See how a retailer uses agentic campaigns and agentic content to plan, launch, and optimize a 30-day marketing campaign.
This use case walks through how Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), a retailer of outdoor gear and apparel, uses Campaign Agent capabilities to launch a Fall Hiking Collection campaign. The scenario shows the three capabilities working together end-to-end.
- Agentic campaigns—the marketing manager describes the campaign goal, message budget, and channel strategy in natural language. The agent builds the campaign, routes it for approval, and optimizes send performance after launch.
- Agentic content—the marketing manager generates on-brand email and SMS content by using a brief and uploaded product assets.
Scenario
NTO wants to drive $150,000 in orders for its new hiking boots and jackets over 30 days, with a $12,000 message budget across email and SMS. At the same time, NTO has two other active campaigns — a loyalty program re-engagement campaign and a clearance sale campaign—running against an overlapping customer base. The marketing team needs a way to reach the right customers without over-messaging them across all three campaigns.
Three team members are involved.
- Priya, Marketing Cloud Admin—completes org setup before the marketing manager builds the campaign.
- Jordan, Marketing Manager—generates content and builds the campaign.
- Sam, Marketing VP—reviews and approves the campaign before it goes live.
Step 1: Admin Completes Org Setup
Priya confirms that the prerequisites are in place for the NTO org.
- Marketing Cloud Next Advanced edition and Data 360 are enabled, with the data graph configured.
- Agentforce is enabled, which unlocks agentic capabilities.
Priya then completes a one-time agentic campaign configuration.
- Priya sets up the NTO Retail business unit in agentic campaigns setup, which creates the default campaign approval flow.
- Priya configures message budget for email and SMS and enables the Orders business goal that Jordan will use.
- Priya edits the campaign plan approval flow in Flow Builder to route approvals to Sam via Slack.
- Priya sets a frequency cap of 2 campaigns per 7 days across email and SMS for adaptive campaign audience arbitration. This cap protects customers from competing messages across NTO's active campaigns.
- Priya confirms that the content personalization and agentic campaigns data graphs are configured in Data 360. The content personalization data graph ensures that agentic content can personalize generated email and SMS content with merge fields such as first name. To successfully use agentic campaigns, the agentic campaigns data graph setup is required.
Step 2: Marketing Manager Generates Content
Jordan opens the Agentic Content tab in the Marketing app and creates a workspace.
- Brand: Jordan selects the Northern Trail Outfitters brand, which defines NTO's visual identity and brand voice.
- Brief: Jordan creates a brief named "Fall Hiking Collection Launch" with a goal of driving orders, a KPI of $150,000 in attributed order revenue over 30 days, a "Shop the Collection" call to action, and guardrails that block price or competitor comparisons.
- Assets: Jordan uploads product photography for the boots and jackets, plus the NTO logo.
Jordan enters a prompt that describes the email and SMS to generate, specifying the brand, assets, product focus, visual style, and hero image. Agentic content generates a draft email with a hero image, product grid, and call-to-action button, and a draft SMS message.
Jordan refines the drafts by prompting the agent to shorten the SMS and generate a second email variant with a different hero image. After reviewing both variants for brand compliance, accessibility, and personalization, Jordan publishes them to Salesforce CMS, where they're available to use in the campaign.
Step 3: Marketing Manager Builds the Campaign
Jordan opens the Campaigns tab and clicks Build Agentic Campaign. Jordan connects the brief created in the previous step and selects the NTO Retail business unit.
Jordan describes the campaign in the natural-language prompt: drive a 30-day order campaign for the Fall Hiking Collection, with a $150,000 orders goal, a $12,000 total message budget, and SMS limited to no more than 20% of total spend.
After the agent generates a campaign draft, Jordan configures the remaining details.
- Audience: Jordan selects a segment as the audience entry point. Adaptive campaign audiences ensures every customer in this segment is also evaluated against NTO's other active campaigns before being assigned.
- Content: Jordan selects the agentic content workspace and adds both email variants and the SMS message as content variants.
Jordan reviews the campaign summary that includes goal, message budget, channels, variants, and audience, then sends the campaign for approval. Sam receives a Slack approval request, reviews the campaign details, and approves it. The campaign is automatically created and published.
Step 4: Adaptive Campaign Audiences Assigns Customers
After the campaign is active, Adaptive campaign audiences runs its arbitration process four times a day. Each run follows this sequence.
- Find eligible customers. The system pulls NTO customers who match the campaign's eligibility criteria, evaluating a subset for each run to give all active campaigns fair coverage.
- Group by behavior. Customers are clustered by patterns including purchase recency and frequency, email and SMS engagement, browsing behavior, and lifecycle stage.
- Rank campaigns for each group. The AI model ranks active campaigns for each behavioral cluster. For example, the "recently engaged repeat purchasers" cluster ranks the Fall Hiking Collection campaign highest because their behavior aligns with a new-collection order goal, not the clearance sale.
- Make assignments. Customers with available capacity under the 2-campaigns-per-7-days cap are added to the campaign in rank order. Customers who are a strong fit for both this campaign and the loyalty re-engagement campaign receive only the higher-ranked message.
- Activate automatically. Assigned customers enter the campaign flow and receive the email or SMS variant. Engagement data feeds back into each customer's profile to refine future assignment rounds.
Step 5: Marketing Manager Monitors Campaign Performance
Throughout the 30-day campaign, Jordan monitors progress on the campaign insights dashboard. Key signals include goal pacing, message budget spend, channel split, and the success forecast score.
Jordan sees a rebalance notification: the agent shifted send weight away from Email Variant B (lower click-through rate) toward Email Variant A and SMS, based on early engagement signals. Jordan doesn't make any manual changes. The agent adjusts the allocation automatically.
Jordan can also see the total audience evaluated, how many customers were held back due to frequency caps, and how much competition came from the other active NTO campaigns. This information confirms that adaptive campaign audiences is preventing overlap with the loyalty and clearance campaigns.
Outcome
The Fall Hiking Collection campaign reaches its $150,000 orders goal within the 30-day window and stays within the message budget. Each capability contributed a distinct result.
- Agentic content produced on-brand, personalized email and SMS variants from a brief and uploaded assets, with built-in brand and accessibility review.
- Agentic campaigns turned a natural-language description into a complete campaign, optimized channel and variant allocation in real time, and handled the approval workflow automatically.
- Adaptive campaign audiences prevented over-messaging by ensuring each customer received only the campaign message they were most likely to engage with, protecting the customer experience across all of NTO's active campaigns.
- Insights provide near real-time updates about how the agent is adjusting the campaign to optimize toward the goal.