Today’s consumers expect seamless, personalized customer experiences when interacting with brands online. As marketers, we hear and likely use this phrase often. And many of us have the same goal: to not only meet, but exceed, these expectations. Over the last few years, brands have increasingly been competing against one another to create the most enjoyable and seamless customer experience – and the onset of COVID-19 has only amplified this.
In the face of an overwhelming, unprecedented situation in which everything you once knew about your customer becomes obsolete, how do you continue to create effortless and contextually relevant experiences?
The Answer…
Marketers need an intelligent platform that picks up on consumer behavior changes and enables them to engage with customers in new ways. A platform that allows marketers to leverage real-time data and content when it is needed, to ensure marketing messages are always relevant at the time of open – and to adapt to where the customer is in their buyer journey, and reflect their changing behaviors.
An extensible marketing platform is the key to success in delivering meaningful, relevant, and connected customer experiences across all digital channels.
Extensibility is the potential to expand the impact of a digital marketing platform by adding more data sources and functional features. Technologies that are extensible at their core, like Marigold Engage, will easily connect to any other solution and combine data from various sources to make that data actionable for users across an organization.
Many solutions claim to be “open and flexible.” But research contradicts this. Ascend2 recently conducted research among B2B and B2C marketers to understand their biggest challenges and priorities when it comes to marketing technology. Research found that integrating disparate tools is the number-one barrier to marketing technology success. The marketing research firm also found that 38% of respondents prioritize technologies that integrate with tools already in their marketing stack.
What does this mean for marketing technologies? Well, it goes without saying that there is no one-size-fits-all MarTech stack, as needs will always vary across businesses. But the common thread is that marketers choose tools that play nicely together. A well-connected tech stack will enable brands to deliver connected data-driven customer experiences more easily, more quickly, and at less cost.
Marigold Engage’s open architecture and flexible data model allows marketers to focus more on strategy and worry less about technical integrations. It boils down to two things: configuration and control.
Put simply, Selligent’s open architecture enables marketers to seamlessly integrate third-party systems and data into our platform, extending the number of applications and data sources available to them. On a more granular level, Selligent leverages APIs and connectors to connect to other tools, for frictionless synchronization of key information to make marketing more personal. Our API and pre-built connectors support rapid data integration, enabling marketers to activate it and drive messaging with the level of personalization and relevance today’s consumers expect from brands.
Via our open and flexible data layer, marketers have the ability to modify their data schema and manipulate their data however they choose. There are no predefined or restrictive data models, meaning the model can be designed specifically to match your priority use cases. As programs evolve, users can amend the existing data model, modify import and export processes, and expand to incorporate new data, albeit ad hoc or recurring imports, to adapt and enhance existing contact strategies. Selligent fully empowers marketers to manage and activate their data.
In today’s ever-changing digital marketing landscape, it is increasingly important to have a marketing platform that allows you to adapt as your needs evolve. Truly extensible technologies continue to provide added value by seamlessly integrating new channels and apps, while also growing alongside clients’ needs. Selligent offers out-of-the-box connectors to a variety of e-commerce, CRM, mobile, and display partners, enabling rapid setup and integration with leading technologies. Because our technology was designed with the marketer in mind, configuration of connectors is simple, and synchronization and customization is defined by the user. If a connector is required but not yet offered, the flexibility of our solution allows our team to create customizable integrations using our native custom components rapidly. Selligent’s adaptable data integration approach connects all aspects of your data ecosystem to optimize your results through data-driven cross-channel customer engagement.
The numerous devices and platforms where consumer touchpoints occur can make providing seamless omnichannel customer experiences more challenging. But making sure you have a strong cross-channel strategy is more important now than ever. Doing so requires a tech stack that is optimized for cross-platform data integration, a 360-degree view of your customer, and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence-based automation to deliver personalized content and offers.
1) 360-Degree Customer View
In this world of hyper-personalized marketing, consumer data is the fuel for achieving previously impossible levels of consumer-centric engagement. However, with so much data being generated today, it is imperative to have a marketing platform that can filter, analyze, and make customer data relevant and actionable in journeys, in real-time.
Selligent synthesizes all consumer data and creates a rich universal profile for every consumer – both known customers and anonymous visitors. These profiles store the behaviors, preferences, and actions of each individual. Selligent automatically captures interactions and customer signals (aka events) from all consumer engagement channels to enrich these profiles and provide marketers with a 360-degree view of customers.
As consumer behavior has shifted in response to the pandemic, universal consumer profile data is more important than ever. The ability to measure, analyze, and extract valuable insights about consumer behavior in order to adapt messaging and targeting approaches is key to continuing to create relevant omnichannel customer journeys. Not only does a holistic view of all your consumer data enable you to identify shifts in behavior and preferences, but it helps to improve overall understanding of consumers so you can better engage them and deliver personalization at scale.
2) Intelligent Optimization
To drive smart omnichannel activities and really make an impact, it’s necessary to have Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality that is natively integrated into a marketing cloud platform, encompassing all functionality from data capture, to journey design, to execution and smart automation.
This is the reality of Marigold Engage’s AI capabilities. Our natively built AI engine enables marketers to apply data science that combines consumer profiles, behavioral and demographic data, and business logic to deliver highly relevant, personalized marketing and omnichannel customer experiences in real-time. Marigold Recommendations AI ensures data is processed in real-time to anticipate the needs of visitors and better engage them with both precision and relevance.
To drive powerful AI and Machine Learning (ML) activities, it is essential to leverage data from all consumer engagement channels. Marigold Recommendations AI plugs into rich data from universal profiles to personalize content and offers, achieve laser-focused audience segmentation, and choose the perfect time and touchpoint for messaging.
The truth is, marketers need AI to attain hyper-personalization and connect with consumers to provide an exceptional experience for every single customer, across all channels. As a living, breathing part of the platform, Marigold Recommendations AI makes use of all consumer data available and analyzes it in real-time to create unique experiences for each individual.
Marketing automation platforms provide more value than ever before – both to marketers and consumers. From a marketer’s perspective, extensible technologies like Marigold Engage will enable them to anticipate the needs of consumers and take action to exceed their expectations. For consumers, extensible marketing platforms create relevant, helpful, and connected omnichannel experiences that will help them find the product or service they are looking for more quickly and easily.
Want to learn more?
Now that you know more about Marigold Engage’s extensible technology, watch this short video on “Solving the Challenge of Creating Connected Experiences” to see it in action. Together, let’s make marketing personal.
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