Do you want to join the future of intelligent marketing and commerce? Marketing and commerce technology has experienced a renaissance over the last several years with the explosion of cloud-based point solutions that are easy to try and buy. Many provide quickly attainable lift in the specific areas you’re looking to expand on, or perhaps aid with reducing inefficiencies in your business. While providing value on their own, you may be wondering if the sum of the individual parts could ever come together to multiply impact on ROI.
They can. Let me explain.
When your business applications operate independently, while simultaneously adding to the ways that people interact with your brand, you’ll end up with disjointed silos of data, which means you’ll have an incomplete picture of your most valuable asset – your customers. And that’s only half the conundrum. Knowing your customers and their journey in relation to your brand is important. However, being equipped with the right tools that enable you to skillfully choose the most meaningful, omni-channel orchestration is also key if you want to optimize customer relations and profitability.
For example, if I visit your website on my laptop and start reading reviews of a particular product, and then abandon a shopping cart, you might send a compelling follow-up email that helps nurture me back to that product page. If, however, I’m on Facebook on my iPad a few minutes later and am presented with a coupon from your store and act upon it, would you still send me that nurture email?
We’d like to say, “No, we’ll suppress that email. Instead, we’ll send them a personalized thank-you email about their purchase and offer complementary products which other customers find valuable.”
But is it true? Can you really do that? In this example, there are three channels of communication: website, email, and social. There also are at least as many applications working behind the scenes to pull this off. All must function together and have real-time awareness of one another to deliver the right experience – the type we all hope for as customers, but rarely observe.
We can all relate to the present woes of how brands (including our favorites) don’t always treat us in a one-to-one manner, but how can they get there?
It starts with an open ecosystem. IBM’s open ecosystem strategy has been a cornerstone of our business ideology and will continue to drive how we work with our great partners.
We provide our clients with a breadth of highly performing cloud and on-premise solutions. To make these offerings truly transformative, we recently released a cloud-based interface that intelligently binds our applications together. It’s called the Universal Behavior Exchange, or UBX for short.
UBX is the real-time system that keeps every application in sync in the above example. It’s not just for IBM systems to communicate efficiently, but rather, it’s a UI-based, drag-and-drop way to connect all your applications – both the ones you license as well as your internal tools. It’s an open system and we are signing up new partners every week to deliver the world’s most advanced and loved third-party applications to our clients.
This vision for an open ecosystem resonates. One of our clients recently enabled UBX and is now much more strategic about their spend with MediaMath by targeting audiences that coincide with their location-based email campaigns. With the IBM Marketing Cloud and UBX in the mix, they’re automating the measurement of individual engagement, transferring the behavioral-based audiences to MediaMath, and improving their paid media strategy across all channels. In the end, customers are seeing and experiencing more of what they want – and that’s what multiplying your impact is all about.
Whether you’re a current or prospective client or partner, I encourage you to take note and consider what we’ve discussed. Don’t let your solutions deliver disjointed experiences to your customers. Join the future of intelligent marketing and commerce, and start multiplying!
This post originally appeared on IBM’s Commerce Blog.