Engage with your customer as a unique individual. That’s one of many new marketing mantras which have a strong ring of plausibility–but also threaten to stretch internal marketing resources beyond breaking point. Segments, yes, but if you have a lot of customers–and you do want a lot of customers, don’t you–how do you track their behavior and purchasing patterns, and understand and predict their needs?
Well you could use a spreadsheet. Actually,you’re almost certainly doing something more sophisticated than that. Migrating single customer data to the cloud might sound attractive, with the usual promises of cost savings and scaleability, but a logistical and technical challenge.
Here comes Occam, the data marketing division of the UK St Ives Group, invited businesses to subscribe to its cloud-based single customer view solution Accelero, launched this month.
Customer behavior data can be dispersed across different silos and information sources. Aggregating data is one thing; turning it into an actionable resource is something else. Accelero plugs clients’ marketing data into the cloud, and uses pre-integrated applications to understand customers’ needs and expectations at a highly personalized level, thus promoting effective, and narrowly targeted, communications and campaigns.
Among the applications pre-configured on the Accelero platform are IBM Campaign and Sugar CRM. In effect, Accelero is a marketing cloud on demand.
Using the cloud, of course, means a promise of quick deployment, and thus quick ROI. According to Gary Arnold of Occam, Accelero places a special accent of bespoke marketing “by integrating our single customer view technology with carefully selected software that provides capabilities to understand and interpret customer behaviour, then take action to deliver engaging customer experiences.”
That’s the proffer, anyway, and yet another indication that the trend towards integrated marketing-as-a-service may be a viable model for coping with the proliferation of automated marketing tools.
