Bluecore, the leading intelligence and decision enablement platform for commerce, announced its entry into the Salesforce Partner Program in support of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This partnership with Salesforce will power individualized interactions by unifying customer and catalog data over the Commerce Cloud.
In its blog post on February 1, Bluecore announced that it is launching its all-new decisioning platform for commerce at eTail West 2017. Its decision to join Salesforce Partner Program will help marketers churn out the maximum value from the yet-to-be-announced decisioning platform.
Bluecore for E-Commerce
“At Bluecore, we power individualized interactions by unifying customer and catalog data. This falls in line with our legacy of automating unique triggered emails for retailers like Reebok, Gap, and Cabela’s – but now we’re going deeper.”
“eTail West 2017 will be the debut event for Bluecore’s decisioning platform, the connective tissue in your marketing stack – effortlessly integrating to connect sources of data, like the CRM and eCommerce platform, with channel technologies that communicate directly with your customers. In doing so, the decisioning platform processes massive data sets in seconds, making it immediately actionable for marketers to build audiences (which could include your most valuable customers, discount-buyers, customers who are about to churn, etc.), and create campaigns for email, social, search, onsite and more.”
Bluecore’s integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a unique opportunity for E-commerce clients in implementing Bluecore’s dynamic technology across their storefronts in minutes via Commerce Cloud’s cartridge system. Currently, the Bluecore platform offers immaculate personalization with a simple point-and-click interface, helping marketers capture powerful, real-time behavioral and catalog data. E-commerce marketers can now run fully-personalized, high-performance campaigns across all marketing channels with a very refined Mobile-First approach.
“Everything and everyone is becoming more connected and smarter than ever before,” said Alan Bunce, VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce.
“By joining the Salesforce Partner Program in support of Commerce Cloud, Bluecore is joining the world’s largest community of born-in-the-cloud partners who are committed to innovating on the Salesforce platform and driving customer success.”
The deep site integration with Bluecore allows Salesforce Commerce Cloud users to unify data from onsite customer browse search and purchase activity, along with product catalog activity like price fluctuations and inventory changes without product feeds. It not only allows for more personalized collaborations and timely communications, but it can also help retailers generate highly targeted audiences for precision targeting across additional channels.
Bluecore, which is rated as one of the fastest and most efficient data integration platforms for Commerce, offers 100+ million customer-product interactions filtered through 10+ proprietary collaborative predictive tools. By joining the Salesforce Partner Program — the industry’s largest “born in the cloud” partner program, Bluecore Partner Program will be catering to larger user base, helping them build successful businesses that leverage the Salesforce platform.
Dropbox has attained the Golden Metric of SaaS revenue, reigniting the interest around its possible IPO plans in 2017. Two weeks ago, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston claimed its revenue growth rate touched $1 Billion in 2016. The projections are based on Dropbox’s quarterly results for 2016-2017. If Dropbox manages to churn $250 million every quarter, it is safe to announce its annual run rate (ARR) is $1 Billion. In last quarter of 2016, the SaaS firm raised $102.8 million in revenue.
Talking at an event in San Francisco, CEO Drew Houston shared that his SaaS platform enjoys the loyalty of 500 million users and over 200,000 B2B clients. While most of the revenue is “self-serve”, Dropbox also has enterprise sales support. A Large share of its revenue, however, comes from customers signing for Dropbox suite directly from its website and app-based services.
However, according to Business Insider, Dropbox is ‘not in any rush’ to go public. According to a post on diginomica, Dennis Woodside, Chief Operating Officer at Dropbox, said –
“If you have a business that is growing and making money then you can be happy either public or private, so it can be an implementation detail or involve access to capital markets. But yes, (filing IPO) can also be a distraction and draw your focus away from the long term. We have been able to get some good shareholders, like Fidelity, which have been shareholders for a while. So we have been able to get financing from the private markets and to get investment early in the company’s progression.”
Compared to 2016 – the driest spell for IPO in MarTech, market experts are optimistic about firms filing for IPOs more aggressively in 2017. AppsDynamics and Snapchat have already confirmed their IPO documents, while Salesforce continues to keep its IPO cards close to its chest. Spotify, Cloudera Yext, and Okta are other firms that have gathered the IPO momentum for 2017. By announcing the $1 Billion moment publicly, Dropbox not only propelled itself to the top of the SaaS league but also stands at the healthiest vantage point for an IPO in 2017.
To put things into perspective for a late-2017 IPO, Dropbox CEO announced plenty of incremental additions and upgrades to its enterprise file-sharing and collaboration toolkit. The most recent introductions – Dropbox Paper app and Dropbox Smart Sync, were timed in tandem with the announcement of the ‘Big Billion Dollar” news.
The $1 billion is a big thing for any SaaS company, especially for the ones with no acquisition strategy in place. While Salesforce and Microsoft are evidently on acquiring spree, nothing realistic is visible on paper for Dropbox. Undoubtedly, Dropbox has strong enterprise product, but it will require more than just reputation and revenue to attract investors for IPO in 2017.
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“No matter where life takes you: Stay Hungry, Stay Humble, and Stay Appreciative.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]
On Marketing Technology
MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a martech company)
I’m Danny Wajcman, Co-founder and COO of Lucky Orange. The inspiration for starting Lucky Orange came down to the basic need of wanting to better understand what visitors were doing on a website. Lucky Orange co-founder and CTO Brian Gruber and I were just two small business owners fed up with the lack of tools in the market. We quickly discovered we would need either an enterprise-level budget (which we didn’t have) to get all of the features we wanted or use products so complicated that we needed a Ph.D. in data analytics (which we didn’t want to have) to even get started!
So Brian and I decided to create our own product instead. All that we wanted was an easy-to-digest and indisputable way to understand what people were doing on our site…and Lucky Orange was born.
MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
Here’s something to consider – more websites will be created over the next five years than ever before. The importance for people to have access to information is critical, but since we are all multi-taskers, the data needs to be quick, insightful, and actionable. You will continue to see more people going away from long reporting and into simple, easy-to-understand, “push button” visual insights.
MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
Artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and bots are obviously going to be huge factors over the next few years – in fact, we’re already seeing Salesforce Einstein and HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah’s Growthbot making their presences felt. But I think the tech trend that’s going to have the biggest impact over the next several years is going be collaboration and how companies connect the people that drive their businesses as the workforce grows even more mobile, global and geographically remote. Slack, Zoom and Cisco are all making huge strides in this space and we’ve been working hard to make channel sales and marketing more collaborative with our own Co/Labs feature to help companies work more closely with their partners.
MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
One of the biggest challenges is definitely company adoption. A lot of companies spend time vetting new tech vendors before finally deciding on one.
However, where these companies should be spending more time is training team members on how to properly use the new tech. The more team members that use new tech, the more insights you can gain. This training is especially true when you can deploy the technology across departments. This is also helpful because the budget for new tech can be shared across multiple divisions.
MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
We just integrated Slack into our company – it’s been very helpful for cross-team communication.
MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
On a daily basis, we rely on Lucky Orange, Slack, HubSpot, GitHub, and Get Vero (to name a few).
MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
In December, Lucky Orange had the opportunity to launch a full-court digital press to promote our newly-rolled out our Dynamic Heatmaps, the industry’s first fully interactive heatmap overlay. We combined a Product Hunt with social media barrage, press releases, infographics, and speaking engagements (just to name a few). Even though we live in a digital world, too many people still don’t know that conversion optimization technology is available (and affordable), and we had to change that. Our goal was to reach new companies, new industries, and broaden to teams that wouldn’t necessarily be seeing our insights (but should). Between the dramatic increase in sign-ups, engagement, chat, and partnership opportunities, I think it’s safe to say it’s been a success
MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
As I mentioned earlier, as more and more of our daily lives become automated, our tolerance and patience for incoming information continue to shorten. That is why we created a new feature called “Daily Email reports.” The goal was to come up with a way to give you all the wisdom Lucky Orange provides in one single, curated summary that could be delivered straight to your inbox every single day. We get that you may be too busy today to log into your account to view recordings or heatmaps today, and now with the Daily Email reports, you can still get actionable insights quickly.
This Is How I Work
MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Multi-tasker.
MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Lucky Orange, of course…
MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Hire great people and delegate. It may sound simple, but most managers hate giving up control. Utilizing your team members to their fullest will allow you to take on even more, be more productive, and the end results will yield even more value.
MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Do bedtime stories to my three little girls count? If you do not think it is a lot of reading, try putting three kids to bed! It can be up to two hours of reading every night.
MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
No matter where life takes you: Stay Hungry, Stay Humble, and Stay Appreciative.
MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
We are willing to accept feedback and direction. Now, that doesn’t mean we will do what you say or even agree with you, but I will always be open to hearing feedback or suggestions for a pathway. It allows us to make the most informed decisions and end with the best results.
MTS: Thank you Danny! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.
Over the years Danny has developed his passion for marketing and advertising by developing and executing successful branding and selling strategies, while generating new business leads and retaining current clients through excellent communication, effective team management, and through personal and respectful communication with everyone.
A dynamic sales and team leader with a proven track record of success by creating new operational efficiencies, and updating dated sales and account management practices. He encourages open communication, lateral thinking, and an energetic- competitive environment for my teams. His greatest strength and asset is the talent of the team around me.
Lucky Orange is an incredible tool that lets you quickly see who is on your site, monitor their engagement, and then be able to interact with them in many ways. It features:
Live Dashboard
Chat Feature
Heat Map Suite
Visitor Engagement Tracking & Recordings
Visitor Polling
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[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]
The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.
WorkWave, the leading SaaS provider for field service lead management and “last mile” fleet management, has announced the release of indigenously-built marketing automation tool services within its core offering – PestPac. The new WorkWave Marketing integration will enable its customers to track and manage all their leads at one centralized location using intelligent sales and marketing automation processes.
From a MarTech perspective, sales reporting and sales intelligence solutions on mobile integrated through WorkWave Marketing automation will allow companies to leverage Big Data and real-time analytics, improving conversion rates signficantly. The new tool on WorkWave Marketing allows sales and marketing teams dynamically analyze billions of data points – static and dynamic, enabling each member to identify the various scenarios and outcomes based on the client account. By integrating real-time analytics into sales intelligence CRMs, WorkWave users can derive actionable and quantifiable sales insights across the field service ecosystem.
Marketing Automation via WorkWave
“Closing the lead to revenue loop and creating a true end-to-end field service management solution is a game changer for us and our customers,” said Chris Sullens, President and CEO of WorkWave.
“Since acquiring Refgo and ContactUs.com in 2015, we have been hard at work building a set of integrated tools to allow WorkWave customers to tightly manage the sales process, automate marketing and drip email campaigns and to gain full visibility into the growth engine of their businesses. With these tools, WorkWave’s PestPac customers can now calculate the true ROI of all marketing campaigns, both offline or online, without the spreadsheet gymnastics and (the) guessing currently required by third party packages today.”
WorkWave sees the new release as a medium for users to fluently generate optimized ROI from every customer and prospect. Clients can align with diverse customer goals to bring complete and total efficiency to the markets they serve.
“Adding Lead Management and Marketing Automation provides a single vendor solution that eliminates third-party integration headaches for our customers and makes it far easier for them to track and manage key performance metrics across their entire business,” said Malcolm Lewis, senior vice president of WorkWave’s Marketing Solutions.
Marketing Automation via WorkWave
WorkWave, formerly known as Marathon Data, develops software solutions for on-field workers – drivers, pest control inspectors, landscrapers, delivery services and so on. The cloud-based field service management company recently acquired Hawaiian GPS and telematics brand GPS Heroes in December 2016.
The latest announcement on PestPac integration from WorkWave comes just days ahead of the PestPac User Conference, scheduled for March 6-9, 2017, in Las Vegas. As the fastest growing fleet automation software firm, WorkWave offers tightly integrated mobile-first solutions, including WorkWave Service™, ServiceCEO™, WorkWave Marketing™ and ContactUs™.
As the MarTech territory gets more competitive, firms with B2C prospects are leaping forward with their own automation tools and integrations. 2017 is an exciting year for micro-segmentation of the present MarTech ecosystem.
Snaplytics, the foremost analytics and marketing platform for social media insights, has released the most comprehensive survey on Snapchat data. The Snaplytics report combines insights from 500 brands with 24,000+ Snapchat stories and 217,000 Snaps. The purpose of the report is to enable organizations with powerful analytics on how to leverage Snapchat to improve audience reach and engagement at a more “eye level”.
“Snapchat is unique because it allows businesses to connect with people in the moment and offer a different brand experience.” – Thomas Cilius, founder and CEO, Snaplytics.
Cilius added, “It’s the only social network where marketers aren’t seeing a decline in reach. With 161M daily active users on Snapchat, brands are quickly learning this is the go-to outlet because it allows them to engage their brand ambassadors and deliver content that really resonates with people, in real-time.”
In the recent months, Instagram Stories has stolen a major chunk of Snapchat’s audience. However, brand viewership at Snapchat continues be strong, even as B2B companies prefer to tell their brand stories via Snapchat Story.
Snaplytics Cross-conversion Funnel for Snapchat Engagement
via Snaplytics
As brands are still figuring out the best way to incorporate Snapchat into their marketing toolbox, the Snaplytics report offers critical data regarding the experience these 500 brands are having with their Snapchat campaigns –
61% of the content assets posted by brands on Snapchat are videos, which represents 5% increase from the first quarter of 2016.
25% new followers on Snapchat used Snapcodes to complete action, while 9% used Deeplinks.
A Snaphat Story enjoys an open rate of 54.8%; 87.5% of those watch the full Story.
The number of snaps in a story averages around 11 snaps per update.
Consistency in the ongoing activity is the key on Snapchat. Brands post, on average, content two times a week.
Completion rate, or the number of people viewing the whole story, climbed to 88% compared to 84% the previous quarter.
Lessons From Snaplytics report on Snapchat Marketing
According to Piper Jaffray, Snapchat is the go-to audience engagement for marketers targeting millennial population. It beats other social media platforms with a handsome margin, accounting 35% share among the millennial audience.
“It is essential for marketers to be creative and build followers quickly since our research shows that recommendations and calls-to-action made through Snapchat are much stronger than what is accomplished with Facebook or Instagram,” Cilius continued.
The Snaplytics report on Snapchat engagement recommends –
The best approaches to growing a follower base (followers find brands by Username 64% of the time).
Marketers can gain more traction via cross-promotion of content across Twitter, Instagram, Pinterst, Twitter and Facebook.
Youth brands and NGOs focus on creating longer Snapchat Story. Brands prefer posting twice a week, between Wednesday and Saturday, creating a potential to engage audience on Sunday and Monday.
Marketers should identify the “golden ratio” for Snapchat posts. According to the report, 50% of all stories on Snapchat contain six snaps running for less than a minute.
By publishing this report, Snaplytics is offering the first-ever fully comprehensive analysis on Snapchat metrics and trends across industries and channels. The report features case studies from McDonalds Germany, Scary Mommy and BBC One, enabling marketers to learn how users find brands on Snapchat and the success rate of social campaign over the medium.
According to the latest findings, 63% adult mobile users avoid mobile apps because of too many advertisements. The research was carried out by Tutela, the leading Canadian crowdsourcing and analytics monetization platform. The independent study reports mobile users in the US and UK are least likely to pay for apps or extra features on mobile.
“Users are up to four times more likely to favor apps collecting usage statistics (45%) than apps which they have to pay to download (17%) and apps which charge for full functionality (12%).”
“Revenue growth is a huge challenge for the mobile app industry. With thousands of new apps being created every day, users are overwhelmed with choice and can avoid or quickly churn away from apps requiring payments or displaying annoying ads,” says Tom Luke, Vice President of Tutela.
The study assessed 600 adults in the US and UK and was conducted via Google consumer surveys in January 2017. The survey findings reveal the potential of revenue from statistics collection models with 95% of mobile app users saying they would use an app which collects anonymous usage statistics.
Introducing Tutela Wireless Analytics Monetization Model for App Developers
Marketers are increasingly adapting mobile-first strategy to woo customers online, engaging them at multiple touchpoints – social, e-commerce, apps and videos. Despite a boom in mobile app downloads in 2016, developers are yet to hit the jackpot in terms of app monetization.
While most app developers continue to include in-app purchases to bring revenues, advertising on app platforms remains a sordid picture. Expectations from app marketing and the outcome are polarized, largely due to the price tag and the premium upgrades.
Enlightening mobile app developers on how to churn revenues from ad-centric models for apps, Tom says –
“This is where the Wireless Analytics Monetization (WAM) model can come in. Collecting signal strength statistics in the background can help mobile app publishers boost revenue without affecting user experience – while also helping to improve the world’s mobile 4G coverage”.
Going by its own admission, Tutela enables mobile app publishers to earn $100k to $3 million by helping in measuring wireless signal strength statistics around the world. As mobile apps look for enhanced monetizing opportunities, Tutela’s ingeniously built Wireless Analytics Monetization (WAM) can fulfill key app marketing aspects – app downloads, click-rates, app sales and advertising.
Leveraging Annonymous Data Monetization to Improve Revenues
The cardinal focus of any mobile app should be user experience. Mobile app developers are creating responsive, intuitive and AI-powered experiences to promote engagement. However, developers are still unaware of the potential of Anonymous Data Monetization (ADM). Though in its infancy, ADM is a critical factor in maintaining data anonymity, removing the need to do reverse engineering and re-attribution in the future.
via Tutela
By deploying ADM platform, marketers can monetize their app data in the long run, differently from their existing ad revenues. This allows app developers to ramp-up revenues in an incremental order without affecting the engagement with the user.
By partnering with the right ADM platform, app publishers can leverage competitive analytics to improve user experience and churn maximum ROI, even with limited cash and ad budget.
As app marketing moves into Location-based services and immersive experiences, ADM platforms will flourish in 2017- the year MTS reckons as “The Year of Real-time Information and Engagement.”
Every marketer understands the impact of engaging customers on Facebook but lacks the inability to sustain interest through organic and sponsored posts. Conversely, Facebook users are responding more to News Feeds compared to paid marketing content. As consumers are increasingly adopting ad blockers to keep away disruptive ads from spoiling their experiences, marketers have begun to acknowledge the power of Facebook marketing as a key driver in generating consumer engagement, especially in the ‘original content’ category. That’s exactly what Mavrck’s latest report on User-Generated Content intends to showcase through its industry-benchmarking insights on Facebook marketing.
Mavrck, the leading micro-influencer marketing, announced the release of “Facebook User-Generated Content (UGC) Benchmark Report”, a study that compares how engagement levels with both brand-generated posts and user-generated posts changed over the course of 2016. Mavrck’s analysis of News Feed engagement trends also features guidance for marketers on how they can most effectively use Facebook to connect with their intended audiences in 2017.
“In 2016, Facebook made several significant updates to their news feed algorithm to place emphasis on content from friends and family,” said Lyle Stevens, CEO of Mavrck.
“Using our massive dataset of consumer Facebook posts, we were able to determine how these (algorithm) changes impact the way consumers engage with content from friends and family on the social network. This is critical for marketers to understand when considering ways to reach their target audience in the News Feed.”
The report features an analysis of 25 million user-generated Facebook posts published between January 2016 and December 2016, aggregated from the first-party authentication of one million micro-influencers, defined as people with between 500 and 5,000 Facebook friends.
Key Insights from Facebook UGC Benchmark Report
User engagement in 2016 fell compared to 2015
There was a 15.14% decrease in engagements per post in 2016 compared to 2015. Users also saw 11.41% year-over-year decrease in the total number of engagements on their posts.
via Mavrck
Facebook users posted fewer original posts in 2016
Average original posts per user decreased 29.49% in 2016, resulting in lower engagements per user.
UGC containing a “brand” mention improve engagement
UGC that included a brand name generated 6.9x higher engagement than independently marketed brand-generated posts.
Number of Likes, Comments, and Shares weaker in 2016 than in 2015
Compared to 2015 user engagement statistics, 2016 saw an increase of 7.87%, 37.47% and 27.8% decrease in Likes, Comments, and Shares per post.
Likes and Comments rebounded during 2016
Over the course of 2016, there was a 30.7% increase in likes per post and a 19.84% increase in comments per posts. Shares per post decrease by 4.81% over this period.
Broke the 7-month jinx in News Feed engagement
Facebook successfully reversed seven declining months of News Feed. Facebook’s 2016 algorithm changed, which focused on prioritizing both video content and content shared by users, reversing the seven consecutive months of decline in News Feed engagement, occurring between September 2015 and March 2016.
2016 ended on a high note
Users engaged more with each other by the end of 2016 than they did at the beginning of the year. The year saw 26.06% increase in engagement per post between January and December.
User-generated posts drove much higher engagement than brand-generated posts: User-generated content featuring a brand drove 6.9x higher engagement than brand-generated content.
Mavrck’s analysis shows a clear correlation between a user’s influence and the average engagement that user saw per post. On average, the earned engagement rate for users in the 75th influencer percentile was 3.5x higher.
“For marketers, the greatest opportunity to reach your target audience on Facebook is by encouraging existing customers to create user-generated content about your brand, rather than simply publishing and promoting brand-generated content,” commented Stevens.
“With user-generated posts earning 7x more engagement than brand-generated content, I expect to see more companies ramp up their influencer marketing and digital word-of-mouth efforts as factors like ad load come into play this year.”
Mission 2017: Rejig Facebook marketing Efforts to Grow Base of Loyal and Recommending Influencers
via Mavrck
Focus on News Feeds Marketing Strategy
Marketers should expect Facebook to run out of ad space in mid-2017 due to unlimited ad supply. As Facebook’s ad marketplace turns elusive for brand engagement, marketers should plan an alternative marketing strategy, focusing majorly on original content and News Feed posts. Marketers need to make a choice between having “News Feed visibility or being outbid and off-network – buying your CPMs through Facebook’s Audience Network.”
Leverage Influencers within User Community
Facebook users respond to more content when shared among friends and families. According to Adam Mosseri, VP- Product Management, News Feed, “Friends and family come first (on Facebook).”
Facebook’s UGC Benchmark Report recommends marketers to improve engagement with existing customers, offering Loyalty Programs to those who created and shared content via contest entries, product feedback, referrals and social content.
Facebook LIVE and Instagram should inspire marketers to increase the time users engaged with content – posts, photos, videos and News. Collectively, content marketing for Facebook should be informative, educational, inspiring, entertaining and ROI-centric.
The report suggests –
“Prompt users to share exclusive product offers. These are promotional posts that include promo codes and other exclusive promotions that friends & family can redeem. These posts are often transactional, with the customer receiving a mutual incentive of equal or more perceived value (FTC disclosure required).”
Even if Facebook continues to alter its algorithm frequently, UGC-powered social strategy buffers its impact on ad strategy significantly. Facebook marketing initiatives in 2017, powered by MarTech tools to automate and scale customer engagement, will be easier to integrate with existing ad strategy.
Seattle is turning into the cradle of AI revolution. In a recent development, XNOR.ai, a computer-native AI startup has managed to scoop $2.6 million seed funding early this month from Madrona Venture Group. The Seattle-based AI startup intends to utilize the funds to expand its product innovation into MarTech domain, enabling mobile marketers to leverage the power of deep learning across devices. A spin-off from Paul Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, XNOR.ai aims at making state-of-the-art AI capabilities cheaper in coming months.
via XNOR.AI
“Our goal is to make all devices around us smarter,” said Ali Farhadi, CEO and co-founder of XNOR.ai. “Anywhere that requires running AI on the edge is where our technology becomes a key player. It enables new AI-powered apps on phones, handheld devices, wearable devices, AR, VR, drones, automotive, etc.”
“There is a big gap between the demands of AI algorithms — in terms of memory, computation, power — and what we can do on devices around us,” explained Farhadi. “For example, to tag an image with labels on your phone, you need to send the photo into GPU servers. They will process the image and get back to you with the tag. XNOR.ai’s technology empowers devices around us with the power of AI and enables running complex AI algorithms right on the device.”
via XNOR.AI
XNOR.AI is, fundamentally, an ingenious computer-native algorithm that tunes AI models for vision and speech recognition, empowering devices to operate practically anywhere independently without relying on external servers and GPUs. This brings an unprecedented level of responsiveness and customer engagement on devices featuring XNOR.ai.
An interesting innovation at XNOR.ai is the $5 Raspberry PI ZERO computer, which is basically a computer chip running on artificial intelligence technology. Smaller than every smart device available today, this Raspberry from XNOR.ai can turn into AI product.
via XNOR.AI
According to XNOR.ai, “Any device, which is a smart device, has endless possibilities.”
Cameras, wearables, sensors, watches and other smart devices – XNOR.AI will offer low-cost AI solutions to every commodity that runs on a computer chip. Despite the proliferation of intelligence technology into basic devices, they still can’t handle a magnanimous amount of data. XNOR.ai will bring ubiquity to smart devices, making AI technology the norm of every business. In short, XNOR.ai is set to democratize the AI fraternity, enabling different users to sell machine learning capabilities across open-source communities.
Most CMOs want AI and machine learning in their MarTech stack. However, the cost of innovation and integration remains a major hurdle. While there are obvious long-term cost benefits of using AI in MarTech, it’s the power of data privacy and data ownership that every CMO wants to adopt using machine intelligence. “No data needs to leave your device,” Farhadi says.
XNOR.ai’s seed funding is a big push for MarTech industry that has recently witnessed a windfall of AI innovations, penetrating into major marketing and sales stacks. As top Cloud and SaaS companies continue to acquire AI startups at will, XNOR.ai presents a fresh ground for native AI incubation within MarTech.
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“People want to feel special when they start a buying cycle and be able to interact with the brand.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]
On Marketing Technology
MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a martech company)
I am the cofounder of CoffeeSender/Sendoso. We started the company about two years ago as a side project, because we were looking for better way to connect with prospects and customers. We started by mailing coffee gift cards out which sucked but it was effective for getting meetings, people remembered them. From there a past manager told us that he loved the idea of this but we should plug it into Salesforce and build an API. That was the start of a killer side project which turned into a real job and a contract with Starbucks. After lots of late nights and beers we had a full working CoffeeSender site which has been great for helping people connect to prospects and customers. But we always knew we wanted to be able to send other items like lunch, handwritten notes, swag, etc. so that is our newest launch Sendoso which we just launched.
MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
The industry is extremely exciting right now, I think over the next couple years we will see more marketing technologies that are focused on making sense of all the data we now have on prospects and customers. We are able to collect a ton of info but we are not able to digest all of that data just yet. I also think that we will see more tools that help companies become more human. People want to feel special when they start a buying cycle and be able to interact with the brand.
MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
Sales and marketing tools becoming one system has to be the next trend. Right now sales and marketing stacks are separated with tons and tons of data in them, the first tech that figures out how to combine all of it will be huge.
MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
More leads and connecting with the right people at the right time with good content. Every piece of outreach needs to add value and you need to make sure you marketing team is on top of it. If someone downloads a white paper that person needs to get a call from sales right away, and marketing needs to make sure it happens. The last challenge is standing out from the crowd, and using tech that gives you a unique way to reach out.
MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I love Engagio and what they are doing in the ABM space. I also am a huge fan of what Terminus is doing.
MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We have a tool called Mailshake for email, Marketo for landing page, Salesforce for CRM. Lastly Sendoso for doing unique sends 🙂
MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
We did a digital campaign for Dreamforce using all coffee from CoffeeSender. On the very first day of the conference we sent every one “Survival Coffees” as we called them. The goal was to create a buzz about our platform and to also create demos. We sent out about 250 and set 30 demos which was killer. The reason it worked is because it was unique and we hit the right people at the right time.
MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
This is exciting that we are moving this direction. With AI and even triggers we need to use these to things quicker and faster. If an AI can pick up on a person on my site engage with them in a chat, find out what they are looking for and set a demo for me, that is amazing. Then if that same AI could know what that person likes and send a coffee or lunch over before the demo, you are starting to now build a business relationship. Sendoso is very excited about this move.
This Is How I Work
MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Focus.
MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Looking at job descriptions online for prospects companies that mention account based marketing, if they do that is a killer lead for Sendoso.
MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I am reading Ready Player One for the second time cause I love it. For work I am reading How To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future.
MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
That if you work past 6 you did not spend your day how you should have, so get better organized and focus on what you need to get done to move the needle. That was advice from my grandfather who started a company.
MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I follow up better than anyone. I will keep reaching out to you until you get back to me.
MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Braydan is the co-founder of CoffeeSender.com, the leading B2B eGifting platform. Companies use CoffeeSender daily to send customers, prospects, partners, and employees coffee. The recipient instantly receives an email with a custom message and a $5 Starbucks eGift card.
Braydan has 8 years of tech sales and demand generation experience.
From very small start-ups just starting out to more established companies.
He started CoffeeSender a year ago in order to make getting demos easier, and to help build a better relationship with clients.
CoffeeSender is a fully integrated reward, incentives, and perks platform for enterprises. Companies use CoffeeSender daily to send customers, prospects, partners, and employees coffee. The recipient instantly receives an email with a custom message and a $5 Starbucks ® eGift Card.
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[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]
The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.
Velocify, the leading cloud-based sales intelligence platform, has introduced a new business performance analytics solution to track and improve the health of sales efforts across the enterprise. Called the ReportHub, the sales intelligence tool provides real-time actionable insights on sales performances across reps, campaigns, and lead sources. ReportHub is now readily available at no additional cost to customers using Velocify LeadManager.
Velocify ReportHub’s dashboard is very similar to a digital fitness tracker. Its function—even more similar! By providing actionable sales performance insights, the latest sales intelligence tool enables managers and administrators in the sales team to evaluate and improve contact strategies, enhance lead sourcing and refine resource allocation.
As businesses grow more customer-centric, the only way companies can survive the competition is by putting sales automation into its processes. Velocify provides powerful sales acceleration capabilities to professionals, enabling them to draw a clear conclusion from easy-to-use data visualizations and sales execution automation.
“Sales processes have become increasingly digitized, generating enormous amounts of relevant performance data,” said Manoj Goyal, COO at Velocify. “ReportHub presents crucial data in an easily digestible way, helping guide data-driven decisions that can have a meaningful impact on sales growth.”
How ReportHub works?
ReportHub breaks down an individual company’s sales analytics into three main categories: lead source performance, contact day/time of call performance, and sales rep/user performance. Each category offers an array of interactive reports, including dashboards for quick analysis, and detailed charts for sales managers to drill down into the data to uncover deeper performance trends across sales reps, lead sources, or contact strategies.
via Velocify
By adding ReportHub, Velocify users can have seamless access to large stores of highly granular and accurate sales activity data. Additionally, ReportHub will also integrate with other existing sales process management capabilities, empowering companies to stay agile and continuously improve performance through iterative optimization.
Velocify currently offers –
Velocify Pulse for focused sales dialing and emails, integrated with Salesforce
Velocify LeadManager for sales acceleration and growth with automated routine task management
Velocify DialIQ, the only click-to-call sales dialer for enhanced sales communication
Sales organizations today need better insight into which reps, lead sources, and sales strategies are performing well, and which ones aren’t. However, sales managers and admins often have to use manual, time-consuming processes to download data and run separate analyses on critical key performance indicators. This painstaking process often inhibits their ability to take quick action.
Adding Velocify’s latest sales intelligence capability removes the dependence on sales coaching opportunities by improving the health of the overall sales pipeline through real-time performance assessments.
Meet Service Cloud Einstein, Salesforce’s latest offering.
Conceived as the world’s first intelligent customer service platform, the introduction of Salesforce’s Service Cloud Einstein is an electrifying development for marketers who are perennially challenged to deliver proactive, personalized service to their customers. The intelligent customer service platform offers SMBs seamless opportunity across all marketing channels, enabling them to deliver services that are responsive, intuitive, personalized and smart.
Most SMBs and start-ups consider customer service as a quintessential but an expensive part of their organization. CMOs are increasingly looking for MarTech tools that can turn their limited customer service capabilities into a revenue-generating profit center. Salesforce has undoubtedly mastered the “Art of Timing” when it comes to introducing most contemporary MarTech features and integrations relevant to changing marketing landscape.
via Salesforce Einstein AI
Inbuilt intelligence in a customer service platform presents a huge opportunity to businesses of all sizes. Salesforce, a leading exponent of intelligence in MarTech, delivered Service Cloud Einstein to magnify the prospects of AI technology and its seamless integration across existing customer services’ functionalities.
“Customers today expect and demand great service experiences,” said Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM, Service and Sales Clouds, Salesforce.
“Service Cloud Einstein empowers companies to transform any customer service interaction into a smart conversation that drives brand loyalty and creates customers for life.”
Applications in Service Cloud Einstein
Einstein Case Management
A powerful, highly efficient correction agent in customer service platform, Einstein Case Management drives faster service for cases that are automatically classified as they come in. By having AI do everything related to customer engagement, businesses can directly bring analytics and omnichannel supervision into marketing campaigns.
With Einstein Case Management, high priority cases get quickly routed to the next available agent who knows what the case is about before they even pick up the phone, making the experience seamless for the customer.
Einstein Supervisor
Contact center supervisors can now leverage real-time operational insights with smart data discovery to drive their omnichannel campaigns, increasing agent productivity and customer satisfaction across multiple touch points.
Apart from taking real-time actions on queued items and recommendations, Einstein Supervisor can also predict the intensity of customer engagement and their satisfaction levels, before making specific recommendations to improve the customer experience.
Intelligent Mobile Service
As marketers switch to Mobile-First ecosystem in 2017, businesses face a hard task automating their MarTech capabilities with mobile. With Intelligent Mobile Service, marketers can connect with their on-field team members with a connected service app on iOS and Android so they can deliver personalized, exceptional service anywhere.
Service Cloud Einstein mobile app utilizes a highly-advanced machine learning algorithm to optimize scheduling and routing. Additionally, it also provides real-time access to complete CRM data and even has offline capabilities so mobile workers can be productive without cell coverage.
Availability in 2017
Currently, only Einstein Supervisor with Analytics Cloud’s Service Wave analytics app and Smart Data Discovery is included in the Enterprise edition and above. Service Wave bundle is priced at $75 per user, per month. The pricing for the Smart Data Discovery functionality is discrete, based on the volume of data and the number of users.
Einstein Case Management will be released as a pilot suite in the later part of 2017. Meanwhile, Intelligent Mobile Service, also referred to as Field Service Lightning, will be readily available at $150 per user, per month for Salesforce clients that have either Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition Service Cloud License. However, this service is also available as pilot mobile app for Android.
What’s next with MarTech innovations in Customer Service?
By introducing Service Cloud Einstein, Salesforce has paved the way for service organizations vouching to infuse intelligence into their operation. There is colossal opening to bring intelligence into customer service. Smart image recognition, intelligent upsell & cross-sell, service bots and son on. Least said, AI in MarTech offers better experiences to customers, creating a competitive advantage even in a disruptive marketplace.
According to Accenture Strategy Report, titled ‘Digital Disconnect in Customer Engagement’, 83% consumers prefer human interaction with channels over digital platforms to solve customer service issues. In another report by Accenture, 79% of IT and business executives “agree that AI will help accelerate technology adoption throughout their organizations” and that “AI is poised to enable companies to improve the experience and outcome for every critical customer interaction.”
The Future of AI in Customer Service…
As businesses look to leverage customer service as a revenue generation center in coming years, AI is very well the omnipotent distinction between performers and survivors in digital transformation journey. To deal with the rapidly emerging channels and technologies for messaging and app commerce, B2B enterprises will look to deploy AI-powered service platforms like Service Cloud Einstein to create exceptional customer experiences. Marketers using AI can finally attune to emerging technologies, delivering exceptional service and maintaining operational excellence, powered by incorruptible intelligence.
Neustar, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based real-time information services, today announced its selection as a partner by Belgium’s largest telecom operator Proximus. By opting for the Neustar MarketShare DecisionCloud digital enablement platform, the telecom enterprise will be able to understand and optimize its marketing and ad campaigns across Belgium.
Neustar offers a range of solutions and services for website performance and fraud detection. Neustar MarketShare DecisionCloud is a robust, next-gen marketing automation tool for planning and allocation, multi-touch attribution, dynamic pricing, TV ad measurement and performance benchmarking. By partnering with Neustar, Proximus will be able to get a complete picture of its sales and marketing investments, enabling CMOs to extract the highest ROI from their campaigns.
Proximus is also taking up Neustar MarketShare’s consulting services to improve its data management, gain further insights and increase ROI from its campaigns.
“Campaign planning and management in multicultural countries with mature markets, such as Belgium, can make it difficult for brands to deliver successfully targeted campaigns at the granular level,” said Luis Chaves, Managing Director, Neustar MarketShare UK.
“By incorporating holistic modeling and monitoring solutions with the help of Neustar, Proximus is now able to optimize its campaigns and accurately report ROI from its marketing activities.”
What prompted Proximus to collaborate with Neustar MarketShare?
Proximus, formerly Belgacom Mobile, partnered Neustar to enhance customer experience across its marketing campaigns. Neustar at Proximus will deliver a holistic view of the sales and marketing the effectiveness, impact of incentive promotions and advertising, and competitor analytics. Proximus will leverage Neustar MarketShare, an advanced analytics solution, for full budget planning and campaign course correction capabilities at both an overarching and granular level to accurately monitor and optimize its campaigns.
Catherine Deltenre, Director, Corporate Strategy and Market Insights at Proximus, said –
“At Proximus, we have the challenge of targeting diverse consumers with the right offer at the right moment, in a highly competitive marketplace. By partnering with Neustar we will be able to plan and allocate our marketing and sales investments and resources accurately across our sales channels, communications methods and marketing techniques to maximize the effect on sales and deliver greater ROI.”
The Neustar MarketShare DecisionCloud solution will enable Proximus to plan its sales and marketing spending; regularly and accurately reallocate its budgets to maximize ROI from its campaigns. By working in partnership with Neustar MarketShare’s consulting services, Proximus will also be able to leverage and optimize its datasets to plan and predict the effectiveness of its campaigns.
What else does Neustar offer?
Apart from Neustar MarketShare DecisionCloud, the marketing enablement firm also offers unique data management and audience discovery solutions —
Neustar Identity Data Management Platform (IDMP)
Powered by OneID, Neustar IDMP is a unified platform offering flawless customer experience based on audience segmentation, data syndication, and closed-loop measurement
Customer Intelligence
Marketers at Proximus will be able to leverage Neustar’s powerful Customer Intelligence tools for online and offline lead scoring, segmentation, data cleanse, and much more.
Data Activation
How to make your data speak? Neustar’s Data Activation solutions enable marketers to build high-value first-party data sets using AdAdvisor, PageAdvisor, and Omnichannel Remarketing tools, powering truly personalized customer experience across the web, mobile and social.
Performance and security
Neustar’s website monitoring and load testing tools help online businesses mitigate traffic issues and bottlenecks, offering synthetic and real-user monitors. It also offers compliance solutions, fraud detection, device detection intelligence, mobile user attribution and IP intelligence capabilities.
Neustar’s partnership with Proximus comes less than two months since it was acquired by Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm. The early-stage investor company acquired Neustar in December 2016 for $1.8 billion. In 2015, Neustar acquired the LA-based advanced marketing analytics firm MarketShare. In 2008, collaborative web performance management platform Webmetrics was scooped by Neustar. Webmetrics has since been renamed as Neustar Webmetrics.
Neustar MarketShare at Proximus opens up a new landscape of opportunities for data scientists, enabling them to isolate precise data sets that influence B2B decisions. Neustar help marketers send timely and relevant messages to the right people. It works with some of the world’s most complex databases, helping clients control their online identity, registering and protecting their domain name, and routing traffic to the correct network address.
MarTech collaborations in 2017 will be as much about data as it will about the value marketers generate from diverse solutions and platforms.
MarTech companies are increasingly focusing on making the enterprise collaboration tools more user-friendly. As email marketing gets more personalized and mobile-centric, marketers chose from a wide range of third-party apps for task management. Outlook, easily the most preferred email app for iOS, now gets more integration in MarTech than other third-party apps. One of the latest platforms to offer Outlook for iOS is Nimble, the leading CRM solutions provider for social sales and marketing.
Nimble is a pioneer in SaaS-based CRM solutions for web and social media. By offering seamless integration with a new add-in for Outlook for iOS, Nimble CRM users will receive instant social business insights on people and companies. The new Nimble Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook on iOS will allow Outlook users to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact – directly from their email messages.
Jon Ferrara, CEO – Nimble, Founder of GoldMine
“We’re all over-connected and over-communicated by too many email messages,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.
“By putting Nimble’s powerful social contact insights right into Outlook, we will help millions of business users to no longer flying blind with relationships and engagement.”
Nimble’s new add-ins for Outlook on iOS rolled out new features –
Automatic matching of social and public details of customers and B2B users
Instant business and social insights for people and companies in Outlook Mobile
company insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year Founded, keywords, company type, revenue, CEO name, address and phone
People insights like person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities
Social contact profile matching to create rich contact details
Social company profile matching to create rich company details
via Nimble CRM
“The biggest cause of communication failure is the lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Ferrara.
“Nimble has reimagined relationship management with a Simply Smarter Relationship Manager add-in that works for you, delivering critical contact background details right inside your Outlook inbox,” adds Ferrara.
Nimble CRM is one of the simplest SaaS-based marketing solutions for growing businesses. By offering the latest add-in features on a 14-day free trial, Nimble has extended its Social CRM platform across G Suite, Chrome, Outlook, Safari, Hootsuite, iOS and Android. Business accounts can add Nimble’s new add-in for Outlook on iOS at $25 per month.
“Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world,” said Rob Howard, Director, Office Product Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble add-in for Outlook on iOS is a logical step.”
The way enterprises do business in 2017 has changed drastically compared to the scenario two years ago. Sales teams need powerful, real-time insights to make rapid decisions — much of it attributed to social media and mobile engagements. By adding CRM features to Outlook on iOS, marketers can create enriching customer experience through deeper engagement. Add-ins focusing on customer experience, like the one between Nimble and Outlook on iOS, also offer seamless collaboration with transformative experiences to every CRM user. Sales CRM integrated with social features provide a “leaping board” for simple customer management across mobile and web.
Bigtincan, the leading unified mobile content enablement platform for B2B enterprises has announced its integration with the Salesforce AppExchange. This will allow Bigtincan users to leverage the power of AI and machine learning of the leading B2B app marketplace. The Boston-based mobile-centric business intelligence company will offer Bigtincan Hub, its mobile content enablement solution, through the Salesforce AppExchange.
“We are thrilled to offer Bigtincan Hub via the Salesforce AppExchange and provide intelligent and results-driven sales enablement abilities to more Salesforce users through Bigtincan Hub,” said David Keane, co-founder and CEO, Bigtincan.
“As seen through Salesforce Einstein and other AI technologies, these advanced capabilities have the ability to intelligently support the selling process and help sales and service organizations increase productivity and win more deals. And now with Bigtincan Hub, customers can immediately experience the benefits of our platform directly within Salesforce.”
Bigtincan Hub, a powerful AI-driven sales enablement platform, offers real-time capabilities to connect with customers, partners, and employees in easy-to-use environments. Salesforce App Exchange is offering free downloads for Bigtincan Hub to enable sales professionals to prepare better for their meetings, engage leads more productively through smooth capturing of actions and increasing conversion rates.
Key Features of Bigtincan Hub
Bigtincan Hub built on Salesforce AppExchange offers unique sales enablement capabilities to users –
Smarter, next-gen AI-powered content collaborations and recommendations based on environment
Compressed life cycle based on intuitive user experience across mobile channels
Online and offline collaborations, automatically pushing the most recent and relevant trending content to mobile users
Completely customizable user interface with automation to sync content from existing repository based on attributes – group, task, event, date/time, customer type and stage of life cycle
Identify content consumption to refine the content structure for ever-changing sales environments
Comprehensive content security with 256-bit data encryption, roles-based access control. Mobile device white-listing and remote content wipe
Seamless content integrations with CRM, intranets, and servers — Adobe CQ5/AEM, Airwatch, Alfresco, Citrix, Box, AWS S3, Dropbox, Evernote, Jive, Marketo, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Oracle/ Siebel & CRM on Demand, SAP, and so on.
Founded in 2011, Bigtincan content enablement platform for sales available on Salesforce AppExchange will make sales more customer-centric with self-automation mapping workflow.
Salesforce AppExchange, Salesforce.com’s cloud computing marketplace is now the fastest growing repository of free and paid B2B apps. “Companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners, and employees to thrive in the age of the customer,” said Kori O’Brien, SVP, App Innovation Partner Sales, Salesforce.
“By leveraging the power of the Salesforce App Cloud, Bigtincan provides customers with an exciting new way to help sales and service teams succeed with the best in sales enablement technology.”
As businesses adapt to “mobile-first” landscape, content enablement platforms on cloud marketplace serve the purpose of enabling sales professionals with clear navigation through content governance policies. Revenue-wise, the content enablement platforms will become the norm, supporting major campaigns and mitigate sales challenges with powerful, engaging content. To what extent AI technology will impregnate sales enablement in 2017 is yet to be ascertained.
HiPay Group, the leading data analytics, and omnichannel payment platform joined the Salesforce Partner Program to enrich e-commerce experience for its users. The Paris-based financial services automation company will integrate with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, enabling marketers to launch personalized e-commerce campaigns for the web, mobile, social and in-store. By unifying its services over the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, HiPay intends to extend its capabilities beyond marketing and customer service across Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific.
“Retailers today need more than just payment processing. They need payment solutions that can help them reach more customers and more markets. The pre-built Salesforce Commerce Cloud connector streamlines the implementation process providing cost and time savings to retailers who want to expand their business using HiPay’s global payment platform. We’re helping some of the most innovative brands, like SMCP, to reach new levels of success,” concludes Charles Wells, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at HiPay.
HiPay joined Salesforce Partner Program to magnify the customer experience through its global payment platform, empowering e-commerce marketers to optimize their conversion rates and increase ROI. HiPay’s transaction processing and relationship management solutions can be seamlessly integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud storefronts, providing an optimal user experience across devices.
“Everything and everyone is becoming more connected and smarter than ever before,” said Alan Bunce, VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce. “By joining the Salesforce Partner Program in support of Commerce Cloud, HiPay is joining the world’s largest community of born-in-the-cloud partners who are committed to innovating on the Salesforce platform and driving customer success.”
The Salesforce Partner Program is MarTech industry’s largest “ingenious born-in-Cloud” collaboration platform. It teams up with consultants, VARs, agencies, digital studios and other participants to create enriching customer experience using the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. By joining Salesforce Commerce Cloud, HiPay will be able to leverage Salesforce’s business app marketplace – AppExchange. HiPay has also partnered Magento, WooCommerce, Proximis, Kooomoo, Oxatis and so on, bringing powerful e-commerce experience to marketers and customers.
The decision to join Salesforce Partner Program comes less than two months after HiPay Group appointed Grégoire Bourdin as its CEO. Earlier, Bourdin (between 200 and2011) played a key role as its CFO in the integration of acquired companies at HiPay Group. The new CEO had then revealed his plans to accelerate HiPay’s annual run rate by strengthening its technological innovations, structuring product portfolio and forging international commitments.
For HiPay, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a strategic partnership model conceived to delight customers with hyper-personalized engagement, loyalty, conversion, and retention. The 1:1 model is suitable for retailers and B2B e-commerce marketers planning to leverage predictive intelligence, sales enablement, and omnichannel partnership.
Evident from the recent innovations in the industry, AI will touch every aspect of life in 2017. Amazon Alexa devices are engaging humans now than they ever did. Cleverbot, a unique social-bot with its own website API, has been integrated with Amazon Echo as an Alexa Skill. The introduction of this AI-based social bot in Amazon Echo allows users to converse using voice chat. Surprisingly, Cleverbot did not claim its spot for Amazon’s 2016-2017 Alexa Prize – an annual university-level competition for conversational AI bot developers.
Created as a successor of the highly successful Jabberwacky project by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter, the Alexa Skill “Cleverbot” is currently available for English (US) only and was published by Existor Limited. Cleverbot as an Alexa Skill can freely talk to by voice independently on Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, offering real-time conversations and companionship on all popular topics. It is yet to be confirmed if be available on free Amazon Web Services (AWS) support. Ideal for music lovers and Live message celebrities, Cleverbot comes across as a very engaging and “safe” medium.
Average conversation with Cleverbot can last more than 20 minutes, with a maximum delay in replies stretching to just about 8 seconds. Google Home assistant will also feature Cleverbot Action based on Cleverbot API.Cleverbot, capable of engaging in 7 million interactions per second, gains its intelligence from Cleverscript engine. Recently, a Twitch stream of two Google Home devices inserted Cleverbot.io capabilities, garnering 700,000 visitors and 30,000 peak-time interactions since its conception.
Currently, users can Cleverbot API as well as Cleverbot for iOS (Cleverbot app). The app version has no voice, ads and avatar options. However, it offers to chat in Spanish as well!
Created by Existor, the Cleverbot is a genuine companion, offering the highest level of human level conversation. The API version is free for using up to 5,000 API calls per months. The commercial users can apply for Cleverbot API package based on their monthly requirements.
The highest-performing social-bot in the 2016-2017 Alexa Prize will win $500,000. Additionally, the social bots developer team will be granted $1 million if their produce manages to converse coherently with humans on popular topics for at least 20 minutes. Users can test these social bots on a trial period that begins in April 2017. Winners will be announced at The re: Invent2017, a global Cloud computing conference hosted by AWS.
Brands are increasingly playing like media companies, trying to compete in a hyper-personalized marketplace by leveraging accelerate content discovery platforms. Marketers no longer wait for campaigns to generate traffic; rather it’s programmatic algorithm that runs the campaign performance using customer data from multiple devices. In a bid to promote brand content at a breakneck pace, marketers overlook the quality of the content. That’s exactly what Robert Thomson, the Chief Executive of News Corp, has to say about content’s integrity. He cited Times Of London’s report n big brands funding “extremists and hardcore pornographers.
Robert James Dell’Oro Thomson, Chief Executive of News Corp
“Digital distributors have long been a platform for the fake, the faux and the fallacious (and) have eroded the integrity of content by undermining its provenance. Ad agencies and their programmatic networks are also at fault because they have sometimes artificially aggregated audiences, and these are then plied with the content of dubious provenance.”
In an increasingly competitive programmatic ad marketplace, advertisers seek reassurance about their brand inventories that are displayed across channels.
“In the ad market, there has been an awakening and there will surely be a reckoning,” said Mr. Thomson. “Audiences are craving integrity,” noting how many News Corp mastheads have reported strong growth in readers and subscribers. Thomson added how content integrity is the most priceless asset for any brand. However, digital media owners and distributors continue to embrace “the fake, the faux and the fallacious”, affecting the legitimacy of the content creators.
Programmatic marketing, though in its infancy, has sprouted a wide range of opportunities for media owners, offering an effective content distribution model. However, the content legitimacy and its accountability remain a dubious aspect of programmatic marketing, especially when it narrates a rhetoric storyline sans logic.
Content – as a brand asset in marketing, extends commercial and social influence to every identity in the digital supply chain. The quality of content (especially the ambiguous ones) affects the commercial and social currency when programmatic algorithms deliver them. A tweak in the programmatic can change the factual integrity of the content – something brand marketers can no longer afford to experiment with.
Thomson squarely blamed the ad agencies and their programmatic networks for stashing dubious content across the web, social and mobile. He maintains that brand affinity and integrity are core elements of a sustainable relationship between advertiser and consumer, and yet affinity and integrity are far too often missing in the modern marketplace. The hardest challenge advertisers in 2017 will encounter is the analytics quoted by the digital platforms and ad agencies. They don’t want muddled metrics and they don’t want digital platforms and ad agencies arbitraging ambiguity.
Thomson recounted the efforts carried out at News Corp to deal with programmatic frauds. “We are (also) testing our own digital ad network, which will provide a measurable, high-quality audience for advertisers, who are increasingly wary, and rightly so, about the murky, tenebrous world of digital advertising.”
Automation and machine learning capabilities in MarTech have allowed programmatic to raise its bar for customer experience. Intelligent algorithms allow micro-segmentation of customers based on their behavior, demography, buying pattern and even use of apps. Data-driven multi-touch attribution helps clear the bottlenecks in content delivery, enabling advertisers to schedule the right message at the right time.
As DMPs acquire higher efficiency and collaboration with the supply-chain systems, real-time programmatic content will help plug the gap between fake and real.
Content legitimacy in a programmatic ecosystem will decide the future of B2B commerce across the diversified customer base.
GroupM, the leading digital media investment firm, has released the preview version of its annual report on the state of digital marketing and its impact on marketers and advertisers. The report, titled “Interaction: Preview Edition for Clients and Partners February 2017”, is published by GroupM’s Worldwide Media and Marketing Forecast, highlighting the challenges in digital marketing across channels. On a positive note, the report predicts the digital share of ad investment in 2017 will jump to around 33%.
Interaction 2017 takes a very cautious approach in defining the digital landscape, suggesting the new and old worlds are contributing equally to new marketing technologies in dollar investments since 2013. In 2016, CMOs spent 72 cents of every new dollar on digital advertising, and 21 cents on TV. In 2017, the balance will swing higher — 77:17, in favor of Digital ad. TV ad spends will remain consistent as per the report.
Top Focus-Areas in Digital Transformation
2017 is slated to be the year of Big Bang in marketing and advertising technologies. Top 100 CMOs agree that big-brand advertising is definitely moving towards Intelligence Age from the existing Information Age.
Traditionally, marketers have always been building strategies to outperform competitors at every touchpoint along the customer journey. Marketing budgets in 2016 reveal how nothing has changed in marketing, except for the increased complexity in the marketing platforms and their functionalities. While most enterprises now rely on automation for marketing and sales for B2B commerce, a handful of them also prefer to deploy intelligent technologies for social media and mobile apps. Omnichannel customer experience is driving more audience engagement than ever before.
Interaction 2017 reports –
“On a single platform you can advertise, sell, fulfill the order, and deliver customer service. A single piece of content, or more accurately, intellectual property, can be watched in linear form or on demand, as a show, a still, a clip, a multi-hour binge and multiply reconfigured for multiple platforms.”
And what drives customer experience?
Of course, it’s the accuracy and quality of customer data that marketing automation tools mine from omnichannel platforms.
“High-quality data is data that helps you acquire the customer you don’t know and to better understand the customer you do know.”
Interaction 2017 suggests CMOs should start owning in-house media groups rather than relying on advertising. The threshold of the usefulness of owned media in 2017 is raised by integrating marketing technologies and sales enablement platforms running on AI, machine learning, and NLP.
“As artificial intelligence becomes part of the taxonomy of everything the structured and unstructured story around the brand, its purpose, origin and the conversation it creates will become part of the consumer experience.”
AI manifesting itself in daily life
How can marketers stay away from AI? Machine learning, voice recognition, NLP and cognitive learning capabilities lies at the heart of every innovation made in marketing technology ecosystem. AI in marketing technology provides brute force to marketing efforts, mimicking human behavior for personalized customer experience.
2017 will throw up battles of the AI innovators – “narrow intelligence” (those who are good at only one thing) versus “general intelligence” (those who are flexible and adaptable). Sans doubt, CMOs are yet to assess the extent to which AI can substitute human customer service interactions.
“This is clearly true of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple which by market capitalization are among the six most valuable companies in the world. It’s true also of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Eight businesses, with data at their core (that are) mapping human behavior, (and in doing so) are becoming the wireframe of human experience.”
AR and VR: From Small Screen to No Screen
According to EIU’s latest report on customer experience, CMOs are focusing on moving towards no-screen engagement by 2020. AR and VR technologies enable marketers to deliver entertainment, social relevancy, personalization, and speed. Advertising in 2016 moved from storytelling to story creation. VR accessories touched sales figure of five million units in 2016. Exquisite customer experience in 2017 will be about delivering a 360-degree and immersive experience, minus the screens.
“It’s likely that the biggest AR deals in the near term will be collaborations between brands and retailers and between sponsors and events. Further applications can be expected in travel, tourism, and real estate. In all cases, the momentum needs to exist for the necessary app installs and for sufficient value to be created for all stakeholders.”
Video is a hotbed of Opportunities
TV still rules; online video platforms fail in longer formats.
Marketers shifting focus towards video marketing over Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube are yet to achieve the golden “catch”. Despite programmatic featuring as the fastest growing advertising technology, advertisers are unable to accurately measure key engagement metrics: who watched what, where, for how long and on what device.
Interaction 2017 reports, “For every 20 video ads served in the news feed, three are watched for three seconds or more and just one is watched for ten seconds or more.”
To show how video paradigm is shifting away from TV-only platforms, GroupM published a “video taxonomy” card for advertisers.
via GroupM
“The advertisers that account for 90% of television advertising revenue account for between 30% and 40% of the revenue of the digital behemoths.”
OTT: The Confluence of TV, Programmatic and Internet
Over-the-Top (OTT), or Connected TV, is still in its infancy. However, there is no shortage of advertisers who are promoting their brands over OTT. Promising to be an enriching customer-centric platform, the new ad inventory stack allows advertisers to broadcast quality and brand-safe content in an on-demand environment.
“The monetization of OTT bundles is straightforward – subscription sales plus highly targeted advertising less the cost of re-transmission fees. From the advertiser’s point of view, few will be big enough to represent meaningful sources of advertising inventory and it will be up to the agencies to aggregate the pool and harmonize both delivery and measurement.”
GroupM report notes, “Failure to create something that people are prepared to pay for or perceive as an indispensable utility is itself a prescription for failure. And so, the prescription to make TV ubiquitous is simple even if complex to activate.”
Marketers can’t miss Audio in 2017
Audio is the least explored marketing territory in the digital ecosystem. The soundtrack for brand promotion remains an elusive concept despite the bludgeoning budget allocations across web, social, mobile, search, video and e-commerce. Radio and online audio stores continue to have massive customer retention, thanks to the smart media streaming technologies. On-demand audio content provides unmatched consumer interaction, providing a beyond-the-demography snapshot about customer’s listening behavior and emotional intimacy with brands. Players like Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartMedia offer impeccable audio content discovery. However, ROI attributed to audio channels is meager despite collective revenue of over $9 billion and subscribers over 1.5 billion.
“2017 will be a big year for both Pandora and Spotify. Rumors of Pandora’s sale began to swirl in late 2016 and Spotify is expected to go public, and along with Snapchat, create the next two major publicly traded native digital media companies. In the meantime, against a backdrop of rising interest rates iHeartMedia’s immense mortgage obligations may be a barrier to progress.”
The insights provided by Interaction 2017 on every aspect of digital identity for an enterprise proves to be a ground-breaking “handbook” for every CMO who intends to magnify business objectives using digital transformations. Be it AI, mobile-first or programmatic and OTT, Interaction 2017 will remain the epitome of “ethical” branding policies in 2017.
GroupM has released its latest annual insight on digital transformation occurring across the organization. The report, titled “Interaction: Preview Edition for Clients and Partners February 2017”, which is part of GroupM’s Worldwide Media and Marketing Forecast, identified the primary disruptors in paid ads ecosystem. Interaction 2017 quotes the duopoly of Facebook and Google in online advertising, trends in ad blocking and the malice of fake news. The critical approach adopted by Interaction 2017 demonstrates the ambiguity in online ad pricing trends.
Google versus Facebook: The Battle of Ad Dominance
The Search Engine Continues to Dominate Digital Advertising
Google provides seven advertising platforms, offering a collective user base of more than one billion. GroupM reported in 2016 –
“Google accounted for 13% of all advertising globally and 42% of digital advertising. Facebook accounted for 5% and 15% respectively.”
Google’s dominance over Facebook may substantially amplify if the numbers from Chinese market are included.
Google dominated the search revenues for a decade, accounting 80% of the total market share. E-commerce retailers, like Amazon, and Pinterest are building alternate search platforms, hinting at fall of Google. Facebook is a more competitive ad platform compared to Google, offering a more diversified ad optimization channel.
Talking of “outsiders” in this battle of ad optimization, Snapchat and Amazon are growing big. In fact, Snapchat is the first “no desktop” platform to have grown into a mega brand advertising channel.
“Advertisers have embraced Snapchat. They like the audience, they like the innovative ad products and they like the vertical video product that fills the screen with tolerable but arresting interruption.”
Interaction 2017 also mentions AOL/Verizon as the “third force” in digital advertising, delivering third largest aggregation of ad impressions. Add to it the programmatic and OTT channels that they offer.
Relevant Content doesn’t have the teeth to drive revenue
Online pricing is an ambiguous territory for most marketers. Despite analytics in place to measure sales and conversions, different advertisers still pay differently for the exact same commodity! The report identifies Google as the disruptor in pricing and commodity allocation strategies.
Interaction 2017 clearly identifies a glaring discrepancy in media pricing policies. Media platforms don’t give any pricing advantage to brand advertisers based on content relevance. Relevant content published in media has a two-pronged advantage for both – publishers and media owners.
Interaction 2017 states –
“No one paid Google until an action occurred. The original AdWords auction was straightforward: a generalized second price auction. Bid a cent more than the other guy and the top position was yours. That did not last long. In 2005 Google introduced the quality score.”
“The premise was that it should take more than money to win a bid and provide a pricing incentive to the bidder with the most relevant response to the query. The dominant factor in the quality score was click-thru rate. Google got paid when the click was made. Clicks were a decent proxy for relevance. Since then relevance has become an increasingly important part of the advertising ecosystem. Never more so than in the Facebook family of apps.”
“2017 will be a big year in the practice of both allocation and attribution. A combination of zero-based budgeting and a need for growth means that every channel will need proven measures and proven value to a greater degree than ever.”
Ad fraud and Malvertising
Closely linked to relevant content pricing is the growing menace of fake news and ad fraud. GroupM’s Interaction 2016 featured a full-length report on the integrity of digital assets supply chain, encompassing challenges like ad fraud, blocking and viewability metrics. Methbot highlights the disparaging policies that premium video platforms deploy to attract bot farms.
The issues of ad fraud increase when methods to measure viewability are regulated by the seller. Advertisers paying the media seller based on impressions endanger the integrity of DSP. With the coming of age of programmatic, there is no justification for advertisers to let go of the opportunity to use ethical methodologies. Self-reporting errors detected in Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat
“Advertisers who choose to use the tools made available by Moat, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify are now extraordinarily well equipped to assess if the impression they purchased was “human viewable” for a given duration.”
Ad blocking, Fake News and Privacy
Customer experience and ad blocking – the two antagonistic trends that leave marketers bedazzled. Ad blocking technology is the biggest hurdle in monetization of apps. While media companies increasingly offer improved customer experiences, stakeholders in app ecosystem are failing to extract feedback on why customers block their ads.
Interaction 2017 asks, “What is the immediate and longer-term economic value of the ad blockers that do persist, and how does that translate into lost opportunity for the advertiser?”
Fake News — the most contagious outcome of 2016 led to belittling of all marketing efforts that brands undertake to generate engagement and retain loyalty. What is Fake News?
“Fake news is not a matter of opinion. Something either happened or it did not.”
Google and Facebook are clear on their agenda in their views about Fake News. Technologies to identify genuine content based on AI will allow marketers to filter their inventories before releasing online.
Cure for fake news in paid ads likely by May 2018
“A way of decreasing the incentives to the bad guys is to increase the incentives to the good guys. A simple adjustment in the revenue sharing model would go a long way.”
Finally, to what percentage should enterprises focus on protecting their users’ identity from media owners?
100%, says Group M.
“Companies can’t use and source individual’s data unless they have direct consent from the consumer. Data types that are protected from sharing are user cookies, first-party data, web credentials and device credentials. The ePrivacy draft, set to be effective from May 2018, will impose heavy penalties on violators who share user data unscrupulously. The fines could be up to 5% of the global annual turnover.
The insights provided by Interaction 2017 on every aspect of digital identity for an enterprise proves to be a ground-breaking “handbook” for every CMO who intends to magnify business objectives using digital transformations. Be it AI, mobile-first or programmatic and OTT, Interaction 2017 will remain the epitome of “ethical” branding policies in 2017.
Allbound, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Partner Sales Acceleration solution, announces myChannelScore™, a free online assessment for CEOs, sales executives, and channel leaders to establish a baseline for channel program performance, and to help channel operators set priorities for accelerating recurring revenue through partner programs.
myChannelScore grades partner programs across four key attributes: content marketing, collaboration, customer success and culture. A downloadable report provides personalized recommendations and best practices that can then be put in place immediately to help improve areas with weaker scores.
“The role of channel partners has evolved to account for the entire customer lifecycle,” said Scott Salkin, CEO and Founder of Allbound. “With recurring revenue now the number one performance indicator for business health and growth potential, partners are playing as critical a role for product adoption and customer success as they once did for demand generation and closing deals. As executives are tasked with scaling faster while spending less, there’s a need to determine how they can build a best-in-class channel program that not only reduces customer acquisition costs, but reduces churn and, most importantly, drives better outcomes for the customer. myChannelScore allows them to assess how their channel is performing and continuously identify what improvements are needed to build a more comprehensive channel program for the subscription economy.”
In addition to providing executives with a clear, visual picture of exactly how their organization’s channel is performing, myChannelScore compares results against other channel professionals and provides baseline metrics for ongoing analysis, guidance, and improvements to channel strategies that impact sales velocity with partners. Already, more than 50 organizations with channel programs have used myChannelScore to evaluate the effectiveness of their channel partner programs and get personalized suggestions to improve their channel sales and customer success strategies.
“Your grade is a measure of the readiness of your channel program in today’s more sophisticated, digital marketplace where companies are selling Cloud and SaaS solutions that range from simple to extremely complex,” explained Salkin. “Now businesses can benchmark themselves against similar companies while also tracking their performance over time using the Allbound platform. It’s a win-win-win — for manufacturers, partners and their shared customers.”
myChannelScore is complementary to the Allbound’s partner sales acceleration platform, which provides companies with a turnkey SaaS platform for partner onboarding, enablement, content marketing, pipeline management and customer success.
Later in 2017, Allbound plans to share insights from the data obtained from myChannelScore to provide information to the market about how businesses are building successful channel programs that accelerate revenue, highlighting key trends and commonalities.
