AJO messages learned to think like Adobe Target
AJO is the channel marketers already trust to get every communication right — email, push, and SMS, orchestrated from one place. Adobe Target, meanwhile, has been the brain behind your best on-site moments — the right offer, the right visitor, the right second. That intelligence used to stop the instant someone left your site. Not anymore: AJO can now reach out mid-send, pull that same targeting logic straight from Target's Delivery API, and carry it into an email, a push notification, or an SMS — so the trust you've built on-site travels with every message AJO sends.
Most teams have solved this the hard way before: rebuilding the recommendation logic inside the messaging tool, keeping two systems in sync by hand, and hoping the "top pick" in tonight's email actually matches what's live on the homepage. AJO closes that gap with Integrations — connect the Target Delivery API once, and any message template can call it at send time. The smartwatch a shopper almost bought yesterday shows up, correctly priced and in stock, in tonight's cart-abandonment email.
Under the hood
It's really just one helper function doing the heavy lifting: externalDataLookup calls the configured Target integration and pulls back the full response in a single request — no extra round trips, no matter how many fields you end up using.
{{externalDataLookup integrationName="target_recommendations" result="targetResponse"}}Everything after that is just local parsing — pulling out the mbox you need, unpacking its JSON if that's the format, extracting exactly what you want to render.
If Target instead hands back ready-made HTML, skip the parsing step and render it as-is with triple braces — so your markup comes through instead of an escaped string.
The result: that almost-bought smartwatch doesn't need a separate campaign built around it. The same intelligence that surfaced it on your homepage now decides what shows up in tonight's email too — no marketer touching a line of code, no engineer maintaining a second pipeline just to keep the two in sync.
Already piping Target into AJO messages? What's the use case — recommendations, dynamic pricing, urgency banners? And if it's not Target for you, what's the system you'd want AJO calling instead? Drop it in the comments.