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Oracle named a leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs for the ...

Bryan Finfrock — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 13:51:58 +0000

Oracle is honored once again to be named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. This category only includes solutions that support a broad array of criteria like marketing responsiveness, marketing execution, and customer experience. The evaluation assessed 20 vendors across completeness of vision and ability to execute. This is the fourth consecutive time Oracle has been named a Leader in this competitive landscape.

A growing collection of AI for marketers

Customer retention is a big theme for marketers in 2021. According to a recent Ketchum survey, "a majority (62%) of Americans expect that their brand preferences will change permanently before the pandemic ends." As a result, marketers are concentrating on ways to improve engagement and reduce churn. Recent enhancements in Advanced Intelligence for Oracle Responsys help marketers improve customer experience by offering intelligent segmentation which addresses message saturation, leading to greater customer lifetime value.

Additional innovations help marketers become more agile. For example, we also use machine learning to enable marketers to offer personalized product recommendations and predict the results of customer journeys before they go live.

Easily test customer reactions to personalized messages

As customer expectations rapidly evolve, more marketers are taking advantage of Responsys features like automated winner selection to drive testing programs in “hands-free” mode, and the ability to understand customers better with multivariate testing for up to eight variations for email and push.

The Intelligent Switch uses machine learning to do the testing for you, and chooses the best channel, campaign, and send time for each individual. These are just a few of the ways that we’re continuously seeking to make it easy for marketers to test consumer reactions to webpage personalization, email and push campaigns, or loyalty engagements.

Simplifying customer experiences

Sophistication doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with simplicity, often forcing marketers to choose one or the other. We work hard so that marketers don’t have to make that choice.

The new Redwood user interface in Responsys offers more intuitive workflows and processes to help marketers accomplish more—teams can collaborate effectively and avoid errors with an object relationship navigator that highlights a campaign element that is reused in multiple campaigns. Personalization is easier with drag-and-drop widgets that allow marketers to include content from Pinterest or a barcode for a coupon without writing specialized code.

Oracle Marketing makes it possible for you to make every customer interaction matter.

To learn more about Oracle and our recognition as a Leader, access the full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs.

Or, if you’re a marketer looking for a partner to help you take your customer experiences to the next level, please let us know how we can help.

Need to create email marketing campaigns quickly? Try an Agile approach

Magan Le — Mon, 31 May 2021 15:45:00 +0000

Email marketers are constantly asked to do more with less. So, how do you increase campaign frequency and put more advanced email techniques into practice without reducing quality? One way to address both challenges is by adopting an Agile email marketing process. Originally designed to accelerate software development, applying an Agile methodology to email marketing can boost efficiency and leave more time for strategy.

Traditional campaign development workflows are linear. First you strategize, then write copy, get feedback, and finalize assets—all before building out the actual email campaign. This process prevents the majority of email teams from shipping campaigns in less than two weeks, according to our recent State of Email Report.

Agile email marketing, however, allows teams to work on different parts of a project in parallel. Instead of making your developers wait a week for final copy and graphics, they can build campaign wireframes based on in-progress drafts.

Inside our Agile process

Agile email marketing breaks down large tasks into smaller ones and incorporates reusable tools and templates to create more efficient workflows. Here’s how we apply Agile practices for email production—the actual writing, designing, and coding of emails.

Create content

Unlike static planning documents that don’t include the actual content deliverables (and often aren’t referred to after kick-off meetings), our email briefs combine campaign objectives and tactical updates, including copy revisions. We share campaign briefs with the team during early campaign planning and add details as it progresses. Our email brief and planning template includes:

The campaign goal, targeted personas, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Relevant URLs and tracking information
Sender information
Subject lines and preview text
Campaign body copy

By centralizing campaign information and sharing it with everyone on the project, multiple team members can work on different campaign elements in tandem. The content team collaborates on copy in the document while designers use the brief to develop graphics in parallel. Also at the same time, the demand generation team sets up landing pages and implements tracking capabilities while other materials are reviewed.

Shared design tools are similarly helpful. We use Figma for design work, which enables multiple graphic designers to work in the same file. It allows developers to pull out assets needed for coding, and we have shared libraries for photography and iconography to simplify access to core brand imagery.

Develop and code

Developing email campaigns—the actual production of coded emails—can be time-consuming if you start each email from scratch. That’s why we rely heavily on a software library to accelerate development.

Templates, snippets, and partials—collected in Litmus’ Design Library—allow us to build emails from a common structure and enable developers to swap content and components for each campaign rapidly. Here’s how they work:

Templates are fully coded emails that are pre-tested for optimal rendering across email clients. Each template has a specific purpose (e.g., transactional, promotional, etc.).
Snippets are smaller bits of code that can be pulled into an email and customized for that email. We use snippets for everything from article sections to CTAs.
Partials are similar to snippets because they both are specific email modules. But partials are universally consistent across all campaigns and aren’t customized for individual emails like snippets. We use them for email parts that change infrequently, like our header, logo, and footer information.

Templates and modular email development can enable non-developers to create campaigns. Additionally, WYSIWYG editors like Visual Editor inside of Litmus Builder let anyone build campaigns without coding experience.

Agile email marketing is empowered email marketing

The Agile email marketing methodology emphasizes testing small updates quickly and learning along the way. By breaking down traditional email processes, simplifying each step, and adopting more efficient tools and techniques, you can do more with less and rapidly adapt to market changes.

These changes can create a better experience for your team and your subscribers. For additional tips and insights, download our Agile email marketing ebook.

For more information about email marketing, check out:

Email marketing deep-dive: What is a transactional email?

Chad S. White — Fri, 28 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This question is more challenging than you think. And how a company answers it has a major impact on the size of the audience it’s able to reach with that message.

That’s because transactional messages can be sent to all customers for whom you have email addresses. This includes those who haven’t opted in to receive your promotional messages, as well as those who have unsubscribed from receiving your promotional emails. Under the United States’ anti-spam law, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act, these emails also don’t need to include an unsubscribe link.

But be sure to properly identify your emails as transactional because CAN-SPAM, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can impose hefty fines if a company falsely sends promotional emails as transactional.

Let’s start with a closer look at what these laws say.

How laws define transactional emails

While their definitions vary slightly, generally speaking, CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR define transactional messages as necessary:

To complete a transaction or facilitate an ongoing subscription or membership.
For the performance of a contract or compliance with a legal obligation.
As part of an employment relationship.
To alert recipients to safety and security issues related to their purchase or account.
For “relationship messaging” or for the communication of “legitimate interests.”

That umbrella covers a wide range of messaging that’s necessary for your email marketing and cross-channel strategies, including purchase receipts, shipping and delivery notifications, and much more.

However, many companies mistakenly believe that umbrella covers other types of messages that don’t actually qualify. Much of the confusion stems from the “relationship messaging” referred to in CAN-SPAM and the “legitimate interests” clause in GDPR. Another thing that can make the lines even fuzzier: mixed messages.

‘Mixed messages’

Businesses know a 100% promotional email when they see one, but what if you add a little promotional content to a transactional email? Is it still considered transactional?

Here, the laws offer fairly clear guidance, says Heather Goff, Strategic Director of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting.

“CAN-SPAM allows for ‘mixed messages’,” she says, “and marketers have generated great results by adding cross-sell messaging to their transactional messages. With open rates on transactional messages being exceptionally high—25-35% or higher on average based on our experience with clients—the opportunities to upsell or cross-sell are much higher and more profitable.”

Brian Sullivan, Strategy Director of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting, adds that while promotional content can be included in a transactional message, the primary purpose of the message must be transactional. To avoid overdoing it on the promotional content, he recommends:

Focusing the subject line 100% on the transactional content.
Always positioning promotional content after the transactional content.
Limiting promotional content to no more than 20% of the total email content.

While the U.S. allows mixed messages, Canada does not, says Goff. “CASL has a zero tolerance for any content that has a purpose of garnering more commerce or profit within transactional messages. Senders can only include details about the specific transaction. And if they chose to include a navigation bar, for example, the message might be considered commercial and have to be sent as promotional.” Plus, CASL requires senders to have a promotional email unsubscribe link in transactional messages.

How email marketing experts define transactional emails

With CAN-SPAM allowing mixed messages and the term “relationship messages” being part of the legal definitions, it’s no wonder some companies struggle to properly identify their transactional messages.

To hopefully bring some clarity to things, here’s how our consultants talk about transactional emails with our clients:

“If you’re wondering if a message is transactional,” says Daniel Deneweth, Head of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting, “ask yourself this: Would a person call to complain or separately request the information if they didn’t receive the email message?”

That’s the very definition of critical and essential messaging, which is the spirit of what a transactional email is supposed to be.

Goff suggests to her clients marketing inside the U.S. to ask themselves if a “recipient reasonably interpreting” the email would think it was transactional. That’s how CAN-SPAM talks about mixed messages. “In the U.S., brands must strike a balance with transactional messages between tapping the sales potential of these emails and the risk of legal action,” she says. “If a reasonable recipient doesn’t feel a message is transactional, it most likely isn’t.”

Don’t let that definition give you false comfort because consumer expectations for email marketing have shifted dramatically over time. After all, over the past two decades, consumers have expanded the definition of spam to include email they no longer want from brands for which they opted in to receive promotional messages.

Which messages are most often misclassified as transactional

While companies correctly classify most of their messages as either promotional or transactional, some messages routinely mix them up. Here are some promotional messages that our consultants have found routinely misclassified as transactional:

Abandonment triggers. These messages are triggered when a person abandons a web session, shopping cart, or checkout process.

Welcome messages. When someone signs up to receive promotional campaigns from a brand, the welcome message that follows is by its very nature promotional—or at least it should be. These welcomes should be asking subscribers to do something that’s high-value, not simply confirming that they signed up successfully.

Product review requests. While this clearly is about a transaction, there’s little to no benefit to the customer, and it’s not required to complete a transaction. These emails are promotional.

Short-supply, re-order, and replenishment campaigns. While these are triggered based on a past purchase and how much time it takes for the consumable product to be used up, the purpose of these campaigns is to generate additional sales, not to service the previous sale.

“Often, the reason to send those emails as transactional is to avoid including an unsubscribe link in order to reduce list attrition,” says Sullivan. “This can have the opposite effect, aggravating users who want to opt out of promotional messages, forcing them to use the complaint button in the absence of an unsubscribe link. And if there’s any chance a message could be legally ruled as promotional when it was sent as transactional, the fines can be significant.”

A list of common transactional emails

While some transactional emails are broadcast, many are triggered. Transactional emails are well represented in our Automated Campaign Ideas to Explore checklist. In fact, 50 of the more than 110 automated campaigns identified in the checklist are transactional, each of which are flagged with an asterisk.

Use that checklist to help build out your automated campaigns within Oracle Responsys, which gives you powerful and intelligent tools to help you react to your customers’ behaviors and guide them along their customer journeys.

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Need help with your transactional emails or other email marketing needs? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a Database Management & Compliance Services team to help you follow the law and a Campaign Automation Services team to help you optimize your triggered campaigns. To learn more, reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.

3 ways retailers can build customer loyalty through a frictionless and flexible approach

Brigitte Yuille — Wed, 26 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Consumers’ choices and expectations are changing due to shifts in their shopping behaviors. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, a McKinsey report found that three out of four consumers changed stores and brands. They spent less money on discretionary items like clothing and more on “essentials” like home furnishings. The same report also noted that half of consumers plan to continue their new habits, such as restaurant curbside pickup.

Keeping this in mind, consider rewarding consumers for their new shopping behaviors and preferences by trying these three approaches to customer loyalty.

1. Maximize engagement with a data-driven, cross-channel strategy

Recognize and reward customers through multichannel marketing using tools and processes to analyze customers and their behaviors. For example, collect customer data across all touchpoints and channels by adopting a loyalty program like Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement. These programs reward customers when they buy from a brand in store and online and complete engagement activities, such as surveys.

Also, enhance the mobile experience. The use of mobile devices grew during the height of the global health pandemic in 2020, which presented retailers with a huge opportunity. A June 2020 Ericsson Mobility Report noted that the time people spent connected to mobile broadband went up an average of an hour per day based on a survey of smartphone users from 11 different countries. When you make your customer loyalty program accessible via mobile, you can reach customers on a device they’re already using, which makes it easier and more convenient for them to participate and engage with your brand. Take a look at what Vitamix did.

2. Highly personalize experiences to boost customer loyalty

BCG and Google recently conducted a customer survey in which respondents shared that they were 110% more likely to add additional items to their baskets and 40% more likely to spend more than they planned if they had a highly personalized shopping experience. When asked to rate a particular retailer, customers ranked companies 20% higher when the level of personalization was high vs. low. Popular brands like cosmetic company tarte realized the value of this when analyzing their loyalty program data: repeat clients made up a fifth of their customer base and about half of their revenue.

Brands that map out the customer journey can create highly personalized customer experiences. This initial step may help you figure out key touchpoints for your customers as well as identify how you can customize each interaction to minimize friction and add value. Focus on a new customer’s journey so you can shape your brand’s messaging and offer strategies early to build long-term loyalty. Analyze shifts you notice with ongoing customers so you can try a new, creative approach.

Consider mapping out how you can apply the loyalty program data you collected to every customer interaction to create highly personalized customer experiences. Fill the gap left by traditional in-person experiences during this time of social distancing and innovate ways to connect with shoppers and recreate in-store experiences. For instance, augmented reality can give consumers the chance to interact with products they are assessing, and online chat can help fill the void of in-person interactions.

3. Map the customer experience throughout the journey

Identify the pain points you’ll need to solve throughout the customer journey by determining what customers think and feel—in addition to what they are doing at each step. According to Wharton Baker Retailing Center and WisePlum, customers who experienced problems while shopping were 35% less loyal than those who conducted business problem-free. Leading retailers aim to solve pain points by providing convenience and an incentive to spend more and purchase more frequently. For this reason, consider offering contactless return policies and extending support channels across phone, email, and social media.

In addition, subscription-based models can give customers the opportunity to obtain greater value and convenience from a brand through exclusive benefits like free shipping. These are perks that you can either offer for free or at a premium to loyalty members in exchange for signing up and spending with the brand. Both loyalty programs and subscription-based models provide retailers the opportunity to collect insights over time to help inform their acquisition and retention strategies.

Building customer loyalty involves thoughtful and positive customer interactions at each touchpoint throughout their purchasing journey. When you design and implement activities that build customer loyalty, incorporate data, strategy, and optimization, you will likely see a return on your investment.

Discover more ways to adjust to changes within the retail industry in a competitive landscape.

Personalize customer experiences in real-time with Oracle Infinity Behavioral Intelligence

Dave Stark — Tue, 25 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The customer experience (CX) professional’s imperative

What’s a CX professional supposed to do? Focus on the customer. Create delightful experiences for them. Personalize those experiences. Send relevant and helpful messages––and send them at the right time. But don’t send too many. Automate it all. And do it now.

These things help us get the customer experience right and make every customer interaction matter. This is easier said than done, and disconnected data leads to fragmented customer experiences including: misaligned marketing and service organizations, broken fulfillment processes, and unmet customer expectations.

Connecting the data dots

Connected data, on the other hand, helps provide personalized experiences that are authentic, context-aware, and empathetic. That’s why Oracle Advertising and CX is bringing together customer data and processes to provide exceptional experiences across marketing, sales, service, commerce, and advertising. You get a complete view of every customer interaction, no matter how, when, or where they engage. And use that information and insight to deliver the right message at each touchpoint and deliver great customer experiences.

Personalize your customer interactions in-flight

In our latest quarterly Innovation Showcase, we show how to apply intelligence to your data by capturing relevant context and making your customers feel engaged and loyal from each interaction. Within marketing, we highlighted two innovations, one of which we’ll focus on: real-time intelligence and personalization with Oracle Infinity Behavioral Intelligence.

Oracle Infinity makes it easy for marketers to turn behavioral data into action and deliver relevant customer experiences quickly and with self-serve use—requiring less IT involvement. Customer behavioral data is streamed into Oracle Infinity, then artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning derive intelligence from that data.

Next, intelligence and customer data is sent in milliseconds for activation, for instance delivering a personalized in-session website experience through Oracle Infinity or personalized emails through your marketing automation or campaign management systems. Oracle Infinity also provides testing tools, including heatmaps, to determine the best website or app experiences for your customers.

Below are some examples of actions you can take to deliver personalized customer experiences.

You can then set filters and rules to deliver the right tailored experiences through the digital channel you specify.

The in-session website or app experiences and emails the customer receives can include custom real-time product, content, or offer recommendations. You can even set recommendations to only show products you specify as in-stock.

Oracle Infinity simplifies connecting the all the dots to create a seamless, unified marketing experience. Our advanced algorithms provide intelligence and streamlines use of customer behavioral data to deliver authentic, tailored customer experiences in real time.

Learn more about our recent innovations, or read blog posts covering recent updates in advertising, service, sales, and marketing.

4 commonly neglected areas to spotlight in your next email marketing audit

Sophie Haywood — Fri, 21 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your email marketing program—rushing to get the next campaign out. It’s hard work! But if you’re on auto-pilot, you might neglect several strategic and structural areas of your program. While your marketing technology stack is advancing with new features, your marketing programs might not be.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s time to conduct an audit of your email marketing stack. Here’s a checklist that can help you identify areas that may need attention.

1. Managing your martech stack

The marketing technology landscape is constantly evolving. Not only are new offerings constantly coming to the market, but all your existing technologies are evolving as well. Assess these areas:

New functionality. Are you making the best use of the features and functionality offered by your existing martech stack? At Oracle, we release new functionality and other improvements every quarter that help our customers do their jobs more easily and serve their customers better. Are you up to date on the latest releases for Oracle Responsys and Oracle Eloqua?
Functionality gaps. Do you have gaps in your current functionality? Are there third-party apps or services that can fill them?
Data availability. Is your data set up for success? Centralizing data and having the right access can help your marketing technology platform perform at a higher level.
Validating changes. Whenever you add or start using new functionality, test to validate the effectiveness of your investment and identify where other enhancements can be made.

2. Fully leveraging automation

While marketing automation is a highly effective approach to campaign management, a “set it and forget it” mindset can be costly. Your automated campaigns are living and breathing campaigns that often impact your customers for years and typically generate high returns on investment (ROI). You need to regularly check on them. Here are some areas to evaluate:

Regular quality assurance. Automated campaigns need maintenance. Otherwise, you end up with outdated copy, broken links, broken rendering, and other problems that seriously impact your customer’s experience.
Regular optimization. Broadcast and segmented email campaigns are A/B tested at much higher rates than triggered campaigns even though updates to automated campaigns have longer-lasting effects and generate higher ROIs. When optimizing your automated campaigns, consider low, medium, and high level-of-effort improvements.
Seasonal updates. Many automations can benefit from messaging and imagery changes that speak to the seasonal needs of your customers. For instance, during November and December, a retailer’s welcome email program could greet new subscribers with holiday imagery, direct them to gift-buying guides, and alert them to order-by deadlines. Consider creating a regular schedule of seasonal updates to your triggered campaigns.
New automations. Building out a stable of optimized automated campaigns adds to your competitive advantage. Should any of your existing automations be segmented? Here’s a checklist of 110+ automated campaign ideas to explore.

3. Refreshing creative and improving workflows

Anytime your company updates the look and feel of its website or mobile app, that should automatically trigger a refresh of your email marketing creative. Beyond that, it’s important to implement updates that address email’s unique challenges and cater to your email subscribers’ needs. Consider the following:

Inbox rendering changes. Inbox providers and devices are constantly evolving. Those changes can affect how your emails render and function across email clients.
Inbox rendering enhancements. In addition to keeping up with changes in code support at the various inbox providers, improve your subscriber experience with design changes that keep up with current trends. For example, optimizing email for dark mode and improving email accessibility with inclusive design are two major focal points.
A/B test design changes. Over time, campaigns need to be reviewed, assessed, and refined. Most brands do major redesigns of their emails at least every 12 months, but try to A/B test smaller changes regularly to collect insights that will inform those major redesigns.
Add more personalization. Your customers expect email content tailored to them. Whether it’s through traditional personalization or driven by machine learning or AI, adding dynamic data will generally improve performance and customer satisfaction.
Streamline email production. Having a clearly defined email development and approval process will help minimize disruptions. Having consistent and controlled templates will facilitate faster production and time to market. Many of our clients have implemented modular email architectures, which have reduced email build times for them by 25% to 40%.

4. Improving marketing performance

Your audience will change and so will their behaviors. Keep a close eye on the performance of your campaigns and segments. Review these areas:

Assess campaign performance. How are your key performance indicators like conversion rates, campaign revenue, and revenue per subscriber trending? How are your channel health indicators like opens and clicks performing year over year? If you do see problems, identify the root cause of your performance issues to put the appropriate fixes in place.
Measure audience engagement. An engaged customer is a valuable customer. Review what proportion of your database has engaged with your emails by looking at the percentage that has opened or clicked at least one of your email campaigns in the past 90, 180, 360, and 720 days. Review your strategies for managing your inactive subscribers. At what point are you suppressing your inactive contacts? How are you trying to reengage them and move your contacts up the ladder of engagement?
Messaging mix assessment. Look at what proportion of your emails are batch-and-blast broadcast emails versus segmented versus triggered and transactional. Then review the performance of those different buckets. Your triggered communications may perform better, but how much time and energy are you investing in those? Can you reallocate resources from one bucket to another?

Shining a Spotlight

This email marketing audit checklist is exactly what we follow when working with our clients. We call it a Spotlight, and we find that clients who conduct them and act on the results perform significantly better over the next year.

For example, we used this email marketing audit approach to help a global telecommunications company make better use of their Eloqua platform and start work on implementing an account-based management (ABM) strategy. The audit identified several potential improvements, entailing database hygiene, data enhancement, lead score models, and reporting. In one case, there was a lead score model that hadn’t been reviewed in more than two years. It didn’t reflect their current campaign calendar nor the increase in web-based events. We restructured that model using a persona-based approach and it identified $4.2 million worth of new opportunities in just one month.

We also worked with a financial services company to do a performance analysis across customer campaigns at different stages in their lifecycle. We identified some simple improvements, including opportunities to use existing data to personalize campaigns. In total, the changes represented an estimated additional $7 million in program revenue, which the team is currently working toward.

Those are just two examples of the compelling results you can find when you take the time to do an annual email marketing audit. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your program, but it’s important to make time for strategic reviews so you can continue to grow.

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Need help auditing your digital marketing program? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds around the world ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including Analytic & Strategic Services, Creative Services, and Performance Reporting Services teams to help you review your program, identify improvements, and help you execute them. To learn more, reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.

4 marketing innovations that will supercharge your customer experiences

Holly Simmons — Thu, 20 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Great customer experiences don’t happen on their own. And the return on investment to create them is well worth it: 80% of consumers are more likely to buy when brands create personalized experiences. Our latest innovations in data, content, and intelligence help marketers deliver more personalized experiences at scale, and by connecting these capabilities, customers can receive personalized offers when and where they want. As marketers today are increasingly tasked to do more with less, it’s paramount that their experience is easy, connected, and prescriptive.

Digital marketers need help to:

Leverage and continuously enhance customer data for micro-targeting
Centralize and optimize content creation, collaboration, and delivery
Automate personalization for real-time offers
Make the best decisions regarding campaigns and channels

Here are four highlights I’m thrilled to share from Oracle Marketing.

Future-proof customer data

At the intersection of marketing, data, and content, top marketers can segment, target, and deliver messages and offers.

They’re leveraging robust customer data platforms (CDPs), like Oracle Unity, to manage customer profiles and intelligence using data from numerous channels across the customer lifecycle. With the elimination of 3rd party cookies and mobile advertising IDs, marketers are left with an immediate need to build robust 1st party profiles and uncover ways to supplement and grow those profiles over time.

Companies can leverage solutions including Oracle DataFox or Oracle Advertising to enrich account and contact information. Identity management and resolution help marketers to connect unknown data with known profiles to ensure master profiles are up to date.

Engage beyond a single purchase

In addition to data enrichment, marketers can also engage customers and prospects through loyalty programs. For example, Oracle CrowdTwist not only contains information about customer preferences, purchase history, status, or points as part of its loyalty programs, but it also enables marketers to collect new information about customers via profiles and surveys continuously. With this rich information, marketers can better segment and target customers with personalized programs.

I’m proud to share that Forrester recently named Oracle CrowdTwist a “Leader” in The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Solutions, Q2 2021 among 14 loyalty solutions. Six CrowdTwist customers also recently made Newsweek and Statista’s list of America’s Best Loyalty Programs of 2021. This recognition demonstrates these solutions are instrumental in building comprehensive customer profiles and creating connected experiences that engage and nurture customers beyond a single transaction.

Streamline content creation

Data doesn’t work on its own. Content is key, yet it can be difficult for marketers to manage high volumes of content and videos for marketing campaigns. Today, with more focus on original and user-generated content, marketing teams are struggling to deliver consistent messaging across the entire customer journey. According to Gartner, marketing teams dedicate about 30% of their budgets to content creation.

Oracle Content Management’s advanced video creation and content management solutions enable marketers to deliver content for increased engagement easily. Our video creation capabilities provide the tools to create, edit, curate, and manage videos, scale their delivery across campaigns and channels, and reduce content creation costs.

In addition, our blog creation wizard streamlines content creation processes and workflows with a step-by-step wizard, the new content calendar to improve planning and collaboration across teams, and scheduled publishing capabilities give marketers control over when and where a piece of content gets published. With an efficient content management solution, marketers can focus on maximizing the use of their existing content by incorporating it into other channels such as email, mobile, or web, and developing content on additional mediums such as video to reach audiences in more engaging ways.

Intelligence: Personalize and prescribe outcomes

Marketers are often bogged down by the need to iterate on existing campaigns. The cycle of analyzing and editing can be extremely tedious. They need a way to get predicted results to optimize and personalize before launch.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools enable marketers to:

Predict campaign and channel results
Make informed decisions about the best content to deliver
Determine optimal frequency and cadence for your target audience
Develop lead scoring models without the need for manual tuning

Successful personalization leverages data and content and requires intelligence to help marketers deliver relevant experiences in real-time. Oracle Marketing provides marketers with the tools that predict and recommend relevant channels and offers that will achieve the best results for your audience.

To deliver the most compelling campaigns, the ability to react and iterate in real-time is crucial. Oracle’s latest innovations in intelligence enable marketers to determine the propensity for a customer to take a specific action on a site, as well as their readiness to buy. Additionally, marketers can understand the predicted outcomes of campaigns and programs before publishing, allowing you to send the most engaging campaigns and content to your audience from the start.

What’s next

By leveraging efficient, intelligent technology, marketers can quickly adapt to the evolving market conditions and deliver relevant, connected experiences for customers across the entire lifecycle. It’s time to evaluate how we’re using data, optimizing content, and adopting intelligence to create a more personalized experience for our customers.

These latest innovations help savvy marketers achieve that.

To learn more about the latest product enhancements and releases across Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, visit oracle.com/cx/innovations.

Attention cross-channel marketers: Oracle Maxymiser launches visual editor for Android

Taz Khela — Wed, 19 May 2021 15:11:00 +0000

The mobile share of global online traffic continues to outgrow that of desktop devices. Many countries across the world are already considered “mobile first,” with our pocket computers being much more accessible than tablets and desktops. With a growing number of customers interacting with businesses through handheld devices, it’s paramount to optimize your mobile app experience and craft a seamless, cross-channel marketing experience.

Oracle Maxymiser has offered Native App Testing for years for both iOS and Android. But with a recent surge in app testing and increased uptake in the use of our Software Development Kits (SDKs), we recently added Android visual editing to our portfolio, along with our visual editor for iOS.

The new Android visual editor enables marketers to easily:

Update user interface (UI) elements visually with a WYSIWYG interface
Extend a cross-channel marketing campaign using JSON code - See updates in real time on the app and within the UI
Publish and update without going through the app store process

Manual vs. no app store approach

Marketers can use the native app testing capabilities of Oracle Maxymiser to run consistent personalized experiences across both web and mobile devices, test new features and functionality to improve the in-app experience, or tailor content and offers to specific audiences. We have two approaches available:

Manual approach: This uses variants that are coded into the application and released to users through a general app store release. In this case, Maxymiser is used as a test decision and reporting engine.
No app store approach: This provides a way to build A/B tests for native apps, enabling remote updates to the app. Variants can be published from Maxymiser without requiring a new update via an app release cycle.

However, the no app store approach for both iOS and Android does come with some limitations due to the ecosystem in which apps are built. This means that code cannot be injected remotely.

Using the Oracle Maxymiser SDKs, you can modify UI elements, but let’s take a closer look at which approach might be better suited to your specific needs:

For more information regarding our SDKs, get started with these files to learn more about Native App Testing for your cross-channel marketing campaign.

4 tips to streamline content creation in Oracle Content Management

Monte Kluemper — Tue, 18 May 2021 16:01:00 +0000

Engaging experiences require fresh content. And streamlining your content creation process is important both for contributor teams who are focused on productivity and occasional users who require an intuitive interface.

Whether you're a content architect managing a multi-channel content strategy or an front-end developer responsible for a single website, involving your content contributors early in the project can make the difference between a successful content management system (CMS) launch and one mired by delays and rework.

Work with them to validate the contribution experience as you design your content model. Focus on the content they’ll have to create most often––product collateral, news articles, events, guides, stories, etc. And generally, the simpler the content model, the easier it will be for contributors to understand it and create what you need.

Once you have a first draft of your content model, take time to review it internally. Here are the areas I focus on when reviewing a content model:

Content Types: How many content types do I have (e.g., videos, images, collateral, etc.)? Is the number manageable? Would a business user understand what each one represents by its name?
Fields: How many fields does each content type have? Do they make sense? Can they be grouped?
References: How many reference fields are used to explicitly relate content items? Is there a potential to create circular references that might complicate content creation, approvals, or publishing?

Once you’re satisfied that the model makes sense functionally, create a repository and some sample content and validate the contribution experience with your business users. We offer several content management tools to help in this journey, making it easy to create the right content model and ensure that your business users can easily create the content you need for a successful project.

1. Optimize your content types

The simplest way to start optimizing your content types is to group fields. Content fields can be grouped under logical titles to give structure to the content type. For instance, if you’re modeling a product with a set of product details, you can group these fields under the title "Product Characteristics" to indicate to contributors that these fields are related. This will help when users create and edit content through the web interface.

If the information you need to model is more complex, Oracle Content Management offers an "Embedded Content" field type. An Embedded Content field allows you to store structures and lists of content elements as a single field.

Imagine we're storing information on cameras, where different product lines have varying sets of characteristics. An Embedded Content field called “Product Characteristics” would allow users to manage different sets of data for different products in a more flexible way. Another example might be an “Address” field, where the various address elements are managed together in a single field, but each element can still be styled and presented independently.

Another best practice when modeling content types is to avoid asking users to assign multiple versions of an image or videos to a content type. Oracle Content Management makes it easy for you to manage multiple renditions for the same image as a single asset. It also allows you to define custom media types, like product images (e.g., 800x800 / PNG format) versus marketing images (e.g., 400x200 / 96 dpi / JPEG format) so you use the right images for different parts of your content model.

2. Leverage taxonomies to relate content types

Taxonomies are powerful tools for organizing and relating content. They provide an alternative to reference fields when creating relationships between assets. Whereas a reference field defines a tightly coupled dependency between two assets, taxonomies support a more loosely coupled relationship between assets that can evolve over time.

Oracle Content Management allows you to create one or more taxonomies to support a multi-faceted relationship between content items. For example, a How-to article on getting the most from your new camera could simultaneously be categoried by:

One or more products in a Product Catalog Taxonomy
Multiple target audiences in an Audience Taxonomy
Specific blogs and blog topics in the Blog Taxonomy

Taxonomies reduce the need to define every relationship explicitly when creating content. For example, instead of defining related products to my camera, I can categorize it in a way that allows users to find other cameras that have been categorized similarly. I can also add taxonomy categories to digital assets like images and videos as I upload them. This instantly creates a relationship with corresponding product or products, without having to explicitly relate them to the individual products.

Taxonomies are designed to represent your business and, as such, they will likely evolve over time. Content can be categorized any number of times, even after it has been approved and published. Content management systems like Oracle’s offer native AI capabilities to make it easy to recommend and recategorize content as your taxonomies evolve.

3. Enhance the user interface with custom fields and forms

Oracle Content Management dynamically generates content creation forms based on your content model. Each field in your model can be associated with one of several predefined field editors. For instance, if you’re creating a content item for a new camera and one of the content fields is the camera brand, you might model this as a text field, and decide to associate either the Text Box editor where the contributor would type out the name of the brand or a Single Select Menu editor for users to select from among the pre-populated list of brands you sell.

For many customers, leveraging these predefined field editors is sufficient to provide an intuitive, productive interface for creating content. For more nuanced customer requirements, Oracle Content Management provides several alternatives, including custom field editors and custom forms.

Custom field editors allow you to make simple improvements to standard content forms without having to rethink the entire contribution experience. Back to cameras––you might create a custom field editor with the set of brand icons that users can click on instead of a drop-down list. Another option would be to create a Text Box field editor with autocomplete functionality. A user starting to type in a brand name, would see a list of valid brands to select from that contain the text they've written. You can find more information and sample custom field editors in our documentation.

Custom forms to create and edit form content are also available in Oracle Content Management. These are particularly useful when your content type is complex, either because of the number of fields or because you are storing JSON in Embedded Content fields. In our camera example, we might want to manage a large list of product attributes for each camera as well as text variants for different channels. Using a custom form, you can guide users through the entire creation process from start to finish.

Custom forms also allow you to incorporate dynamic feedback and help authors as they create content. For instance, a custom form could be used to give users real-time SEO analysis (e.g., read time, tag extraction, suggested links) on the text they're writing. You can find more information and a sample custom form in our documentation.

4. Create content from custom applications

Oracle Content Management offers a powerful set of Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs for creating and publishing content from any custom application on any device. And, this solution also enables you to reuse standard and custom content forms when building custom web applications leveraging the Embeddable UI capabilities (specifically, the Content Item Editor Embed UI).

With the Embed UI, you can build a custom interface that combines content creation with other user activities in a completely branded experience. You can accomplish this using a headless framework like React, the Site Builder tools that come with Oracle Content Management, or any other browser-based technology.

This is useful when building a custom interface that manages not only the content related to cameras, but also information coming from the ERP, the PIM, and other systems. Find more information on embedding the Content Item Editor in our documentation.

Why a content management system is a good investment

With a CMS like Oracle Content Management, you can incorporate user feedback to finetune your content model and contribution forms, maximizing usability and productivity for your content creators.

To learn more, watch our most recent Quarterly Update on Innovations for Advertising and CX.

4 Ways to Get Fresh Insights from Your Email List

Jason Rodriguez — Mon, 03 May 2021 12:00:00 +0000

The best way to improve your campaign performance is by understanding what your audience actually needs and wants. But getting responses from your customers can be challenging, especially if survey tools aren’t embedded in regular customer interactions. Here are four low-friction ways to get ongoing insights from your email list and subscribers.

1. Always ask for feedback

One of the simplest ways to gather consumer insight is to ask for it in every email campaign you send (and collect it properly). Whether it’s transactional or promotional, include a quick way for your email list subscribers to tell you what they think.

This could be a simple call to action (CTA) at the bottom of every email that says, “What did you think of this email? Let us know!” To make it fun, collect responses using a lightweight rating system like the one we use for our monthly Litmus newsletter.

A lightweight rating system enables quick feedback.

Giving subscribers a fast way to show their appreciation (or dissatisfaction) is a great way to gauge overall email campaign effectiveness. It’s essential to include these feedback mechanisms in every email so that subscribers get used to seeing and using them.

Regardless of how you ask for customers’ opinions, make sure that you’re actually collecting this information and responding with a personal touch. That’s why it’s so important to stop using “noreply@example.com” addresses for campaigns.

Make it clear that someone is reading their replies and acknowledge that you’ve received their feedback. Good or bad, all of this information is useful. Plus, you can use those small interactions to start larger conversations that could shape future campaigns.

2. Make feedback the star

Short, persistent surveys included in newsletters and as popups after online purchases can be effective, but can also be overlooked amid everything else on web pages or in apps.

Email, however, is the perfect medium to make getting feedback the star. We recently did this to help improve our weekly digest email, Litmus Weekly. As the lead feature in the email, we asked subscribers a simple question: “Yay or nay?” Subscribers were directed to a brief survey that asked questions like:

How often do you read our weekly digest email?
What kind of content do you want to see in the future?
What other awesome digest emails do you read?
And what specific days of the week do you prefer to read Litmus Weekly?

We used direct subscriber responses instead of only making assumptions based on email open and click-through rates to inform our Litmus Weekly testing and content strategy moving forward.

Our Litmus Weekly feedback request.

3. Simplify post-purchase surveys

Most lifecycle programs contain post-purchase survey emails. Make it even easier for customers to engage by including a response form directly in your confirmation emails. The Indiana Pacers do a good job of this. They include an embedded feedback form directly in post-game emails to ticket holders, which provides the perfect opportunity to see how satisfied they were with the experience while it’s still fresh in people’s minds.

Although interactive forms in emails don’t work universally, a growing number of email clients support this technology. And, while coding interactive emails can be new to email marketers, it’s relatively straightforward. Our Ultimate Guide to Interactive Forms in Email provides steps to code dedicated, interactive feedback emails. It also addresses basic support issues and outlines how to handle fallbacks for email clients that don’t support interactive forms.

4. Collect feedback during unsubscribes

Although it’s disappointing to see subscribers leave, it’s important to understand why. Most brands include a confirmation page or email after someone hits “unsubscribe”—but a lot miss the opportunity to use that real estate to gather insight.

Including multiple choice questions as to why someone unsubscribed can be helpful, especially when your reasons are clear, honest, and thoughtful. And including freeform text fields can yield more useful information. Be direct when asking folks why they unsubscribed, and actually review those responses regularly to improve future campaigns.

And even if people aren’t opting out, you can use preference centers to gather critical consumer data when they’re opting down (or up). Instead of just listing optional email lists or cadences on your preference page, include a feedback CTA or lightweight form to gather responses just like you (hopefully!) do in your email campaigns. (Read more about making your unsubscribe survey more actionable in our recent blog post.)

Improve your campaigns based on real conversations

The goal of any subscriber feedback program is to improve your ongoing campaigns and marketing efforts. Website tracking, A/B testing, and the like all allow you to gather data indirectly. But using email as a feedback tool enables you to get reliable data directly from the source: your subscribers. By listening and responding to subscriber feedback, you can start valuable conversations that have the potential to improve your campaigns and strengthen your customer relationships more than you ever realized.

Whether you're a B2B or B2C marketer, or both, we have more resources for you.

Download the Personalized Marketing for B2B Marketers ebook here.

Download the Personalized Marketing for B2C Marketers ebook here.

Or, to find out more about the tools needed to succeed as a digital marketer, check out Oracle Marketing.

Oracle Named a Leader in the Q2, 2021 Forrester Wave™ for Loyalty Solutions

Emily Rudin — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Download the report here.

Last year, consumers around the globe turned to digital in unexpected ways and at unprecedented numbers. Customer experience expectations have reached an all-time high in a digital landscape with more choice and the freedom to switch brands with a simple click or tap. McKinsey noted, “The crisis has prompted a surge of new activities, with an astonishing 75 percent of US consumers trying a new shopping behavior in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities.”

For many brands, the consumer shift presented great opportunities, but for others it introduced new challenges and competition. Both winners and losers in the great brand switch of 2020 are now asking themselves, how do we keep new-found customers loyal or win back the lost ones? To inspire new customers to become loyal, savvy marketers will:

Define new loyalty programs and increase membership engagement
Closely manage benefits and identify potential fraud
Demonstrate exceptional understanding of customer profiles and preferences
Invest in analytics and automation to support personalized, frictionless experiences
Focus on measuring emotional loyalty and effectively apply it

Excellence in customer loyalty requires a comprehensive loyalty solution, and Oracle CrowdTwist’s philosophy and product offering delivers a platform which received the highest possible scores in 16 criteria in The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Solutions, Q2 2021. The report looked at a field of 14 loyalty solution providers, and Forrester named Oracle CrowdTwist a “Leader”.

Oracle’s highlights from the 2021 Forrester Wave™ include:

“Oracle CrowdTwist’s vision is to provide superior experiences through a unified platform that enables contextual, personalized experiences, content, and offers.”
The CrowdTwist platform “…is preloaded with guided user experiences and standard activities (e.g., “make a purchase,” “product review,” and “read brand content”), integration widgets, and gamification capabilities to make it easy for marketers to create engaging, rewarding, and personalized programs.”
“Oracle CrowdTwist is a good fit for brands desiring an engagement-based self-service platform that includes back-up program management services.”

Oracle maintains a unique focus of making every customer interaction matter by connecting data across advertising, marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Given that “91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations,” according to Accenture, organizations that are able to deliver relevant experiences across brand touchpoints are likely to gain market share and revenue through their focus on creating connected experiences.

CrowdTwist enables brands to build 360-degree customer profiles, connect digital and physical experiences, engage with customers in relevant ways beyond transactions, and nurture customer loyalty with personalized experiences and rewards. We are honored to be named a Leader and continue to be fully committed to helping brands grow revenue and increase customer lifetime value through customer loyalty.

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Want to learn more? Click here to download the full report. You can also contact us to learn more about how the Oracle Advertising and CX suite of solutions can help you reach your marketing goals with engaging, connected customer experiences.

Introducing Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience

Beth Perry — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Thanks to a greater focus on experiences and digital content, adtech and martech continue to converge, allowing marketers to optimize their advertising investments and create seamless, personalized customer experiences across the entire customer journey.

To support this convergence, Oracle Data Cloud and Oracle Cloud CX recently joined forces as Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) with a goal of helping you make every customer interaction matter by connecting all your business data across advertising, marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Our connected suite of applications builds a complete view of your customer and their every interaction—no matter how, when, where, or with whom they engage.

As part of this transition, you may notice a few changes across our website and other digital properties, so we wanted to highlight a few of the best ways to find the right tools for your business and stay connected for all the latest news and updates.

Here’s a quick overview of the products offered within Oracle Advertising and CX:

Oracle Advertising (formerly Oracle Data Cloud)
In an increasingly complex, connected world, it’s critical to know who your best audiences are, be able to reach them in the right environment, and ultimately make sure your ads are seen by real people. It’s all about that age-old question: “Did my advertising achieve its objectives?” Answer this question today and be ready for what’s next with Oracle Advertising.

Oracle Marketing
Oracle Marketing is the most comprehensive, integrated marketing solution available to launch cross-channel marketing programs and unify all prospect and customer marketing signals in a single view. This solution helps generate a higher return on digital marketing investments, create customer loyalty through superior campaign performance, and unlock real-time performance decisions during critical campaign cycles.

Oracle Sales
Oracle Sales guides sellers with intelligent recommendations to help them focus on the most valuable prospects at the right time. Our machine learning-based CRM selling tools center around clean, complete customer data from internal and external sources that sellers can trust.

Oracle Service
With Oracle Service, you can predict the need for service, automate processes, and deliver tailored responses, while balancing self-service and assisted customer service models. It offers powerful and intelligent B2B, B2C, and field solutions that allow customers to receive the service they want, when and where they need it.

Find us on social

To make it even easier to connect with us and keep up with all the latest on Oracle Advertising and CX, we’ve also updated our social accounts. Be sure to refresh your bookmarks and follow us here:

Oracle Advertising

Oracle CX

Oracle Marketing

Oracle Service

Twitter

Advertising and CX Blogs

Want to learn more about Oracle Advertising and CX? Check out this brief video to see how we can help you deliver exceptional customer experiences when it matters most.

A version of this post also appears on the Oracle CX blog.

Oracle Named a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for CRM Lead Management

Michael Henning — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000

The Oracle Marketing team is excited to announce that we have been recognized as a Customers’ Choice in the 2021 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: CRM Lead Management. Our team at Oracle takes great pride in this distinction, as customer feedback continues to shape our products and services.

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings. To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.

Here are some excerpts from customers that contributed to the distinction:

“Oracle Eloqua has powerful functions and features that allow our campaign designers to implement the campaign flows the way we need to achieve our complex business processes.” – Service Delivery Manager, Manufacturing

“We have [taken] our basic digital marketing outreach and morphed it into a best-in-class digital marketing strategy across multiple platforms all bringing back incremental revenue. " – Marketing Automation Manager

“We are able to track each and every step of our campaigns to reach the customers, which further helps us to make decisions and changes in our roadmap. Eloqua has helped us to increase our sales effectively and efficiently.” – Manager, Communications

We’re proud to be honored as a 2021 Customers’ Choice for CRM Lead Management. To learn more about this distinction, or to read the reviews written about our products by the IT professionals who use them, please see the CRM Lead Management page on Gartner Peer Insights.

To all of our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! These reviews help us continue to build solutions that delight our customers.

If you have an Oracle Eloqua story to share, we encourage you to join the Gartner Peer Insights crowd and weigh in.

The GARTNER PEER INSIGHTS CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

How Email Marketers Can Balance Personalization and Segmentation

James Glover — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Can email marketers balance personalization and segmentation?

It’s an intriguing question for those looking to drive conversions with content that’s timely, engaging, relevant, and tailored to meet someone’s specific needs and interests.

In some respects, marketers consider the combination of personalization and segmentation their “Mount Everest.” They’re both crucial elements of email marketing. Make the two work together, and the world beats a path to your door. If you can’t, your email campaigns won’t perform well.

How segmentation works

Segmentation helps marketers place prospects and customers into separate buckets or groups rather than one amorphous audience for every email campaign. It's based on the understanding that specific customers behave differently.

Email marketers can segment in many ways, such as:

Demographics (e.g., age, gender, location, occupation)
Position in the sales funnel (e.g., awareness, evaluation, purchase)
Level of email engagement (e.g., recent opens and engagement versus no opens over a period of time)

For example, because "Joe" expressed interest in buying a pair of jeans online, he could fall into the denim product category. As a result, he’ll receive content around jeans as opposed to other clothing items.

The power of personalization

An email campaign might go out to hundreds, if not thousands, of people, but thanks to personalization, it can strike the recipient as unique and designed just for them.

Email marketers can communicate with the audience on a human level, based on relevant data like purchase history, email open rates, or website visits. The level of personalization depends on how in-depth a marketer wants to be with a campaign.

So how do marketers leverage the power of personalization and segmentation together?

Personalization and segmentation together

Machine learning is one of the most effective tools in digital marketing. It acts as a data analysis tool, allowing computers to analyze, predict, and act without explicit instructions. It works well with segmentation because it enables you to base communication on consumer behavior. The content attracts engagement and clicks, rather than what was labeled as their interest from some fixed point in time.

To drive customer-centric marketing and sales, modern companies combine their segmentation strategy with machine learning. Using this approach, you can:

Measure segmentation activities against personalization experiments. This will confirm your machine learning-based personalization solution is outperforming your segments.
Identify a starting point for communicating with customers, which machine-learning-based personalization can then enhance.
Make sense of what you see in the data.

Segmentation is a vital piece of a targeting strategy, but on its own, it's not robust enough to achieve a truly customer-centric experience. Combining your segmentation with machine-learning-based personalization helps you achieve higher engagement by sending the most relevant message to each customer based on their behavior, not a static label. And by creating email campaigns for individuals, they’ll hopefully buy more products from you over time.

For more information about email segmentation and personalization, check out the following blogs:

Or, to learn more about the solutions necessary to succeed as a marketer in today's landscape, check out Oracle Marketing.

How Automation Can Help Your Sellers Sell More (and Your Marketers Market Better)

Rob Tarkoff — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 15:30:00 +0000

The pandemic has relegated most of us into pixilated images on a Zoom call. While some activities will revert to a pre-pandemic state, many will not, making it harder than ever to build relationships and develop affinities.

This is why it’s vital to put the most advanced digital tools in the hands of salespeople and marketers. What I’m talking about are not just legacy sales and marketing apps in the cloud––I’m talking about those apps with rocket boosters. I’m talking about backing historical information and more automation right into the tools your customer-facing workers use.

While many back-office tools such as ERP and supply chain management have already adopted AI-driven automation, the front office (sales, marketing, and service) remains the last bastion of non-automated processes.

Why? Sales and marketing people have dug in on the idea that their roles are more art than science. And they’ve clung jealously to the idea that their intuition and creativity are what differentiate them––which is true, only not in the ways they think.

Bringing science to customer experience

For example, many salespeople think they know the best reference example to bring to a sales call, usually because they’ve used the reference successfully in the past, or because they were themselves involved in the deal, and feel more comfortable talking about it.

But it turns out that machine learning and AI can do a better job of identifying the best sales references based on which ones have worked best for a particular industry or region or company size, using a more complete set of data. These suggestions can help salespeople increase their chances of closing a sale. And they’re better criteria for determining the value of a reference than someone’s intuition.

Likewise, marketers are convinced they know the best piece of creative to use for a given campaign––but again, they’re relying on a form of confirmation bias. An AI-driven tool can actually tell them which piece of creative is best suited for a given campaign because it has learned from the experiences of other marketers across the organization.

In each case, there’s still a lot of room––I’d even argue, need––for creativity: in developing the marketing creative, in telling the story, in explaining the “why” of a given pitch. AI simply gives them the best sales or marketing collateral at the right moment.

Marketers should be creative about branding, or about using feedback to adjust what a product or service should deliver to a customer, or how to describe the features of a given product.

But salespeople and marketers should welcome a tool that takes variability out of their performance by letting a machine help them be better at their jobs.

Going full circle

Today, organizations using the right suite of tools can break down traditional information silos between sales, service, marketing, and advertising organizations. Those tools can provide marketers and salespeople with suggestions based on all the data at an organization’s disposal, as part of a single, engineered flow, with data from back-office systems like ERP and supply chain supplementing data contained in front-office data sets.

On one level, it’s not surprising that sales and marketing people have resisted traditional sales and marketing “automation” tools. The only automation they provide is geared to managing and monitoring them or preventing them from downloading their contacts when they leave an organization.

Today, organizations can turn that paradigm on its head. Sales and marketing leaders can provide their organizations with tools that help salespeople sell more and marketers market more effectively, driving better results for their organizations––and for their employees’ own performance-based salaries.

To learn more about tools for sales and marketing, take a product tour.