How is your customer feeling today?
Submitted by Maria Winans on
People can change their likes, dislikes and propensities daily, and sometimes more often. Will your customer choose an action movie over their usual romantic comedy today? Do they love that the bagel shop has a new strawberry cream cheese? Are they “sooo ready” for a vacation? Are they super sick of car shopping? Are they craving Indian food for lunch? Just what kind of customer are they, today?
And, to create the kinds of customer engagement your customer actually welcomes, it’s also about understanding how they feel about your products and services, how satisfied they’ve been in the past, and where they are in their buying journey. Have they shopped around, are they ready to buy or just learning and discovering?
As marketers, we know that decisions are fundamentally driven by feelings rather than pure logic. Knowing how your customer is feeling today is marketing nirvana. Gaining that insight lies, in part, in accessing data across myriad social channels and other resources and discerning meaning from it.
But, even if you can acquire the data, a challenge comes in connecting it across internal systems, Business Partners’ solutions, and various vendors’ tools (including IBM solutions and others) in order to use it effectively.
To make this a reality, we are expanding our IBM Commerce ecosystem to include even more Business Partners, and building a click-and-connect data exchange that marketers and ecommerce professionals will use to seamlessly connect customer data (like journey events) and entire segments from one platform to another. This real-time syndication can be done from an IBM system to another IBM system, a Business Partner system to an IBM system and from a Business Partner to a Business Partner system.
- The information can be leveraged in customer engagement to provide additional insight on historical behavior, preferences, current interests
- It can be included in programs and digital campaigns and leveraged in real-time to provide better offers to customers in an email, when they visit a site, contact a call center, etc.
- The data exchange connects publishers and subscribers directly for an expedient, real-time data exchange. IBM is not handling the information, but rather facilitating the communication.
Look for an IBM announcement in September when the new data exchange will become available. The IBM Commerce solution will get the right bit of contextual information to the right place at the right time. And, make it easier for you as a marketer to not only know how your customer is feeling today, but to act on that in real time to create connections that drive loyalty.
The growing list of IBM Commerce ecosystem Business Partners now includes:
IBM will use deep analytics, on top of Facebook’s anonymized and aggregate audience insights, with additional information from the IBM marketing cloud so marketers have a clearer picture of their target audiences. For example, a retailer launching a new line of running gear can use Facebook’s Custom Audiences and targeting solutions to segment its customer groups that are interested in long-distance running. The retailer can then glean aggregated insights into the audience’s preferences in running gear and, based on location, offer deals on apparel that fit the appropriate training climate.
With IBM Marking Solutions, RocketFuel can ingest first-party data to automate individualized, marketing decisions across all paid channels. Their AI-powered decision engine allows clients to build data-based marketing actions and more precisely nurture and move targets through the funnel across marketing touchpoints, driving toward optimal business outcomes. IBM Marketing Solutions clients can leverage the RocketFuel data-management platform (DMP) to target those anonymized users with the right messaging by using the Rocket Fuel data.
Acxiom’s partnership with IBM strengthens IBM’s ability to improve marketing efficiency while delivering exceptional experiences to consumers. Acxiom’s LiveRamp Connect adds critical onboarding and connectivity capabilities to deliver audiences accurately and at scale to over one hundred and thirty partners in the digital marketing ecosystem, providing accurate audience targeting, site optimization, and measurement.
MediaMath provides a unified, extensible marketing operating system, TerminalOne, that enables advertisers and agencies to manage and activate first- and third-party data, automate the execution of paid media buying across all channels, and optimize campaigns in real time. Through TerminalOne, MediaMath unleashes the power of goal-based marketing at scale, and delivers outcomes, transparency, and control for marketers around the world.
Gigya’s Customer Identity Management Platform helps companies build better customer relationships by turning unknown site visitors into known, loyal and engaged customers. By integrating with IBM’s data exchange technology, first-party, permission-based identity data captured via Gigya’s platform can be easily ported into the IBM Marketing Cloud and other partner technologies.
Shoutlet is the Social Publishing and Customer Profile Data component of the IBM Marketing Cloud. Social campaigns that include scheduled posts, contests, and promotions build valuable customer profile data to help create a consistent and powerful cross-channel experience. Over 600 brands in 70 countries use Shoutlet to drive the social engagement required to gather customer activity, interest, and influence data that results in more meaningful customer relationships.
Vibes is a mobile marketing leader that offers Catapult, a cloud-based mobile marketing technology SaaS platform. IBM’s click and connect streamlined integration will unlock data and insights across IBM’s customer engagement solutions and Catapult, allowing our clients to execute mobile marketing campaigns that are highly personalized. This partnership gives CMOs the ability to achieve best-in-class results from every mobile touchpoint, including Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet, text messaging, and app push messaging.
As this ecosystem continues to grow, marketers’ lives will become easier. It will be like the meeting that ends early, giving you time back in your day. And we all know how good that feels, don’t we!
