Brands on Knotice for Complete Customer Profiles

Amberly Dressler — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:15:00 GMT

Creating coordinated brand experiences that extend across digital channels and device types can help companies better engage customers through consistency, helpfulness and value, according to Patti Renner, director of marketing at Knotice whose company recently announced an expanded relationship with Fender Musical Instruments.

Fender is using the Knotice platform to unite its campaign data and customer information. This relationship will allow Fender to inform highly tailored content across email, mobile, display, SMS and on their website. They will also be able to have a complete view of the customer across device types. Below, Renner offers an in-depth explanation of why this is important for all brands and the challenges that businesses face when creating complete customer profiles on their own.

How can unifying data and getting a complete customer profile help in a brand’s marketing efforts?

Patti Renner: Today’s customers are always connected, always looking for information and messages on whatever screen is handy at the moment. They could be browsing your site on an iPad, looking up information about your product on their mobile device or making a purchase on their PC. It doesn’t matter where they are or what device they’re using – they simply expect a consistent, relevant, enjoyable experience across channels. Connecting the channels across device types requires data management where the customer preferences and activity is stored within individual data profiles that can be automatically updated and appended as things happen.

Unfortunately, some marketers don’t think in terms of providing a cohesive consumer experience regardless of devices they use. They view each consumer by channel, focusing on their email audience as separate from their website visitors, separate from their online display views.

Having all their data unified within a universal profile management system, brands have the ability to connect the digital dots with each consumer, allowing them to provide a truly useful, relevant experience to each person as individuals. Here’s how a profile-based data management works. Let’s use Joe as an example. With proper data management, the brand knows Joe has opened their last 3 emails on a tablet, searched for the address of their nearest retail location on his iPhone, saw 4 ads for a blue sweater, then clicked on the sweater section of their website from his PC. Now, that brand can send Joe tablet-optimized emails, let him know when his favorite sweaters go on sale, and serve him with the content that interests him. The ability to cater to the interests of the custom based on available first-party data makes the brand experience better for Joe since he gets what he wants faster, and it also provides increase efficiency and a higher likelihood of conversion for the brand. Unifying your data makes this possible. Instead of pushing random offers to Joe, they’re now able to serve him with the information and products that best suit his needs.

What challenges are there for a company to try and do this on its own?

In most organizations, customer data lives siloed in separate systems or it’s difficult to access due to internal departmental hurdles. Trying to integrate customer data into a single system with just your IT team can be a real challenge as important data can fall through the cracks (or not integrate properly) when attempting to combine into a single system. If a company is able to get all its data into one place, it then faces the challenge of being able to create those unique customer profiles to wrap all that data around, with automation in place so the data profiles update and append as new information is received. On top of this is usability and actionability of the data so you can use it to inform content going out (so Joe sees sweaters and Mary sees the item she left in the shopping cart last week). You also want to be able to inform advanced analytics, so you send and spend smarter. There also is the issue of having a storage environment large enough for you to collect and quickly access all the information you’re taking it.

Working with a data management partner takes the stress of the organization by seamlessly uniting all that data, storing it safely in a powerful Big Data profile-based environment, which can then be easily used to inform messaging, content and analytics. For instance, our system has email, website, SMS and display options already built into the platform seamlessly. Everything can be simultaneously fueled by the same data environment, which makes response and relevance faster and simpler compared to pieced-together DIY integrations. We also offer analytics dashboards so you can better monitor what’s going on and make adjustments to help shorten the sales cycle. While you might be able to integrate a few points on your own, your time and money may be better spent working with a professional data management platform provider to get there faster.

For more information, visit www.knotice.com.

Connect Across All Digital Channels with Ektron

Michael Garrity — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Web success in 2012 means far more than just having a good (or even great) website. With so many different avenues for consumers to connect with brands online, companies are all but required to optimize every one of their various Web properties.

Ektron, a provider of enterprise Web content management systems, has unveiled some major updates to the Ektron Web Content and Digital Experience Management Platform that adds a plethora of features to help businesses deliver their customers a relevant experience across all of their digital channels. It also launched two brand new supplementary products, the Ektron Digital Experience Hub and Ektron Cloud Manager.

The upgrade, Ektron 8.6, adds to the company’s flagship content and management platform and aims to improve the content creation and management experience for authors, developers, and designers.

Among the biggest enhancements to the platform are simplified content authored with support for an advanced HTML5-based editor, more support for mobile devices that includes an adaptive image resizing feature, intelligent content synchronization, greater support for URL redirects, and increased flexibility and performance with search thanks to integration with Microsoft’s Search Server and FAST products.

But, as previously noted, that’s not the only news out of the Ektron camp this week. The company also announced the immediate availability of the Digital Experience Hub (DXH), which provides comprehensive, personalized experiences for users across websites, mobile devices, and social networks by integrating customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and analytics solutions with the traditional Ektron platform.

This product will help users increase business efficiencies with pre-built integrations into enterprise systems, automate form publishing, and unify customer experience management with marketing campaign optimization. It also offers support with Microsoft SharePoint to integrate existing content, workflow, and management capabilities.

Last, but not least, is the new Ektron Cloud Manager, which lets Ektron’s customers launch websites and marketing campaigns in the cloud. This product includes Wizard-based cloud provisioning that enables the authoring of site content with an on-premises environment for deployment into the cloud, hybrid deployment, the ability to deliver sites at an unlimited scale, and support for both Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Service’s EC2 cloud platforms.

All of these new offerings are meant to help companies provide a relevant content experience and meet the needs of potential customers regardless of where they come from. And when used in conjunction with one another, as they’re built to do, they become all the more beneficial.

'Net Features : channels

Brands on Knotice for Complete Customer Profiles

How can unifying data and getting a complete customer profile help in a brand’s marketing efforts?

What challenges are there for a company to try and do this on its own?

Connect Across All Digital Channels with Ektron