Customized marketing in real time

In today's sales scenarios, digital marketing is becoming increasingly important.

After companies have optimized purchasing processes down to the last detail, the focus today is primarily on an individual customer approach and an immediate response to current customer behavior.

Very clear goal:

Tapping further sales potential.

Customers want to receive the right information, tailored to their needs, at the right time via the right channel.

To this end, for example, new channels such as push messages will be integrated into marketing activities and services such as search or recommendations will be further personalized.

The desire and demand of companies to do real-time, customer-specific marketing has grown strongly with solutions that must overcome three key challenges:

First: Collect marketing-relevant data across channels.

Second: evaluate them in near real time.

Third: comprehensively automate marketing processes in digital channels.

Such an integrated tool to support direct, tailored and automated customer communication is also offered by SAP with the Hybris Marketing Cloud.

The solution is based on Hana and can be divided into six functional areas:

1. Customer and Consumer Profiling forms the core of the solution. Events and customer interactions from different channels are brought together centrally and customer profiles are created. SAP data, e.g. from Hybris Commerce, ERP and CRM, as well as data from social networks and other solutions can be integrated.
2. Segmentation and Campaign Management includes the timely evaluation of data and the customer segmentation based on it, as well as the automated execution or initiation of multi-level marketing activities, for example via e-mail, SMS or call centers.
3. Commerce Marketing refers to the integration with Hybris Commerce. In the direction of Hybris Marketing, this enables detailed recording of click behavior, including the relevant product and transaction data in the click context, using a service for replicating customer, product, and order data, among other things. In the other direction, personalized content and campaigns can be played out in near real time.
4. Marketing Analytics combines the reporting functions of the solution. The obligatory dashboards and an app for marketers are available.Deeper insights into campaign success can be gained through various analysis options for individual campaigns and channels.
5. Marketing Resource Management essentially bundles functions for budget and campaign planning, content and campaign creation, and campaign controlling.
6. In addition, under Marketing Lead Management and Loyalty Management, options are offered for connecting processes in sales, via integration with Cloud for Customer, and as part of customer loyalty programs.

The exciting field of creating content and campaigns in a collaborative creation process with reviews, approvals, annotations and project management support is currently not yet part of the standard features of the cloud solution.

However, the extensive integration of customer, product, and transaction data from the SAP world in particular offers far-reaching opportunities to incorporate this data in a targeted and innovative way into the customer-specific design of shopping experiences.

Overall, SAP has found an answer to a trend that should be of particular interest to existing SAP customers and covers a factor that will be critical to success in modern sales scenarios in the future.