Oracle named a leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs for the ...

Oracle is honored once again to be named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. This category only includes solutions that support a broad array of criteria like marketing responsiveness, marketing execution, and customer experience. The evaluation assessed 20 vendors across completeness of vision and ability to execute. This is the fourth consecutive time Oracle has been named a Leader in this competitive landscape.

A growing collection of AI for marketers

Customer retention is a big theme for marketers in 2021. According to a recent Ketchum survey, "a majority (62%) of Americans expect that their brand preferences will change permanently before the pandemic ends." As a result, marketers are concentrating on ways to improve engagement and reduce churn. Recent enhancements in Advanced Intelligence for Oracle Responsys help marketers improve customer experience by offering intelligent segmentation which addresses message saturation, leading to greater customer lifetime value.

Additional innovations help marketers become more agile. For example, we also use machine learning to enable marketers to offer personalized product recommendations and predict the results of customer journeys before they go live.

Easily test customer reactions to personalized messages

As customer expectations rapidly evolve, more marketers are taking advantage of Responsys features like automated winner selection to drive testing programs in “hands-free” mode, and the ability to understand customers better with multivariate testing for up to eight variations for email and push.

The Intelligent Switch uses machine learning to do the testing for you, and chooses the best channel, campaign, and send time for each individual. These are just a few of the ways that we’re continuously seeking to make it easy for marketers to test consumer reactions to webpage personalization, email and push campaigns, or loyalty engagements.

Simplifying customer experiences

Sophistication doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with simplicity, often forcing marketers to choose one or the other. We work hard so that marketers don’t have to make that choice.

The new Redwood user interface in Responsys offers more intuitive workflows and processes to help marketers accomplish more—teams can collaborate effectively and avoid errors with an object relationship navigator that highlights a campaign element that is reused in multiple campaigns. Personalization is easier with drag-and-drop widgets that allow marketers to include content from Pinterest or a barcode for a coupon without writing specialized code.

Oracle Marketing makes it possible for you to make every customer interaction matter.

To learn more about Oracle and our recognition as a Leader, access the full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs.

Or, if you’re a marketer looking for a partner to help you take your customer experiences to the next level, please let us know how we can help.

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Need to create email marketing campaigns quickly? Try an Agile approach

Email marketers are constantly asked to do more with less. So, how do you increase campaign frequency and put more advanced email techniques into practice without reducing quality? One way to address both challenges is by adopting an Agile email marketing process. Originally designed to accelerate software development, applying an Agile methodology to email marketing can boost efficiency and leave more time for strategy.

Traditional campaign development workflows are linear. First you strategize, then write copy, get feedback, and finalize assets—all before building out the actual email campaign. This process prevents the majority of email teams from shipping campaigns in less than two weeks, according to our recent State of Email Report.

Agile email marketing, however, allows teams to work on different parts of a project in parallel. Instead of making your developers wait a week for final copy and graphics, they can build campaign wireframes based on in-progress drafts.

Inside our Agile process

Agile email marketing breaks down large tasks into smaller ones and incorporates reusable tools and templates to create more efficient workflows. Here’s how we apply Agile practices for email production—the actual writing, designing, and coding of emails.

Create content

Unlike static planning documents that don’t include the actual content deliverables (and often aren’t referred to after kick-off meetings), our email briefs combine campaign objectives and tactical updates, including copy revisions. We share campaign briefs with the team during early campaign planning and add details as it progresses. Our email brief and planning template includes:

• The campaign goal, targeted personas, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Relevant URLs and tracking information
• Sender information
• Subject lines and preview text
• Campaign body copy

By centralizing campaign information and sharing it with everyone on the project, multiple team members can work on different campaign elements in tandem. The content team collaborates on copy in the document while designers use the brief to develop graphics in parallel. Also at the same time, the demand generation team sets up landing pages and implements tracking capabilities while other materials are reviewed.

Shared design tools are similarly helpful. We use Figma for design work, which enables multiple graphic designers to work in the same file. It allows developers to pull out assets needed for coding, and we have shared libraries for photography and iconography to simplify access to core brand imagery.

Develop and code

Developing email campaigns—the actual production of coded emails—can be time-consuming if you start each email from scratch. That’s why we rely heavily on a software library to accelerate development.

Templates, snippets, and partials—collected in Litmus’ Design Library—allow us to build emails from a common structure and enable developers to swap content and components for each campaign rapidly. Here’s how they work:

• Templates are fully coded emails that are pre-tested for optimal rendering across email clients. Each template has a specific purpose (e.g., transactional, promotional, etc.).
• Snippets are smaller bits of code that can be pulled into an email and customized for that email. We use snippets for everything from article sections to CTAs.
• Partials are similar to snippets because they both are specific email modules. But partials are universally consistent across all campaigns and aren’t customized for individual emails like snippets. We use them for email parts that change infrequently, like our header, logo, and footer information.

Templates and modular email development can enable non-developers to create campaigns. Additionally, WYSIWYG editors like Visual Editor inside of Litmus Builder let anyone build campaigns without coding experience.

Agile email marketing is empowered email marketing

The Agile email marketing methodology emphasizes testing small updates quickly and learning along the way. By breaking down traditional email processes, simplifying each step, and adopting more efficient tools and techniques, you can do more with less and rapidly adapt to market changes.

These changes can create a better experience for your team and your subscribers. For additional tips and insights, download our Agile email marketing ebook.

For more information about email marketing, check out:

• Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation
• Oracle Responsys Campaign Management
• Oracle Marketing

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Email marketing deep-dive: What is a transactional email?

This question is more challenging than you think. And how a company answers it has a major impact on the size of the audience it’s able to reach with that message.

That’s because transactional messages can be sent to all customers for whom you have email addresses. This includes those who haven’t opted in to receive your promotional messages, as well as those who have unsubscribed from receiving your promotional emails. Under the United States’ anti-spam law, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act, these emails also don’t need to include an unsubscribe link.

But be sure to properly identify your emails as transactional because CAN-SPAM, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can impose hefty fines if a company falsely sends promotional emails as transactional.

Let’s start with a closer look at what these laws say.

How laws define transactional emails

While their definitions vary slightly, generally speaking, CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR define transactional messages as necessary:

• To complete a transaction or facilitate an ongoing subscription or membership.
• For the performance of a contract or compliance with a legal obligation.
• As part of an employment relationship.
• To alert recipients to safety and security issues related to their purchase or account.
• For “relationship messaging” or for the communication of “legitimate interests.”

That umbrella covers a wide range of messaging that’s necessary for your email marketing and cross-channel strategies, including purchase receipts, shipping and delivery notifications, and much more.

However, many companies mistakenly believe that umbrella covers other types of messages that don’t actually qualify. Much of the confusion stems from the “relationship messaging” referred to in CAN-SPAM and the “legitimate interests” clause in GDPR. Another thing that can make the lines even fuzzier: mixed messages.

‘Mixed messages’

Businesses know a 100% promotional email when they see one, but what if you add a little promotional content to a transactional email? Is it still considered transactional?

Here, the laws offer fairly clear guidance, says Heather Goff, Strategic Director of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting.

“CAN-SPAM allows for ‘mixed messages’,” she says, “and marketers have generated great results by adding cross-sell messaging to their transactional messages. With open rates on transactional messages being exceptionally high—25-35% or higher on average based on our experience with clients—the opportunities to upsell or cross-sell are much higher and more profitable.”

Brian Sullivan, Strategy Director of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting, adds that while promotional content can be included in a transactional message, the primary purpose of the message must be transactional. To avoid overdoing it on the promotional content, he recommends:

1. Focusing the subject line 100% on the transactional content.
2. Always positioning promotional content after the transactional content.
3. Limiting promotional content to no more than 20% of the total email content.

While the U.S. allows mixed messages, Canada does not, says Goff. “CASL has a zero tolerance for any content that has a purpose of garnering more commerce or profit within transactional messages. Senders can only include details about the specific transaction. And if they chose to include a navigation bar, for example, the message might be considered commercial and have to be sent as promotional.” Plus, CASL requires senders to have a promotional email unsubscribe link in transactional messages.

How email marketing experts define transactional emails

With CAN-SPAM allowing mixed messages and the term “relationship messages” being part of the legal definitions, it’s no wonder some companies struggle to properly identify their transactional messages.

To hopefully bring some clarity to things, here’s how our consultants talk about transactional emails with our clients:

“If you’re wondering if a message is transactional,” says Daniel Deneweth, Head of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle Marketing Consulting, “ask yourself this: Would a person call to complain or separately request the information if they didn’t receive the email message?”

That’s the very definition of critical and essential messaging, which is the spirit of what a transactional email is supposed to be.

Goff suggests to her clients marketing inside the U.S. to ask themselves if a “recipient reasonably interpreting” the email would think it was transactional. That’s how CAN-SPAM talks about mixed messages. “In the U.S., brands must strike a balance with transactional messages between tapping the sales potential of these emails and the risk of legal action,” she says. “If a reasonable recipient doesn’t feel a message is transactional, it most likely isn’t.”

Don’t let that definition give you false comfort because consumer expectations for email marketing have shifted dramatically over time. After all, over the past two decades, consumers have expanded the definition of spam to include email they no longer want from brands for which they opted in to receive promotional messages.

Which messages are most often misclassified as transactional

While companies correctly classify most of their messages as either promotional or transactional, some messages routinely mix them up. Here are some promotional messages that our consultants have found routinely misclassified as transactional:

Abandonment triggers. These messages are triggered when a person abandons a web session, shopping cart, or checkout process.

Welcome messages. When someone signs up to receive promotional campaigns from a brand, the welcome message that follows is by its very nature promotional—or at least it should be. These welcomes should be asking subscribers to do something that’s high-value, not simply confirming that they signed up successfully.

Product review requests. While this clearly is about a transaction, there’s little to no benefit to the customer, and it’s not required to complete a transaction. These emails are promotional.

Short-supply, re-order, and replenishment campaigns. While these are triggered based on a past purchase and how much time it takes for the consumable product to be used up, the purpose of these campaigns is to generate additional sales, not to service the previous sale.

“Often, the reason to send those emails as transactional is to avoid including an unsubscribe link in order to reduce list attrition,” says Sullivan. “This can have the opposite effect, aggravating users who want to opt out of promotional messages, forcing them to use the complaint button in the absence of an unsubscribe link. And if there’s any chance a message could be legally ruled as promotional when it was sent as transactional, the fines can be significant.”

A list of common transactional emails

While some transactional emails are broadcast, many are triggered. Transactional emails are well represented in our Automated Campaign Ideas to Explore checklist. In fact, 50 of the more than 110 automated campaigns identified in the checklist are transactional, each of which are flagged with an asterisk.

Use that checklist to help build out your automated campaigns within Oracle Responsys, which gives you powerful and intelligent tools to help you react to your customers’ behaviors and guide them along their customer journeys.

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Need help with your transactional emails or other email marketing needs? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a Database Management & Compliance Services team to help you follow the law and a Campaign Automation Services team to help you optimize your triggered campaigns. To learn more, reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.

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3 ways retailers can build customer loyalty through a frictionless and flexible approach

Consumers’ choices and expectations are changing due to shifts in their shopping behaviors. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, a McKinsey report found that three out of four consumers changed stores and brands. They spent less money on discretionary items like clothing and more on “essentials” like home furnishings. The same report also noted that half of consumers plan to continue their new habits, such as restaurant curbside pickup.

Keeping this in mind, consider rewarding consumers for their new shopping behaviors and preferences by trying these three approaches to customer loyalty.

1. Maximize engagement with a data-driven, cross-channel strategy

Recognize and reward customers through multichannel marketing using tools and processes to analyze customers and their behaviors. For example, collect customer data across all touchpoints and channels by adopting a loyalty program like Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement. These programs reward customers when they buy from a brand in store and online and complete engagement activities, such as surveys.

Also, enhance the mobile experience. The use of mobile devices grew during the height of the global health pandemic in 2020, which presented retailers with a huge opportunity. A June 2020 Ericsson Mobility Report noted that the time people spent connected to mobile broadband went up an average of an hour per day based on a survey of smartphone users from 11 different countries. When you make your customer loyalty program accessible via mobile, you can reach customers on a device they’re already using, which makes it easier and more convenient for them to participate and engage with your brand. Take a look at what Vitamix did.

2. Highly personalize experiences to boost customer loyalty

BCG and Google recently conducted a customer survey in which respondents shared that they were 110% more likely to add additional items to their baskets and 40% more likely to spend more than they planned if they had a highly personalized shopping experience. When asked to rate a particular retailer, customers ranked companies 20% higher when the level of personalization was high vs. low. Popular brands like cosmetic company tarte realized the value of this when analyzing their loyalty program data: repeat clients made up a fifth of their customer base and about half of their revenue.

Brands that map out the customer journey can create highly personalized customer experiences. This initial step may help you figure out key touchpoints for your customers as well as identify how you can customize each interaction to minimize friction and add value. Focus on a new customer’s journey so you can shape your brand’s messaging and offer strategies early to build long-term loyalty. Analyze shifts you notice with ongoing customers so you can try a new, creative approach.

Consider mapping out how you can apply the loyalty program data you collected to every customer interaction to create highly personalized customer experiences. Fill the gap left by traditional in-person experiences during this time of social distancing and innovate ways to connect with shoppers and recreate in-store experiences. For instance, augmented reality can give consumers the chance to interact with products they are assessing, and online chat can help fill the void of in-person interactions.

3. Map the customer experience throughout the journey

Identify the pain points you’ll need to solve throughout the customer journey by determining what customers think and feel—in addition to what they are doing at each step. According to Wharton Baker Retailing Center and WisePlum, customers who experienced problems while shopping were 35% less loyal than those who conducted business problem-free. Leading retailers aim to solve pain points by providing convenience and an incentive to spend more and purchase more frequently. For this reason, consider offering contactless return policies and extending support channels across phone, email, and social media.

In addition, subscription-based models can give customers the opportunity to obtain greater value and convenience from a brand through exclusive benefits like free shipping. These are perks that you can either offer for free or at a premium to loyalty members in exchange for signing up and spending with the brand. Both loyalty programs and subscription-based models provide retailers the opportunity to collect insights over time to help inform their acquisition and retention strategies.

Building customer loyalty involves thoughtful and positive customer interactions at each touchpoint throughout their purchasing journey. When you design and implement activities that build customer loyalty, incorporate data, strategy, and optimization, you will likely see a return on your investment.

Discover more ways to adjust to changes within the retail industry in a competitive landscape.

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Personalize customer experiences in real-time with Oracle Infinity Behavioral Intelligence

The customer experience (CX) professional’s imperative

What’s a CX professional supposed to do? Focus on the customer. Create delightful experiences for them. Personalize those experiences. Send relevant and helpful messages––and send them at the right time. But don’t send too many. Automate it all. And do it now.

These things help us get the customer experience right and make every customer interaction matter. This is easier said than done, and disconnected data leads to fragmented customer experiences including: misaligned marketing and service organizations, broken fulfillment processes, and unmet customer expectations.

Connecting the data dots

Connected data, on the other hand, helps provide personalized experiences that are authentic, context-aware, and empathetic. That’s why Oracle Advertising and CX is bringing together customer data and processes to provide exceptional experiences across marketing, sales, service, commerce, and advertising. You get a complete view of every customer interaction, no matter how, when, or where they engage. And use that information and insight to deliver the right message at each touchpoint and deliver great customer experiences.

Personalize your customer interactions in-flight

In our latest quarterly Innovation Showcase, we show how to apply intelligence to your data by capturing relevant context and making your customers feel engaged and loyal from each interaction. Within marketing, we highlighted two innovations, one of which we’ll focus on: real-time intelligence and personalization with Oracle Infinity Behavioral Intelligence.

Oracle Infinity makes it easy for marketers to turn behavioral data into action and deliver relevant customer experiences quickly and with self-serve use—requiring less IT involvement. Customer behavioral data is streamed into Oracle Infinity, then artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning derive intelligence from that data.

Next, intelligence and customer data is sent in milliseconds for activation, for instance delivering a personalized in-session website experience through Oracle Infinity or personalized emails through your marketing automation or campaign management systems. Oracle Infinity also provides testing tools, including heatmaps, to determine the best website or app experiences for your customers.

Below are some examples of actions you can take to deliver personalized customer experiences.

 

You can then set filters and rules to deliver the right tailored experiences through the digital channel you specify.

The in-session website or app experiences and emails the customer receives can include custom real-time product, content, or offer recommendations. You can even set recommendations to only show products you specify as in-stock.

Oracle Infinity simplifies connecting the all the dots to create a seamless, unified marketing experience. Our advanced algorithms provide intelligence and streamlines use of customer behavioral data to deliver authentic, tailored customer experiences in real time.

Learn more about our recent innovations, or read blog posts covering recent updates in advertising, service, sales, and marketing.

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4 commonly neglected areas to spotlight in your next email marketing audit

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your email marketing program—rushing to get the next campaign out. It’s hard work! But if you’re on auto-pilot, you might neglect several strategic and structural areas of your program. While your marketing technology stack is advancing with new features, your marketing programs might not be.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s time to conduct an audit of your email marketing stack. Here’s a checklist that can help you identify areas that may need attention.

1. Managing your martech stack

The marketing technology landscape is constantly evolving. Not only are new offerings constantly coming to the market, but all your existing technologies are evolving as well. Assess these areas:

• New functionality. Are you making the best use of the features and functionality offered by your existing martech stack? At Oracle, we release new functionality and other improvements every quarter that help our customers do their jobs more easily and serve their customers better. Are you up to date on the latest releases for Oracle Responsys and Oracle Eloqua?
• Functionality gaps. Do you have gaps in your current functionality? Are there third-party apps or services that can fill them?
• Data availability. Is your data set up for success? Centralizing data and having the right access can help your marketing technology platform perform at a higher level.
• Validating changes. Whenever you add or start using new functionality, test to validate the effectiveness of your investment and identify where other enhancements can be made.

2. Fully leveraging automation

While marketing automation is a highly effective approach to campaign management, a “set it and forget it” mindset can be costly. Your automated campaigns are living and breathing campaigns that often impact your customers for years and typically generate high returns on investment (ROI). You need to regularly check on them. Here are some areas to evaluate:

• Regular quality assurance. Automated campaigns need maintenance. Otherwise, you end up with outdated copy, broken links, broken rendering, and other problems that seriously impact your customer’s experience.
• Regular optimization. Broadcast and segmented email campaigns are A/B tested at much higher rates than triggered campaigns even though updates to automated campaigns have longer-lasting effects and generate higher ROIs. When optimizing your automated campaigns, consider low, medium, and high level-of-effort improvements.
• Seasonal updates. Many automations can benefit from messaging and imagery changes that speak to the seasonal needs of your customers. For instance, during November and December, a retailer’s welcome email program could greet new subscribers with holiday imagery, direct them to gift-buying guides, and alert them to order-by deadlines. Consider creating a regular schedule of seasonal updates to your triggered campaigns.
• New automations. Building out a stable of optimized automated campaigns adds to your competitive advantage. Should any of your existing automations be segmented? Here’s a checklist of 110+ automated campaign ideas to explore.

3. Refreshing creative and improving workflows

Anytime your company updates the look and feel of its website or mobile app, that should automatically trigger a refresh of your email marketing creative. Beyond that, it’s important to implement updates that address email’s unique challenges and cater to your email subscribers’ needs. Consider the following:

• Inbox rendering changes. Inbox providers and devices are constantly evolving. Those changes can affect how your emails render and function across email clients.
• Inbox rendering enhancements. In addition to keeping up with changes in code support at the various inbox providers, improve your subscriber experience with design changes that keep up with current trends. For example, optimizing email for dark mode and improving email accessibility with inclusive design are two major focal points.
• A/B test design changes. Over time, campaigns need to be reviewed, assessed, and refined. Most brands do major redesigns of their emails at least every 12 months, but try to A/B test smaller changes regularly to collect insights that will inform those major redesigns.
• Add more personalization. Your customers expect email content tailored to them. Whether it’s through traditional personalization or driven by machine learning or AI, adding dynamic data will generally improve performance and customer satisfaction.
• Streamline email production. Having a clearly defined email development and approval process will help minimize disruptions. Having consistent and controlled templates will facilitate faster production and time to market. Many of our clients have implemented modular email architectures, which have reduced email build times for them by 25% to 40%.

4. Improving marketing performance

Your audience will change and so will their behaviors. Keep a close eye on the performance of your campaigns and segments. Review these areas:

• Assess campaign performance. How are your key performance indicators like conversion rates, campaign revenue, and revenue per subscriber trending? How are your channel health indicators like opens and clicks performing year over year? If you do see problems, identify the root cause of your performance issues to put the appropriate fixes in place.
• Measure audience engagement. An engaged customer is a valuable customer. Review what proportion of your database has engaged with your emails by looking at the percentage that has opened or clicked at least one of your email campaigns in the past 90, 180, 360, and 720 days. Review your strategies for managing your inactive subscribers. At what point are you suppressing your inactive contacts? How are you trying to reengage them and move your contacts up the ladder of engagement?
• Messaging mix assessment. Look at what proportion of your emails are batch-and-blast broadcast emails versus segmented versus triggered and transactional. Then review the performance of those different buckets. Your triggered communications may perform better, but how much time and energy are you investing in those? Can you reallocate resources from one bucket to another?

Shining a Spotlight

This email marketing audit checklist is exactly what we follow when working with our clients. We call it a Spotlight, and we find that clients who conduct them and act on the results perform significantly better over the next year.

For example, we used this email marketing audit approach to help a global telecommunications company make better use of their Eloqua platform and start work on implementing an account-based management (ABM) strategy. The audit identified several potential improvements, entailing database hygiene, data enhancement, lead score models, and reporting. In one case, there was a lead score model that hadn’t been reviewed in more than two years. It didn’t reflect their current campaign calendar nor the increase in web-based events. We restructured that model using a persona-based approach and it identified $4.2 million worth of new opportunities in just one month.

We also worked with a financial services company to do a performance analysis across customer campaigns at different stages in their lifecycle. We identified some simple improvements, including opportunities to use existing data to personalize campaigns. In total, the changes represented an estimated additional $7 million in program revenue, which the team is currently working toward.

Those are just two examples of the compelling results you can find when you take the time to do an annual email marketing audit. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your program, but it’s important to make time for strategic reviews so you can continue to grow.

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Need help auditing your digital marketing program? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds around the world ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including Analytic & Strategic Services, Creative Services, and Performance Reporting Services teams to help you review your program, identify improvements, and help you execute them. To learn more, reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.

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4 marketing innovations that will supercharge your customer experiences

Great customer experiences don’t happen on their own. 76% of customers expect the companies they do business with to understand their needs. Our latest innovations in data, content, and intelligence help marketers deliver more personalized experiences at scale. By connecting these capabilities, customers can receive personalized offers when and where they want. As marketers today are increasingly tasked to do more with less, it’s paramount their experience is easy, connected, and prescriptive.

Digital marketers need help to:

• Leverage and continuously enhance customer data for micro-targeting
• Centralize and optimize content creation, collaboration, and delivery
• Automate personalization for real-time offers
• Make the best decisions regarding campaigns and channels

Here are four highlights I’m thrilled to share from Oracle Marketing.

 

Future-proof customer data

At the intersection of marketing, data, and content, top marketers can segment, target, and deliver messages and offers.

They’re leveraging robust customer data platforms (CDPs), like Oracle Unity, to manage customer profiles and intelligence using data from numerous channels across the customer lifecycle. With the elimination of 3rd party cookies and mobile advertising IDs, marketers are left with an immediate need to build robust 1st party profiles and uncover ways to supplement and grow those profiles over time.

Companies can leverage solutions including Oracle DataFox or Oracle Advertising to enrich account and contact information. Identity management and resolution help marketers to connect unknown data with known profiles to ensure master profiles are up to date.

Engage beyond a single purchase

In addition to data enrichment, marketers can also engage customers and prospects through loyalty programs. For example, Oracle CrowdTwist not only contains information about customer preferences, purchase history, status, or points as part of its loyalty programs, but it also enables marketers to collect new information about customers via profiles and surveys continuously. With this rich information, marketers can better segment and target customers with personalized programs.

I’m proud to share that Forrester recently named Oracle CrowdTwist a “Leader” in The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Solutions, Q2 2021 among 14 loyalty solutions. Six CrowdTwist customers also recently made Newsweek and Statista’s list of America’s Best Loyalty Programs of 2021. This recognition proves these solutions are instrumental in building comprehensive customer profiles and creating connected experiences that engage and nurture customers beyond a single transaction.

Streamline content creation

Data doesn’t work on its own. Content is key, yet it can be difficult for marketers to manage high volumes of content and videos for marketing campaigns. Today, with more focus on original and user-generated content, marketing teams are struggling to deliver consistent messaging across the entire customer journey. According to Gartner, marketing teams dedicate about 30% of their budgets to content creation.

Oracle Content Management’s advanced video creation and content management solutions enable marketers to deliver content for increased engagement easily. Our video creation capabilities provide the tools to create, edit, curate, and manage videos, scale their delivery across campaigns and channels, and reduce content creation costs.

 

In addition, our blog creation wizard streamlines content creation processes and workflows with a step-by-step wizard, the new content calendar to improve planning and collaboration across teams, and scheduled publishing capabilities give marketers control over when and where a piece of content gets published. With an efficient content management solution, marketers can focus on maximizing the use of their existing content by incorporating it into other channels such as email, mobile, or web, and developing content on additional mediums such as video to reach audiences in more engaging ways.

Intelligence: Personalize and prescribe outcomes

Marketers are often bogged down by the need to iterate on existing campaigns. The cycle of analyzing and editing can be extremely tedious. They need a way to get predicted results to optimize and personalize before launch.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools enable marketers to:

• Predict campaign and channel results
• Make informed decisions about the best content to deliver
• Determine optimal frequency and cadence for your target audience
• Develop lead scoring models without the need for manual tuning

Successful personalization leverages data and content and requires intelligence to help marketers deliver relevant experiences in real-time. Oracle Marketing provides marketers with the tools that predict and recommend relevant channels and offers that will achieve the best results for your audience.

To deliver the most compelling campaigns, the ability to react and iterate in real-time is crucial. Oracle’s latest innovations in intelligence enable marketers to determine the propensity for a customer to take a specific action on a site, as well as their readiness to buy. Additionally, marketers can understand the predicted outcomes of campaigns and programs before publishing, allowing you to send the most engaging campaigns and content to your audience from the start.

What’s next

By leveraging efficient, intelligent technology, marketers can quickly adapt to the evolving market conditions and deliver relevant, connected experiences for customers across the entire lifecycle. It’s time to evaluate how we’re using data, optimizing content, and adopting intelligence to create a more personalized experience for our customers.

These latest innovations help savvy marketers achieve that.

To learn more about the latest product enhancements and releases across Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, visit oracle.com/cx/innovations.

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Attention cross-channel marketers: Oracle Maxymiser launches visual editor for Android

The mobile share of global online traffic continues to outgrow that of desktop devices. Many countries across the world are already considered “mobile first,” with our pocket computers being much more accessible than tablets and desktops. With a growing number of customers interacting with businesses through handheld devices, it’s paramount to optimize your mobile app experience and craft a seamless, cross-channel marketing experience.

Oracle Maxymiser has offered Native App Testing for years for both iOS and Android. But with a recent surge in app testing and increased uptake in the use of our Software Development Kits (SDKs), we recently added Android visual editing to our portfolio, along with our visual editor for iOS.

The new Android visual editor enables marketers to easily:

• Update user interface (UI) elements visually with a WYSIWYG interface
• Extend a cross-channel marketing campaign using JSON code - See updates in real time on the app and within the UI
• Publish and update without going through the app store process

 

Manual vs. no app store approach

Marketers can use the native app testing capabilities of Oracle Maxymiser’s to run consistent personalized experiences across both web and mobile devices, test new features and functionality to improve the in-app experience, or tailor content and offers to specific audiences. We have two approaches available:

• Manual approach: This uses variants that are coded into the application and released to users through a general app store release. In this case, Maxymiser is used as a test decision and reporting engine.
• No app store approach: This provides a way to build A/B tests for native apps, enabling remote updates to the app. Variants can be published from Maxymiser without requiring a new update via an app release cycle.

However, the no app store approach for both iOS and Android does come with some limitations due to the ecosystem in which apps are built. This means that code cannot be injected remotely.

Using the Oracle Maxymiser SDKs, you can modify UI elements, but let’s take a closer look at which approach might be better suited to your specific needs:

For more information regarding our SDKs, get started with these files to learn more about Native App Testing for your cross-channel marketing campaign.

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4 tips to streamline content creation in Oracle Content Management

Engaging experiences require fresh content. And streamlining your content creation process is important both for contributor teams who are focused on productivity and occasional users who require an intuitive interface.

To help content creators easily develop and manage content, involve them early in Content Management System (CMS) enhancement projects and consider their needs during content model and contribution tool design and configuration. Focus on the content they’ll have to create most often—product collateral, news articles, events, guides, stories, etc. And generally, the simpler the content model, the easier it will be for creators to understand it and create the content you need.

Once you have a first draft of your content model, take time to review it internally. Here are the areas I focus on when reviewing a content model:

• Content Types: How many content types do I have (e.g., videos, images, collateral, etc.)? Is the number manageable? Would a business user understand what each one represents by its name?
• Fields: How many fields does each content type have? Do they make sense? Can they be grouped?
• References: How many reference fields are used to explicitly relate content items? Is there a potential to create circular references that might complicate content creation, approvals, or publishing?

Once you’re satisfied that the model makes sense functionally, create a repository and some sample content and validate the contribution experience with your business users. We offer several content management tools to help in this journey, making it easy to create the right content model and ensure that your business users can easily create the content you need for a successful project.

1. Optimize your content types

The simplest way to start optimizing your content types is to group fields. Content fields can be grouped under logical titles to give structure to the content type. For instance, if you’re modeling a product with a set of product details, you can group these fields under the title "Product Characteristics" to indicate to contributors that these fields are related. This will help when users create and edit content through the web interface.

If the information you need to model is more complex, Oracle Content Management offers an "Embedded Content" field type. An Embedded Content field allows you to store structures and lists of content elements as a single field.

Imagine we're storing information on cameras, where different product lines have varying sets of characteristics. An Embedded Content field called “Product Characteristics” would allow users to manage different sets of data for different products in a more flexible way. Another example might be an “Address” field, where the various address elements are managed together in a single field, but each element can still be styled and presented independently.

Another best practice when modeling content types is to avoid asking users to assign multiple versions of an image or videos to a content type. Oracle Content Management makes it easy for you to manage multiple renditions for the same image as a single asset. It also allows you to define custom media types, like product images (e.g., 800x800 / PNG format) versus marketing images (e.g., 400x200 / 96 dpi / JPEG format) so you use the right images for different parts of your content model.

2. Leverage taxonomies to relate content types

Taxonomies are powerful tools for organizing and relating content. They provide an alternative to reference fields when creating relationships between assets. Whereas a reference field defines a tightly coupled dependency between two assets, taxonomies support a more loosely coupled relationship between assets that can evolve over time.

Oracle Content Management allows you to create one or more taxonomies to support a multi-faceted relationship between content items. For example, a How-to article on getting the most from your new camera could simultaneously be categoried by:

• One or more products in a Product Catalog Taxonomy
• Multiple target audiences in an Audience Taxonomy
• Specific blogs and blog topics in the Blog Taxonomy

Taxonomies reduce the need to define every relationship explicitly when creating content. For example, instead of defining related products to my camera, I can categorize it in a way that allows users to find other cameras that have been categorized similarly. I can also add taxonomy categories to digital assets like images and videos as I upload them. This instantly creates a relationship with corresponding product or products, without having to explicitly relate them to the individual products.

 

Taxonomies are designed to represent your business and, as such, they will likely evolve over time. Content can be categorized any number of times, even after it has been approved and published. Content management systems like Oracle’s offer native AI capabilities to make it easy to recommend and recategorize content as your taxonomies evolve.

3. Enhance the user interface with custom fields and forms

Oracle Content Management dynamically generates content creation forms based on your content model. Each field in your model can be associated with one of several predefined field editors. For instance, if you’re creating a content item for a new camera and one of the content fields is the camera brand, you might model this as a text field, and decide to associate either the Text Box editor where the contributor would type out the name of the brand or a Single Select Menu editor for users to select from among the pre-populated list of brands you sell.

For many customers, leveraging these predefined field editors is sufficient to provide an intuitive, productive interface for creating content. For more nuanced customer requirements, Oracle Content Management provides several alternatives, including custom field editors and custom forms.

Custom field editors allow you to make simple improvements to standard content forms without having to rethink the entire contribution experience. Back to cameras––you might create a custom field editor with the set of brand icons that users can click on instead of a drop-down list. Another option would be to create a Text Box field editor with autocomplete functionality. A user starting to type in a brand name, would see a list of valid brands to select from that contain the text they've written. You can find more information and sample custom field editors in our documentation.

 

Custom forms to create and edit form content are also available in Oracle Content Management. These are particularly useful when your content type is complex, either because of the number of fields or because you are storing JSON in Embedded Content fields. In our camera example, we might want to manage a large list of product attributes for each camera as well as text variants for different channels. Using a custom form, you can guide users through the entire creation process from start to finish.

Custom forms also allow you to incorporate dynamic feedback and help authors as they create content. For instance, a custom form could be used to give users real-time SEO analysis (e.g., read time, tag extraction, suggested links) on the text they're writing. You can find more information and a sample custom form in our documentation.

  4. Create content from custom applications

Oracle Content Management offers a powerful set of Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs for creating and publishing content from any custom application on any device. And, this solution also enables you to reuse standard and custom content forms when building custom web applications leveraging the Embeddable UI capabilities (specifically, the Content Item Editor Embed UI).

With the Embed UI, you can build a custom interface that combines content creation with other user activities in a completely branded experience. You can accomplish this using a headless framework like React, the Site Builder tools that come with Oracle Content Management, or any other browser-based technology.

This is useful when building a custom interface that manages not only the content related to cameras, but also information coming from the ERP, the PIM, and other systems. Find more information on embedding the Content Item Editor in our documentation.

Why a content management system is a good investment

With a CMS like Oracle Content Management, you can incorporate user feedback to finetune your content model and contribution forms, maximizing usability and productivity for your content creators.

To learn more, watch our most recent Quarterly Update on Innovations for Advertising and CX.

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