, which sequence, and which data manipulation step to do first. Users describe it as 'not a quick simple setup' and say it 'requires too much resources for maintenance and administration.' The tool assumes you already know what you're doing.

The gap persists because enterprise marketing automation is sold to IT and marketing leadership, not to the campaign managers who use it daily. The vendor's training materials are certification-track courses designed for consultants, not for the marketer who needs to send a birthday email series by Thursday. There's no incentive for the vendor to ship a simpler interface because simplicity would commoditize the product and undercut the professional services ecosystem built around it.

Users specifically ask for 'more tutorials' and say features 'need heavy customization for optimal performance' — which means the gap isn't just in the UI, it's in the hand-holding layer between intent ('I want to send a re-engagement series to lapsed customers') and execution (the 11-step workflow configuration required to do it). That translation layer doesn't exist anywhere in the current tooling.

This is a recurring business because campaign types are finite but the people running them turn over constantly. Every new marketing hire at a company using one of these tools faces the same onboarding cliff. And as companies add new campaign types — seasonal, behavioral, transactional — the complexity grows. A guided builder that encodes best-practice templates for common campaign patterns would be used weekly, not once.

What to build

Build a campaign intent layer that sits in front of Adobe Campaign's API: a marketer describes what they want to achieve (re-engagement, welcome series, post-purchase follow-up) using plain-language inputs and a structured form, and the system generates the correct Adobe Campaign workflow XML, audience query, and channel configuration — which the marketer reviews and deploys without touching the native interface.

Where to start

Start with one campaign type — welcome series for new contacts — and find 10 companies whose marketing team has expressed frustration with their Adobe Campaign onboarding in communities like MarTech Alliance or LinkedIn groups, offering to set up that one workflow for free in exchange for structured feedback on the guided input experience.

The hard part

Adobe Campaign's workflow XML schema is complex and version-specific, so generating valid deployable configurations across different client environments (hosted vs. on-premise, v7 vs. Standard) requires significant upfront investment in schema handling before you can ship anything a real customer would trust to run on their list.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per seat for marketing team members who use the guided builder, priced around $99–199/user/month — justified against the alternative of a consulting engagement every time the team needs a new campaign type built.