Consumers have more ways to interact with brands online than ever, but email continues to be the go-to medium for many. A recent survey from Adobe Systems Inc. saw half the respondents say they prefer to have offers sent to their inboxes.

To help marketers use this channel more effectively, the company today introduced new capabilities designed to automate outreach efforts. They are set to roll out for its Adobe Campaign email marketing platform.

The most significant part of the announcement is a pair of experimental tools currently undergoing development at Adobe’s research division. The first uses Sensei, the collection of machine learning features the company provides in its cloud services, to determine the best times to send messages. After a marketer sets the start and end dates for a campaign, the tool automatically decides when to distribute the individual emails.

The other experimental capability focuses on increasing consumers’ engagement with messages once they arrive in their inboxes. Adobe said that the tool can measure how much time passes before users open a promotion, as well as provide insight into ways of improving campaign performance.

The company didn’t divulge when the two features can be expected to roll out. Adobe unveiled them alongside a number of other, more fully baked capabilities for Adobe Campaign that should become available in the more foreseeable future.

Chief among them is a new email creator that provides a drag-and-drop interface for crafting message layouts. Users can design emails using templates or from scratch by importing visual assets their companies store in other Adobe services such as Dreamweaver CC. Adobe Campaign will also support Dropbox through a connector expected to arrive later this year.

Adobe has been adding more external integrations lately in a bid to better support enterprise workers. In June, the company introduced the ability to use Adobe Acrobat directly inside Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365 and brought its Sign e-signature service to the Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning suite.

Image: Pixabay