| | MARCH 20189CIOReviewCustomers can now access a world of customer data from web, mobile and other sources to support contextually appropriate relevant and timely marketing actions.With this complexity, can the marketing team identify each customer across every touch point? How is it possible to even know it's the same consumer given the different systems and providers capturing information?Ultimately, what's most important becomes most difficult. Siloed, fragmented and disparate data must be stitched together to tell a story and provide the insight for in-the-moment marketing action. That's where the IBM and Ensighten partnership steps in to support the marketing team.The Customer Data PlatformEnsighten was founded in 2009 and quickly established itself as a leader in enterprise tag management. Tag management systems (TMS) emerged as a way to eliminate the bottleneck between marketing and IT over the deployment of "tags," i.e., snippets of code embedded in web and mobile channels as a way for digital marketing vendors to collect data.Enterprise tag management, however, rapidly evolved to become a highly strategic data platform. Or as James McCormick of Forrester Research put it, "Beyond just the management of tags, tag management delivers flexible yet safe data governance, scalable action-based analytics, and optimized customer engagements."Most recently, enterprise tag management has become the anchor to the customer data platform (CDP), which Gartner Research defines as an "integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company's customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience." Gartner recently introduced the CDP into its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016.The Ensighten CDP gives marketers control in collecting and owning first-party customer data across touch points, enables attribution to the right channel, and facilitates creation of customer segments and profiles. Marketers gain the ability to "see" a customer as he or she engages with a brand across channels and devices. In effect, it creates a hub with standardized, cross-channel data from all sources, from offline interactions on search to the valuable information on customers sitting in the customer relationship management (CRM) and point-of-sale (POS) systems.Consider digital display ad performance. It's now possible to track display ad performance, making the data first party to the brand by adding a branded pixel to the ad. The platform retains this first-party data, recognizes a customer within appropriate privacy standards and, based on a set of rules, responds.A Data-Driven IBM Marketing Cloud Data is of little value without the ability to act on it. And that's where the IBM Marketing Platform dramatically extends the value of data. With the Ensighten partnership, IBM commerce customers have access with point-and-click simplicity to a rich source of cross-channel, behavioral data for action across the technologies and analytics in the IBM Marketing Cloud, the company's digital marketing platform.IBM has built the platform as an open-ecosystem to give customers maximum flexibility with the technologies and tools required. And it delivers varied capabilities, including campaign management, analytics, personalization and digital advertising.Additionally, cross-channel data can be used to power IBM Customer Experience Analytics, which gives customers a single place to answer what is happening and why in the customer journey. Analytics enable the marketer to go from question to decision in minutes with unified analytics by turning data points into a point of view on the customer journey. IBM customers also gain instant access to more than 1,100 turnkey marketing tag integrations housed in the Ensighten platform.Ensighten's integration with IBM UBX should be seen as a way to facilitate in-the-moment customer experiences using data from all sources. It enables immediate, pragmatic benefits by:· Creating a holistic view of the increasingly complex customer journey· Jump-starting mobile app analytics and optimization initiatives· Easily integrating data and technology from other vendors· Creating unified customer profiles that can be used to drive real-time action. Ultimately, what's most important becomes most difficult
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