CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 17 October 2019

New iteration of Demandbase taps certified service providers

Account-based marketing (ABM) outfit, Demandbase, has added service providers to the latest iteration of its ecosystem.

The approach brings together B2B technologies and partners to leverage data-driven insights and account-based audiences across channels. With this next phase, agencies, consultants and systems integrators can leverage the Demandbase ABM platform to put data behind their recommendations as they guide and execute clients’ ABM strategies. 

The service provider partners offer training and support to bring category-leading ABM technology to clients. Partners can provide a range of services, from helping clients use intent and engagement data to build audiences and deliver consistent messages to target accounts, to guiding them through organisational change management by aligning sales and marketing efforts.

Demandbase service provider partners fall into one of two tiers within the ABM ecosystem: Essential or premiere. These service providers range from digital agencies, media agencies, regional and global system integrators, marketing partners and consulting firms. Premiere partners include DWA, Edelman, gyro, Merkle, Ogilvy and Quarry.

Qualtrics launches advanced enterprise insight platform

Experience management vendor, Qualtrics, has launched CoreXM, an insight solution and foundation of its experience management (XM) tool. 

CoreXM encapsulates all the innovative capabilities previously found in Qualtrics Research Core, while adding groundbreaking functionality to help experience management professionals listen to their customers and employees, understand their experiences, and take real-time action.

CoreXM is being pitched as a complete insight solution, allowing organisations to start their XM journey using CoreXM to tap into the right listening channels, gather critical insights and enable action. From there, they can grow into more specialised XM disciplines, including CustomerXM, EmployeeXM, ProductXM and BrandXM, to manage the full lifecycle of stakeholder experiences across the four core experiences of business.

CoreXM includes conjoint analysis; advanced analytics to optimise products, package combinations and pricing by scientifically identifying consumer preferences;

There's also expert review, intelligence layers that scrub response data to detect and eliminate poor quality feedback; XM controls, which report and policy controls to help administrators manage and monitor compliance, data, users and activity at scale; and XM directory for all customer and employee data to track experience journeys, build profiles and conduct research.

Finally, XM solutions includes automated workflows to customise needs and requirements, while an enhanced user interface refreshes the product homepage and delivers improved navigation.

Campaign Monitor launches email marketing solution for retail

Email marketing software provider, Campaign Monitor, has launched CM Commerce, a new product offering built from the popular ecommerce platform, Conversio. 

CM Commerce is designed for retail businesses wanting to accelerate their growth through the use of advanced email marketing. CM Commerce enables the creation of professional, automated email campaigns that streamline engagement throughout the customer lifecycle, increase conversions and build trustworthy brands

CM Commerce has deep integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce and Big Commerce, enabling small business owners to integrate their storefronts with the platform to begin utilising features such as abandoned cart emails, post-purchase surveys and product reviews. 

In addition, the platform guides users through the process of campaign development with pre-built workflows for a wide range of email marketing tactics from simple to advanced. CM Commerce also offers users the ability to track key ecommerce metrics like conversion performance, list growth and average order value.

Kibo looks to acquisition to boost customer journey offering

Kibo, a cloud commerce business, is on track to acquire Monetate to expand its personalisation tools and complement its Certona solution.

The vendor's ambition is to extend its personalised omnichannel cloud commerce offering. Kibo claims the addition of Monetate will enable retailers and brands to be better equipped to curate, test and optimise customer experiences intelligently and consistently wherever they occur — online, in-store through mobile apps and via AI assistants. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

Kibo will offer A/B and multivariate testing, content personalisation and audience building and targeting with an intuitive, self-serve user interface designed for merchandisers and marketers.

Pega extends AI smarts with new wizard

Pegasystems, the digital transformation software business, has developed a new guided configuration process using AI to optimise decision choices and strategies. 

The Next-Best-Action Designer, the interface for Pega’s Customer Decision Hub, utilised a wizard-like process with built-in best practices and guardrails based on years of successful decisioning implementations to avoid common mis-steps such as focusing on segmentation rather than one-to-one marketing, not using common strategies for both inbound and outbound targeting, or inadvertently mixing eligibility rules with propensity models to skew customer relevance scores.

Pega Customer Decision Hub serves as an always-on 'brain' providing centralised AI across all customer touchpoints to optimise every interaction and maximise customer value. It analyses individual customers, interprets their intent and executes the next best action in real time.

By configuring the arbitration logic in a centralised Next-Best-Action Designer tab, users can balance key factors used by the Pega Customer Decision Hub to make complex decisions, such as weighted context indicators, propensity scores and customer lifetime value projections. After blending these factors to the user-defined specification, Pega AI ranks the best possible actions for each unique customer in any given situation and then acts on it.

Bazaarvoice adds new Insights and Reports

User-generated content (UGC) and product review platform, Bazaarvoice, has extended its offering with a new Insights and Reports feature.

The new functionality provides reporting and actionable recommendations to help brands and retailers understand what consumers are saying about their products.Bazaarvoice’s Insights application uses machine learning to analyse and surface product and UGC program performance data and consumer sentiment. The latest industry benchmarks sourced from Bazaarvoice’s network of clients are included in the application to help brands and retailers compare performance to peers.

According to Bazaarvoice, the new reports application gives clients an efficient reporting method that scales to meet changing data needs. It also provides business-focused templates that can be customised and easily shared with colleagues.

In addition, Bazaarvoice's new Vendor Scorecard report template provides an additional layer of strategic intelligence specifically designed for merchandising. This report allows retailers to gauge UGC performance by brand, category or individual SKU, enabling retailers and buyers to identify top performers and areas for improvement across their vendors.

Zendesk releases new messaging tool and online support platform

Customer service software provider, Zendesk, has announced two new products, Sunshine Conversations and Zendesk Gather.

Both are aimed at assisting brands to better unify and improve customer interactions through messaging and online self-service support.

Sunshine Conversations is an API-based platform that allows businesses to integrate messaging via today’s most popular social channels and directly interact with customers. Zendesk Gather is another new product whiich enables companies to provide trusted support to customers through online community forums. Gather creates a space where customers can engage with each other and company experts to offer guidance and insight, helping companies increase efficiency, boost SEO and encourage self-service among customers.

Aqilliz unveils blockchain-enabled enterprise product lines 

Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions provider, has new blockchain-enabled digital marketing tools for the enterprise market.

Aqilliz aims to enhance the exchange between brands, platforms and consumers and looks to provide blockchain-enabled solutions that enable greater trust, transparency and cost-efficiency. Its three solutions: Proton, Neutron and Electron function across the online value exchange process and introduce blockchain-based methods to better optimise existing business models. 

Proton is aimed at optimising processes across the digital supply chain, specifically in the areas of source attestation, transaction verification and dispute resolution. Neutron aims to ensure that identities are secured in a decentralised data marketplace. Electron focuses on automating settlements, mitigating risks and reducing costs in order to improve customer outcomes.

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