The New Data Marketer Increased revenue, margin & profits using an affordable marketing cloud. By Cees Franke CEO zMerce Alcuin van Zijl CTO zMerce

Preface Marketers live in the 21st century: they organize their lives with modern tools, such as smartphones, and consume their information omnichannel. But in their daily jobs they’re forced to work with many dated tools, mostly aimed at single channels. Just a small part of the business community is driven by data and applies modern marketing technology. The marketer who’s ready for more, can find some very useful tips in this whitepaper, on top of that, it’s a very simple guide to gaining insights in what can be expected from an affordable marketing cloud system and how to work with it. The focus of this whitepaper lays on both B2B- and B2C-aimed companies. For, the principle of ‘Listening to your customer’ goes for both businesses and customers. Feedback is always appreciated via [email protected]

Cees Franke Cees Franke (1954) has been an entrepreneur and innovator for over 30 years and is now zMerce’s CEO. Together with Alquin van Zijl (CTO) they’re members of the Dell Founders Club with zMerce. zMerce made an appearance at BOOST on the Next Web Conference Europe 2015 and the Crossmedia Congres 2015 in Amsterdam. zMerce is located in A-Lab Amsterdam and has recently started in Berlin’s tech-community.

Content 1 The New (Data) Marketer: Listening to the ever approachable customer with affordable marketing cloud technology 2 My mother’s groceries-book  3 Listening to the customer generates increased revenue, profits and customer-satisfaction 4 Installing and integrating a marketing cloud system 5 The costs of a marketing cloud 6 Summarizing 7 Concluding

1

The New (Data) Marketer: Listening to the ever approachable customer with affordable marketing cloud technology

Marketers live in the 21st century: they organize their lives with modern tools, such as smartphones, and consume their information omnichannel. But in their daily jobs they’re forced to work with many dated tools, mostly aimed at single channels. Just a small part of the business community is driven by data and applies modern marketing technology.

Companies collect a lot of data, and try to communicate with prospects and customers omnichannel. But there’s a great deal of datachaos. Synchronizing data is extremely time-consuming and expensive. Sales department is constantly calling for new leads: consequently, manual collection of the data, transferring from one to another database, correcting data and making exports takes up too much of the marketers time. It’s about time for change. Fear of change: Freeze or Fight “That’s just the way things go around here.” “Sure, it sounds great; data driven, but these are time-consuming ICT-projects with uncertain outcomes, and high, expanding budgets.” Marketers who are willing to move forward, often have to face slow, lineair processes of change within the company. There’s really no need for the implementation of a marketing cloud system to be such an ICT-project. The largest part of the companies play a waiting game on a basis of fear and insecurity. In this current world - The Online Revolution in which the world collectively changes to online (marketing)communication within the cloud - the primitive reactions lead to a division: de largest part of the business community ‘freezes’ and is being overtaken because of the fact that they are being lead by fear. On the other side is the group of entrepreneurs who dare to see chances and move there way up on the market, they dare to fight. Thus, todays marketer has to face one question: Freeze or Fight?

A 5 step-solution for the FREEZE-group to RENEWAL

1. Change always starts from RECOGNITION. Admit that marketing and sales have drastically changed and are changing exponentially faster than you might have thought before.

2. ACCEPT the fact that you have to RENEW your business. 3. ACT. Teach your supervisor that things have got to change. When your boss refuses, apply for a job at the FIGHTERS. 4. Invite three companies who sell marketing cloud systems and have them make a USE CASE for your company. When your budget is sufficient (up to millions of euro’s) you can go to Adobe, Oracle or HP. When your budget is smaller, go to the tech-innovators: the whizzkids on the market. 5. Make DEMANDS regarding the marketing cloud system and find out specifically which problems it can solve for you:











a) Is it an open system? Does it solve the complexity of connecting and analyzing your data? As a marketer you want to work with up-to-date, integrated and analyzed data, without having to move mountains. b) Is the system able to use your current customer-data? Does it prevent a long ICT-project? Does the system fit within the current situation of your company: can the system connect with CRM, ESP, POS, Webshop, Website, Loyaltycard, etc. c) Is the system able to collect, analyze and segment data on a PERSONAL LEVEL, and arrange automated workflows for one-to-one OUTPUT? Without data on a personal level this segmentation can not be made. Don’t stick with trend information in stead of information on the personal level. d) Is the system able to discover and measure behavioral patterns 24/7, and from these patterns make predictions? Being 100% up to date is extremely essential to a marketer. e) Can the system be installed within 40 hours in a maximum lead time of 4 - 6 weeks? Prevent it a lasting ICT-Project.

To make a responsible choice concerning the right marketing cloud for your organization, it is necessary to really understand the way it works. Therefore the next chapter takes a trip into the past, to see how personal marketingWcommunication worked on a small scale, fifty years ago.

FLI

2

My mother’s groceries-book Fifty years ago, in my childhood, de grocer came by every week to note the groceries our family needed that week. My mother wrote her order in a little ‘CENTRA Grocer Arie Breed’ book. Arie was our grocer in my home village. They checked the list together and Arie said: “Well, miss Franke, I see you didn’t write soda down, but I think you might need it. It’s been about three weeks since you last bought any soda,

right?” Arie checked my mother’s ordering history in his little orange book, and found out he was right. My mother was glad he thought of the things she forgot, and said: “Write it down for me, please.” Because Arie knew my mother’s interests and purchasing-patterns, could then and there decide whether or not he’d offer her something. In addition,

he had insights in her budget: if she spent 8 guilder every week, and one week just 6, Arie knew (from the data he built up) my mother still had a little space in her budget.  The great thing was that Arie would always come by the next day, whistling and always in a great mood. As a result, my mother was very fond of Arie (customer loyalty). Fifty years ago, Arie Breed applied the perfect 1-to-1 marketing-communication. Both on a corporate- and product-level. Both Arie and his customers were satisfied.

The ever approachable customer

It’s 2015, the customers and prospects are hard to trace, constantly changing their buying behavior and changing from one supplier to another in a snap. The order-history and purchasing-patterns are spread over closed systems. Within POS data, mailingsystems, CRM Package etc. Integrated data collection and data analysis are still very limited within the business community.  The solution lays within a platform that listens to your customers and their needs. A marketing cloud system collects automated data from behavioral patterns 24/7 through every channel. Thus building up a unique customer-profile. The next chapter explains how this is done.  

3

Listening to the customer How does one create higher revenue, margin and profits, while keeping customers satisfied as well? By listening to your customers and talking to them you get to know your customer; just like Arie (Chapter 2) knew his customers. Listening to your customer

Once you’ve decided you want to run a marketing cloud system in your company, you listen to you customer and collect omni-channel relevant data on a personal level. That’s how you get to know your customer, and that’s how you to get communicate personally and efficiently with your customer. Increasing your chances to conversion. Automating activities gives a marketer the time and space to focus on strategy, segmentation, concept, content creation and releases you from manually collecting, synchronizing and exporting datasets and having to perform complicated technical deep analytics.

Automated data collection on a personal level

Thanks to the marketing cloud you’re collecting customer- and prospect-data 24/7, from all sorts of data collections such as CRM, Transactions, POS, telephone exchanges and social media. Essentially, from every datawarehouse within your company that can be connected. This is one of the main reasons an open software system is so important (no vendor lockin).  Such a system acquires insights and knowledge on the following areas: 1: Who is the customer? 2: What does the customer buy? 3: What is the customer interested in? 4: Where does the customer purchase his products? 5: How often does the customer buy (these) products? 6: How much does the customer spend? 7: Anonymous visitors 8: Website personalization based on interests (No retargeting but content directly on website)

E

NA

LI

ZE

Mi8 Figure A

D

IO N

ERS

MI8

/ 24

7A

O N A L I Z E D C U S TO

A N A LY TIC S

EEP

ICS

LY T

D

TS

CONTENTMAR

LTY YA O L

NC E

SE

R

ETING INTELLIGE

G> N IN MI AAT

8 Mi

RK MA

R ME

D

© 2015 zmerce.com

(Chart A: working of Mi8 by zMerce)

24/7 Data analysis (automated)

The data is automatically collected and analyzed, omnichannel and 24/7, creating current and rich, unique customerprofiles. How much do we know about a customer? What are the customer’s preferences? Can any patterns be distilled from his purchasing behavior? Does she like red wine or does she drink fruit juice? Does he buy Boss or Hilfiger? Vegetarian or meat?

Segmenting

Thanks to the 24/7 datamining and deep analytics, the marketer can segment and divide customers in dynamic groups, on a personal level. If a customer’s behavior changes, his profile changes to a different group as well, automatically. For instance, customer A always buys meat (group: meat buyers) and stops buying meat for a certain period (i.e. 4 weeks), his profile changes automatically to the non-meat buying group. 

Workflows: communicating interactively and personally

The analysis and segmentation allows the marketer to carry out 1-to-1 marketing communication with both customers and prospects. Communication workflows

for emailnewsletters, SMS, telemarketing export, or direct mail can be arranged for every segment with the marketing cloud system.

Illustrating customer journey: marketing & sales

Marketing & sales go hand in hand in a data driven organization. Thanks to the marketing cloud, marketing and sales can work together much more effectively and efficiently and can strengthen each other. The quality of the leads increases as you collect more data. A proper marketing cloud system provides you with insights in the entire customer journey and adds to completing marketing and salesfunnels. See chart B.

4

Installing and integrating a marketing cloud system As stated above, working with a marketing cloud requires the willingness to become a data driven organization. We won’t go any deeper into that subject within this whitepaper. But it is important to be aware of long lasting ICT-projects, and make sure that the transition can be realized quickly. The differences (and the costs they bring along) are huge. For example, Mi8 Marketing Cloud of zMerce needs only 40 hours to be implemented into an organization with 4 websites, 1 webshop, 7.000 products and 250.000 customerprofiles. This is in complete opposition to systems that take up to half a year to be completely implemented.

5

The costs of a marketing cloud For most companies the huge investments make cloud systems simply too expensive. That’s why zMerce created the Mi8 MarketingCloud Expansive systems can cost 800.00 euro’s, merely for a start-license. zMerce appears on the other side of the spectrum. The price of a start-license of

tech-startup that was created in 2014, is only 12.000 euro’s a year. Can an affordable system do the same as the expansive ones? The answer is yes. It’s interesting that the big players don’t offer an open software system. While these systems are the ones with great advantages in connecting external datasources. Besides this, it can release your company from depending on suppliers. On top of that is the huge difference in price that stands out. Another outstanding and innovatory difference is that Mi8 can measure interests automatically, as opposed to other systems. The same goes for automated data analyses and pattern-recognition on a personal level. In other words, considering more affordable systems is more than worth it.

6

Summarizing 6a Which marketing problems does a marketing cloud solve?

1. Revenue- and profit-increase to 60%, possibly more. 2. Marketer saves incredibly amounts of time,  not having to connect and process data manually anymore. 3. Omnichannel data-collections are being connected in order to enrich customerprofiles. 4. A marketing cloud completely automatically enriches the customerprofiles 24/7; deep analytics, transactions, measuring interests, and interaction with the customer/prospect. 5. Marketer can focus on strategy, concept, content and creation. 6. Optional segmentation. Arranging dynamic groups = 24/7 current segmentation bases on current profile-information.  7. Automated workflows for omnichannel marketing automation, allowing many marketing-communication actions to run automatically, fitting the customer on a personal level on the right moment, through the right channel. 8. Website personalization: monitoring and converting anonymous visitors. 9. Saving time and money. 10. Increased customer loyalty.

6b Zijn Marketing Cloudsystemen voor elk bedrijf betaalbaar?

Yes!. The recent increased and rapid technological developments make these systems affordable and within reach of every company. One good example is the Mi8 Marketing Intelligence Platform by zMerce, offering a start-license of 12.000 euro. See: www.zmerce.com/nl/content/licenties

7

Afterword  This paper doesn’t intend to be 100% complete, but can help the marketer who is aware of the future on his way to orienting on an affordable marketing cloud system. Workshops

zMerce offers small scale workshops on a regular basis, concering the opportunities of the Mi8 Marketing Cloud. Checkout: http://zmerce.com in order to find out about content and data.

CLOUD

zMerce Amsterdam Cees Franke A-LAB, Overhoeksplein 2 1031KS Amsterdam +31 (0)622 823 677

zMerce Berlijn Pappelallee 78/79 10437 Berlin +49 (0)3060 984 902 59

Mi8 MARKETING INTELLIGENCE

©2015