| | MARCH 20188CIOReviewToday's battle for the customer can be won or lost on a well-defined field: how well does the marketing team use valuable, first-party data to engage consumers and optimize their experience? Making sense of a trail of data generated across a multi-channel customer journey, however, may be as challenging as unraveling a "genomic" blueprint. The question is how to decipher it.Every customer journey is unique to one individual, whether it begins in a mobile app, a click on a display ad or a promotion in social media. Each touch point generates data. The question that the new partnership between IBM and Ensighten answers is this: How do we make sense of this complex journey from awareness to a decision to purchase or not? How do we collect, unify and act on this behavioral data generated across every marketing application to make smart marketing decisions?In a nutshell, Ensighten's integration with IBM's Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) enables joint IBM Commerce and Ensighten customers to better orchestrate their marketing technologies and data sources to improve customer experiences. Customers can now access a world of customer data from web, mobile and other sources to support contextually appropriate, relevant and timely marketing actions. The Marketer's DilemmaLet's start by defining the marketer's dilemma. A marketing team launches a new advertising campaign, and the CMO is quick to ask, what's the ROI on each channel? What products or services did we sell or influence from a campaign? Even more, how did the campaign affect lifetime customer value?These questions are rarely easy to answer even in days or weeks, long past the moment when a campaign might be optimized or a single consumer re-engaged with relevant offers. This dilemma for "in-the-moment" marketing first and foremost reflects the complexity of the customer journey. Marketers seek to drive the customer to take action, whether it's downloading a whitepaper, watching a video or responding to an email or taking advantage of an in-store promotion. That journey typically spans three distinct paths: the worlds of offsite, onsite and offline channels.The customer, for example, often begins his or her journey "offsite" outside a brand's domain altogether with clicks on display advertisements, video, email or search. That journey may continue to a brand's "onsite" domains, such the company's website, campaign landing pages or mobile apps. And it may also engage "offline" channels, such as point of sale (POS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which hold critical intelligence about customers, but often sit separately within an organization.In today's ecosystem, many systems and providers capture data, whether they are marketing vendors furnishing services like email, retargeting and analytics, or the DMP used in building "look-a-like" audiences and placing digital ads.CRACKING THE CODE FOR DATA-DRIVEN MARKETINGBy Josh Manion, CEO, EnsightenIBM AND ENSIGHTEN: Josh Manion
< Page 7 | Page 9 >