July 1, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

The Road to Omnichannel Marketing Success

solutions the company has acquired over the past few years, including Responsys, Eloqua, Compendium, and, most recently, BlueKai. As the four solutions come together, Oracle aims to become the "number one enterprise marketing cloud, built for marketers and delivered to any audience," according to Oracle president Mark Hurd, who introduced the platform.

With the solutions fully integrated, the cloud offering would enable marketers to leverage BlueKai's data platform to deliver personalized customer journeys through cross-channel marketing, turn content from a tactical necessity into a strategic asset through content marketing, and harness real value from social media by analyzing sentiment and engaging in real time, Hurd explained. The marketing cloud would also enable marketers to analyze their campaigns with far-reaching marketing analytics and extend their ecosystems through the AppCloud and Data Marketplace. "It's a little too early to tell, but it seems like Oracle is getting very close to being channel agnostic and delivering a good omnichannel option," Anand says.

Things are rumbling over at Salesforce.com as well. The company announced key updates to the social products offered in its ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, launching the Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio, a new set of social media tools for marketers that promises to strengthen omnichannel campaigns through improved collaboration and stronger integrations with third-party partners.

"We'll have to wait and see how these changes stack up, but it's clear that the marketing technology is there for all these guys. But that is not enough," Anand says. As companies work to determine the best marketing technology for the context marketing engine at the center of their omnichannel platform, the other half of the equation to consider is analytics.

The Big Players in Big Data

To accelerate innovation, Doty urges marketers to utilize the analytics tools available, but not in the way that they're used to. While most marketers use analytics after a campaign to analyze engagement and use the insight they gain to improve upcoming outreach, in a contextual marketing engine, marketers have to apply analytics "on the fly" to deliver "outstanding real-time experiences," according to Doty. Strong data intelligence solutions with descriptive and predictive capabilities are crucial for driving segmentation and helping companies harness key customer and lead insight, Hopkins agrees, but while marketing cloud giants Oracle, Salesforce.com, and Adobe have "good analytics tools in place," few compare to the breadth that IBM has to offer.

Since 2005, IBM has invested more than $24 billion in its analytics solutions through acquisitions as well as research and development initiatives, including a $1 billion investment in its new IBM Watson Group for analytics and big data in January 2014. "We have a robust set of digital and predictive analytics capabilities through our SPSS, Cognos, Tealeaf and Coremetrics solutions,” said Jay Henderson, global strategy director, IBM. “By bringing together our strong analytics solutions with our marketing campaign and automation solutions from technologies Unica, Xtify, and Silverpop, into IBM's ExperienceOne marketing portfolio, we’re providing marketers with a full breadth of capabilities to engage with customers via omnichannel campaigns.”

Though analysts agree that IBM has one of the most comprehensive analytics solutions currently available, enterprise data warehouse company Teradata has been making major waves in the space as well, according to Hopkins.

In April 2014, the company introduced QueryGrid, a data-access layer capable of running several simultaneous modes of analysis across multiple databases, including Hadoop. The QueryGrid offers two-way, Infiniband connectivity between data sources, and can run in-depth, multipart analyses on data where it resides. After identifying a segment of high-value customers in the Teradata database, for example, that subset of customers can be entered into Hadoop to evaluate their sentiments through social media interactions and determine the most at-risk customers. That customer subset can subsequently be entered into Asterdata (a data analysis and visualization tool that Teradata claimed through a 2011 acquisition), where graph analysis can pinpoint the most influential customers, ultimately creating a list of high-value, influential players at risk who can be targeted with a re-engagement campaign. But Teradata has more to offer than analytics.

As IBM works to build up and integrate the campaign management and execution aspect of its omnichannel platform through proprietary development and acquisitions of companies such as Silverpop, Teradata already has a rebuttal prepared—its Real Time Interaction Manager and Customer Interaction Manager solutions. Hertz, named the top U.S. rental car company for two years in a row by Zagat, used these tools to develop a data architecture capable of meeting the needs of the $10.5 billion company and launch wide-scale multichannel campaigns, Deb Woods, director of product management at Teradata, explains.

Hertz started small with its Teradata implementation, utilizing the Real Time Interaction Manager to include customized messages on customers' rental receipts to let them know if their drivers' license or credit cards were about to expire. "This was a big deal for our Gold customers, because if their [credit card] expires, they'd have to go to the counter before they could pick up their car," Greg Palk, manager of CRM applications at Hertz, said in a company statement.

Using Teradata technology, Hertz also launched its popular Carfirmation feature, a tool that generates an email immediately after a customer's plane lands with the location and type of car the customer is about to pick up. "You can also change the car or upgrade it at the same time, and avoid the line at the counter," Woods explains. Moving past email alone, Teradata's Customer Interaction Manager enables Hertz to share channel-specific messages and offers through call center agents, counter terminals, handheld devices, and the Hertz Web site, depending on recipient preferences. And, Palk adds, if a customer opens a message but doesn't respond to the offer, the Real Time Interaction Manager can "step in" and send a follow-up SMS or MMS message. At any given point, Hertz is able to send an average of 56,000 unique offers and as many as 80,000 during peak times, Woods shares.

With compelling solutions on both the marketing execution and big data analytics fronts, analysts agree that a truly omnichannel marketing strategy is no longer just a pipe dream. While finding an off-the-shelf solution to address the omnichannel question from both the context-based content delivery and big data analytics standpoints—and do so as effectively as best-of-breed companies have been able to—may be a far-off goal, the road to omnichannel success is paved with major milestones, many of which can already be achieved.

"The technology on both sides is already there," Anand reiterates, "but technology alone can't get you from zero to omnichannel. It's going to take a lot of commitment on the part of the vendors to deliver deep, powerful integrations, but perhaps even more commitment on the part of their customers to make organizational and cultural changes that will foster an omnichannel mindset."

Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.

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