At Openworld 2015 in San Francisco, Oracle announced a series of enhancements to its Marketing Cloud capabilities for personalizing the customer journey.
Building on the August 2015 acquisition of Maxymiser, the web and mobile customer experience optimizer, Oracle announced three additional marketing cloud innovations:
- Offline Data Append will make it easier to add offline transaction data to marketing cloud customer profiles, enhancing the brand view of customers, and creating new opportunities for targeted, cross-channel interactions.
- Match Multiplier will help marketers connect users across offline and online channels.
- Business Units for Content Marketing will give marketers a centralized interface for their content assets, calendar, and analytics, allowing centralized management of content, personas, and workflow.
Oracle also announced tighter integration of the Marketing Cloud with the Service Cloud.
I sat down with John Stetic, the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Group VP, Products, at Openworld 2015 to talk about the new offers. He described Append as “an incredibly strong capability, allowing access to huge amounts of essentially offline data. It will play very well for marketers in the retail space.” Append will leverage Datalogix, the purchase data platform Oracle acquired in December 2014, which aggregates consumer, household, and demographic data around credit card, shopping program, and other transactions. This data will now inform customer profiles in the marketing cloud.
“There’s a practical problem that exists when you’re trying to do cross-channel marketing,” said Stetic: successfully identifying the customer across channels. With Match Multiplier, he said, “we’re extending one of the ways you can do that.” Marketers will have the option of pooling their data–not customer identities, Stetic emphasized, but anonymized markers–thus increasing the rate of accurate identification for all participants. I asked whether marketers would feel they were sacrificing competitive advantage by sharing even anonymized data. “It’s a choice people can make,” Stetic said. After all, “your differentiator shouldn’t be being able to access the customer, but confidence in your product offering.”
Business Units, he said, scales out content creation for the enterprise, and offers a central management space. The current connection is with Eloqua. Maxymiser, the recent experience optimization acquisition, makes experimentation with content much faster, and “puts it in the hands of the marketer,” Stetic said. “The loop just needs to keep getting faster and faster.” Maxymiser allows rapid multivariant testing of content and predictive segment creation, to drive personalization.
In a statement, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP and GM, Oracle Marketing Cloud, said that the innovations would “help marketers improve customer engagement and conversion. The latest innovations enable marketers to optimize the customer experience and drive measureable results by enriching customer profiles, enhancing content marketing initiatives and improving cross-channel engagement.”
