SAP SE announced plans to enhance the SAP Marketing Cloud solution, introducing new “smart” capabilities to help companies focus on the best sales leads and increase customer retention.

Plans for SAP Intelligent Services for Marketing were launched at the DMEXCO annual conference being held in Cologne, Germany.

The new services use SAP Leonardo Machine Learning capabilities to add artificial intelligence (AI) to the cloud-based marketing suite from SAP. Using deep learning techniques, the new software analyzes the footprint that consumers leave behind while shopping online or offline, enabling businesses to better understand their customers’ preferences and intent as they consider a purchase.

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This enables marketers to detect patterns in individual customer behavior and gives them the tools to engage more skillfully with their customers, drive brand loyalty and increase revenue. In addition, by automatically identifying the leads with high probabilities of conversion, SAP Intelligent Services for Marketing lets marketing and sales teams focus on increasing revenue while reducing marking costs.

“Marketers are dealing with an unprecedented amount of data about customers. But it doesn’t mean that they understand them better,” said Nicholas Cumins, general manager, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP. “That’s where AI comes in. It allows marketers to make sense of all that data and achieve a much deeper understanding of customers.”

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One Solution, Two Benefits: Grow Conversion Rates and Predict Customer Churn

Since the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than retaining an existing customer, it is critical for companies to reduce customer churn. SAP Intelligent Services for Marketing help businesses address this issue by continuously monitoring and mining customer data to identify churn-related behavioral patterns or events, and predict which customers are at risk.

By presenting this information in a visual way, marketers can more easily understand a customer’s churn score – the reasons why a customer is considering leaving – and take immediate action to persuade them to stay.

This is particularly valuable to companies in sectors that have churn rates as high as 25%. For example, in the sports industry the retention of season ticket holders is crucial. Similarly, in banking and business-to-business industries like chemicals and high tech, it is important to identify high-value customers and high-risk accounts at a very early stage.

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