This blog has mentioned BlueConic in passing a couple of times but never quite gotten around to reviewing it in detail. Until now.
The delay may seem surprising, since BlueConic qualifies as a Customer Data Platform, a type of system I’ve been arguing will play an increasingly central role in marketers’ futures. For those of you who haven’t been paying close attention, a CDP is defined as a
• marketer-controlled system that
• supports external marketing execution based on
• persistent, cross-channel customer data.
This definition distinguishes CDPs from traditional marketing automation products, which do their own execution, and from real-time interaction managers, which lack persistent data stores. CDPs are important because few marketers have been able to build adequate cross-channel databases and because connecting those databases with execution systems has been difficult. The databases and connections are needed because today's customers expect personalized, coordinated treatments across all channels. Call it the “Amazon fallacy”: customers believe that since Amazon.com can give them highly personalized treatments, so can everyone else.
Anyway, back to BlueConic. The system has two main capabilities, which are to maintain customer profiles and to deliver targeted messages. The profiles can be based on data imported from other systems via batch processes or APIs or captured by BlueConic itself. It does this with “listeners” that can read data from forms or monitor behaviors via Javascript tags on Web pages, emails, and other media. “Listeners” can also create interest rankings and scores based on user behavior. All of these become available as attributes on the customer profile, which in turn can create customer segments and drive targeted messages.
The messages are delivered by what BlueConic calls “dialogues”, each of which sends a single message to a single location (email, text message, section on a Web page, etc.) to a specified customer segment. Messages tailored to customer interests would require creating a separate segment for each message. Similarly, presenting a sequence of messages would require a separate dialogue for each step in the sequence. If a customer is eligible for several dialogues at once, the system currently relies on an optimizer to pick best-responding option and will soon let users create rules to further guide the results. There is no built-in predictive modeling but the optimizer can continuously test alternative messages within a dialogue and automatically deploy the winner. Users can also apply a frequency cap to dialogues to limit the number of times any customer sees the same message.
BlueConic’s integration features are more extensive than its decision management. The system can capture data entered into forms even if the form ise not submitted. Users can insert message contains into an existing Web page without writing HTML code. Profiles capture customer identifiers provided by other systems and are automatically merged when two profiles are linked to the same external ID. Data is exchanged with other sources and execution systems via REST APIs. There are standard integrations with Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com, as well as a system development kit for integration with mobile apps. The underlying data store is Apache Cassandra running on Amazon Web Services, which is highly flexible and scalable at moderate cost.
Integration and data management are what make BlueConic most interesting from a CDP perspective, since those are the core CDP functions. A “pure" CDP would provide only those services while leaving decision management and message delivery to other systems. I expect “pure” CDPs to appear, but most marketers prefer a broader solution, like BlueConic, to assembling the components for themselves. Pure CDPs will become more attractive as integration becomes easier through more standard APIs and connectors, a promise that cloud-based systems often make but are just starting to deliver.
BlueConic’s pricing is already data-centric: fees are based on numbers of profile and channels, not interactions or messages. Prices start around $1,000 per month although most clients pay more. Current implementations are mid-size and enterprise firms in B2C industries including retail, publishing, financial services, utilities, telecommunications, sports and travel. The system has about 70 current customers and is sold both directly and to partners such as ad agencies, other software vendors, and marketing service providers.
Showing posts with label cross-channel marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cross-channel marketing. Show all posts
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
Bizo and DemandBase Lead B2B Marketing Automation to Web Advertising and Beyond
I had a fascinating chat earlier this week with a client who described his vision for using DemandBase to tailor messages to Web site visitors from target accounts, using Bizo to further tailor messages to individuals by title, using all this data to synch inbound and outbound campaigns in Eloqua, and eventually driving everything with predictive model scores from a tool like Lattice Engines. That could serve as a pretty complete summary of the state of the art for B2B marketing today, especially if you consider “content marketing” as implicitly included. Equally helpful to me personally, it reinforced my intention to write about Bizo and DemandBase, both of which have recently briefed me on their latest product extensions.
Let’s start with DemandBase. Astonishingly, four years have passed since I last wrote about them. In that time, they’ve continued to build applications that exploit their core technology for identifying Web site visitors by company based on their IP address. This started by providing visitor lists and real-time alerts to sales people who were interested in specific accounts. It later extended to returning visitor attributes in real time so companies could pre-fill forms and personalize Web pages to match visitor interests. The most recent expansion went beyond a company’s own Web site to the much larger world of online advertising.
To reach that market, the company had to build its own version of “data management platform” (DMP) systems that manage lists of known entities, recognizes them when they appear on an external Web site, and delivers them an appropriate advertisement. The big difference is that DemandBase entities are companies identified by IP address, while traditional DMP entities are cookies attached to browsers (and assumed to relate to individual human beings). DemandBase had to build its own engines for real time bidding (RTB) and ad serving (Demand Side Platform or DSP) to support its approach. These can integrate with Demandbase’s own network of Web publishers that will accept its ads and with other ad exchanges that connect to their own, larger publisher networks.
Data in the DemandBase DMP comes from both DemandBase and clients. The DemandBase data are the company-level attributes that DemandBase has long assembled: company name, industry, revenue, employees, technologies used, etc. Some of this, such as DUNS Number, is purchased from external sources and requires extra payment. The client data, which of course is available only to the client who provided it, could be anything but is usually attributes such as account type, buying stage, and sales territory. The system doesn’t store any information about individuals. Marketing automation, Web analytics, and Web content management systems can all access this data via API calls for analytics and as inputs to their own selection and treatment rules. Outside the DMP itself, DemandBase can store content and decision rules to guide bidding and select which ad is displayed to each account.
So much for the mechanics. The business value is that DemandBase is allowing marketers to tailor messages to target accounts even before they engage directly with the company, thereby (hopefully) luring new prospects into the top of the funnel and engaging them if they don’t respond. This is a major extension beyond traditional marketing automation, which works mostly through email to known prospects. It also goes beyond Web site personalization, which requires people to at least visit your Web site and in most cases actively provide information about themselves. As you might imagine, DemandBase offers many case studies to show how much this improves performance.
Bizo comes at Web advertising from the traditional route of building a pool of cookies and assembling them into audiences based on the attributes of the individuals they represent. The pool was originally used to target display advertising and retarget site visitors by sending them ads on other sites. The company says it has pulled data from 4,200 publishers and other sources to identify about 120 million individuals worldwide, including 85 million within the U.S. The number of actual cookies is higher still.* Profiles contain titles and business demographics such as industry, but no personally identifiable information such as names or addresses.
Like DemandBase, Bizo has found many applications for its core data asset. These now extend beyond display ads to social media advertising through Facebook and LinkedIn, Web site personalization through Adobe, Web analytics through Google Analytics and Adobe, and integration with Salesforce.com CRM, BlueKai DMP, and Eloqua marketing automation. Other partners will be added over time.
I’ll assume the Eloqua integration is most interesting to readers of this blog. Basically, it lets Bizo read audience segments created by Eloqua. Bizo then matches segment members to Bizo identities and delivers Web site, advertising or social messages tailored to each segment. Because Eloqua captures such detailed information about prospect behaviors, this allows highly tailored advertising that is tightly synchronized with prospects’ progress through buying stages and marketing automation campaigns. Since it’s driven by cookies, it can send messages to anonymous as well as identified prospects – a huge expansion in marketing automation’s reach. Bizo can even allocate advertising spend across the different media to achieve reach and frequency targets as efficiently as possible. To encourage this approach, its pricing is based on the number of unique individuals that marketers manage in its system, rather than impressions or ad budget.
The business value offered by Bizo is similar to DemandBase: reaching prospects that haven’t yet engaged with a company directly or retargeting them when they don’t respond. The different technical approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses: IP-based identification is relatively stable but works only at the company level and doesn’t identify small businesses that lack their own stable IP address; cookies identify individuals but are often deleted, miss some people, and result in multiple, fragmented identities for others. Like the client I mentioned at the start of this article, you can probably think of them as complementary rather than competing components of a complete B2B marketing solution.
________________________________________________________________________
* Given that the total employed U.S. workforce is about 145 million, I suspect that 85 million contains quite a few duplicates, meaning any one profile captures just a fragment of an individual’s activity. But that’s the nature of this sort of thing; the business question is how well the data works even in its imperfect state.
Let’s start with DemandBase. Astonishingly, four years have passed since I last wrote about them. In that time, they’ve continued to build applications that exploit their core technology for identifying Web site visitors by company based on their IP address. This started by providing visitor lists and real-time alerts to sales people who were interested in specific accounts. It later extended to returning visitor attributes in real time so companies could pre-fill forms and personalize Web pages to match visitor interests. The most recent expansion went beyond a company’s own Web site to the much larger world of online advertising.
To reach that market, the company had to build its own version of “data management platform” (DMP) systems that manage lists of known entities, recognizes them when they appear on an external Web site, and delivers them an appropriate advertisement. The big difference is that DemandBase entities are companies identified by IP address, while traditional DMP entities are cookies attached to browsers (and assumed to relate to individual human beings). DemandBase had to build its own engines for real time bidding (RTB) and ad serving (Demand Side Platform or DSP) to support its approach. These can integrate with Demandbase’s own network of Web publishers that will accept its ads and with other ad exchanges that connect to their own, larger publisher networks.
Data in the DemandBase DMP comes from both DemandBase and clients. The DemandBase data are the company-level attributes that DemandBase has long assembled: company name, industry, revenue, employees, technologies used, etc. Some of this, such as DUNS Number, is purchased from external sources and requires extra payment. The client data, which of course is available only to the client who provided it, could be anything but is usually attributes such as account type, buying stage, and sales territory. The system doesn’t store any information about individuals. Marketing automation, Web analytics, and Web content management systems can all access this data via API calls for analytics and as inputs to their own selection and treatment rules. Outside the DMP itself, DemandBase can store content and decision rules to guide bidding and select which ad is displayed to each account.
So much for the mechanics. The business value is that DemandBase is allowing marketers to tailor messages to target accounts even before they engage directly with the company, thereby (hopefully) luring new prospects into the top of the funnel and engaging them if they don’t respond. This is a major extension beyond traditional marketing automation, which works mostly through email to known prospects. It also goes beyond Web site personalization, which requires people to at least visit your Web site and in most cases actively provide information about themselves. As you might imagine, DemandBase offers many case studies to show how much this improves performance.
Bizo comes at Web advertising from the traditional route of building a pool of cookies and assembling them into audiences based on the attributes of the individuals they represent. The pool was originally used to target display advertising and retarget site visitors by sending them ads on other sites. The company says it has pulled data from 4,200 publishers and other sources to identify about 120 million individuals worldwide, including 85 million within the U.S. The number of actual cookies is higher still.* Profiles contain titles and business demographics such as industry, but no personally identifiable information such as names or addresses.
Like DemandBase, Bizo has found many applications for its core data asset. These now extend beyond display ads to social media advertising through Facebook and LinkedIn, Web site personalization through Adobe, Web analytics through Google Analytics and Adobe, and integration with Salesforce.com CRM, BlueKai DMP, and Eloqua marketing automation. Other partners will be added over time.
I’ll assume the Eloqua integration is most interesting to readers of this blog. Basically, it lets Bizo read audience segments created by Eloqua. Bizo then matches segment members to Bizo identities and delivers Web site, advertising or social messages tailored to each segment. Because Eloqua captures such detailed information about prospect behaviors, this allows highly tailored advertising that is tightly synchronized with prospects’ progress through buying stages and marketing automation campaigns. Since it’s driven by cookies, it can send messages to anonymous as well as identified prospects – a huge expansion in marketing automation’s reach. Bizo can even allocate advertising spend across the different media to achieve reach and frequency targets as efficiently as possible. To encourage this approach, its pricing is based on the number of unique individuals that marketers manage in its system, rather than impressions or ad budget.
The business value offered by Bizo is similar to DemandBase: reaching prospects that haven’t yet engaged with a company directly or retargeting them when they don’t respond. The different technical approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses: IP-based identification is relatively stable but works only at the company level and doesn’t identify small businesses that lack their own stable IP address; cookies identify individuals but are often deleted, miss some people, and result in multiple, fragmented identities for others. Like the client I mentioned at the start of this article, you can probably think of them as complementary rather than competing components of a complete B2B marketing solution.
________________________________________________________________________
* Given that the total employed U.S. workforce is about 145 million, I suspect that 85 million contains quite a few duplicates, meaning any one profile captures just a fragment of an individual’s activity. But that’s the nature of this sort of thing; the business question is how well the data works even in its imperfect state.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Right On Interactive's 5Buckets Simplifies Multi-Channel Messaging
Summary: Right On Interactive's 5Buckets connects lists from external customer management systems with many types of output vendors (email, print, fax, text message, automated voice). It's a low-cost, easy-to-use alternative to more powerful marketing automation systems for companies who don't need other marketing automation features.
Last Wednesday’s revised ranking of demand generation vendors by Web traffic reminded me that I never published notes from a conversation I had several months ago with Right On Interactive, developer of the 5Buckets marketing automation software. Now is a good time to remedy that.
5Buckets isn’t actually a demand generation system, at least according to my usual definition. Rather, it matches the functions of a traditional campaign manager: accept inputs from external sources (CRM, Web sites, surveys, transactions), create lists from those sources, and send the lists to external systems for delivery. It can also combine its inputs into a persistent marketing database, but that's optional. Most clients just select directly from the external systems instead.
This is a much narrower scope than conventional demand generation systems: no email blasts, no landing pages (although the system does generate online forms), no content management, no lead scoring, and limited CRM integration. There's no query builder or "fuzzy matching" to identify records in different systems that relate to the same customer. The system does maintain a cross reference table to link records where different keys from different systems are known to refer to the same individual. The company plans to expand some of these database-related features by the end of this year.
On the other hand, unlike traditional demand generation systems, 5Buckets includes promotions to existing customers as well as sales prospects. By my definitions (see Demand Generation vs Marketing Automation on the Raab Guide Web site), this makes 5Buckets a type of marketing automation system.
Of course, the labels matter less than what the system does. The core feature of 5Buckets is its ability to run campaigns that direct output to different media. Campaigns can be triggered manually or run automatically on a regular schedule. They pull data from external lists and can execute actions including: send a message (email, voice mail, print, fax, post cards, mobile text); update Salesforce.com (create a task, send an email through Salesforce.com, update Salesforce.com bounce history); or get a record count.
A scheduled campaign can contain multiple steps, each with its own list (or “bucket”) and action. The lists are created in the source systems, independently of 5Buckets, and then imported. Existing integrations are available for Salesforce.com, Exact Target, Avectra netForum (association membership), and RealPage (property management). The system can also execute SQL queries. Although the lists are defined using the source system's own selection tools, 5Buckets’ itself does let users include or exclude one bucket from another. This makes it easier for records in a campaign to flow from one bucket to the next. But time intervals between steps must still be built into the external selection rules. Additional selection capabilities are also planned by year-end.
5Buckets hasn't made list selection a priority because it assumes that source systems can already do it. Instead, it has focused on making it simple to send messages in any channel. The vendor has standard connectors for ExactTarget, Salesforce.com and Delivra email; Vontoo voice messaging; PremiereGlobal fax and fax mailmerge; XpressMessages postcards and sales letters; MessageBuzz text messaging and ConnectiveMobile voice and text messages. Most marketers would find it very difficult to run on-going campaigns through so many channels without 5Buckets or the equivalent.
Pricing is also intended to make things simple. 5Buckets costs $6,000 to $12,000 per year depending on the number of schedules and connections. This is much less than conventional marketing automation systems like Unica or Neolane. Although some demand generation systems are in a similar range (see my ever-popular post Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation ), they don’t have 5Buckets’ prebuilt connectors.
Indeed, Right On Interactive VP Marketing Richard Cunningham says he considers 5Buckets to be complementary rather than competitive with traditional marketing automation systems. I’m not so sure, but do suspect 5Buckets will be attractive to marketers who want to automate multi-channel campaigns without other marketing automation functions. Since 5Buckets itself will probably expand its features over time, automated campaigns are a good place to start.
5Buckets was introduced in early 2008 and currently has about 30 implementations shared by about 300 organizations. (The difference is that several implementations are used by multiple entities, such as franchisees and business association members.) Right On Interactive is a marketing services agency but is shifting its focus towards software: of the 5Buckets implementations, only five to ten also use unrelated Right On marketing services.
Last Wednesday’s revised ranking of demand generation vendors by Web traffic reminded me that I never published notes from a conversation I had several months ago with Right On Interactive, developer of the 5Buckets marketing automation software. Now is a good time to remedy that.
5Buckets isn’t actually a demand generation system, at least according to my usual definition. Rather, it matches the functions of a traditional campaign manager: accept inputs from external sources (CRM, Web sites, surveys, transactions), create lists from those sources, and send the lists to external systems for delivery. It can also combine its inputs into a persistent marketing database, but that's optional. Most clients just select directly from the external systems instead.
This is a much narrower scope than conventional demand generation systems: no email blasts, no landing pages (although the system does generate online forms), no content management, no lead scoring, and limited CRM integration. There's no query builder or "fuzzy matching" to identify records in different systems that relate to the same customer. The system does maintain a cross reference table to link records where different keys from different systems are known to refer to the same individual. The company plans to expand some of these database-related features by the end of this year.
On the other hand, unlike traditional demand generation systems, 5Buckets includes promotions to existing customers as well as sales prospects. By my definitions (see Demand Generation vs Marketing Automation on the Raab Guide Web site), this makes 5Buckets a type of marketing automation system.
Of course, the labels matter less than what the system does. The core feature of 5Buckets is its ability to run campaigns that direct output to different media. Campaigns can be triggered manually or run automatically on a regular schedule. They pull data from external lists and can execute actions including: send a message (email, voice mail, print, fax, post cards, mobile text); update Salesforce.com (create a task, send an email through Salesforce.com, update Salesforce.com bounce history); or get a record count.
A scheduled campaign can contain multiple steps, each with its own list (or “bucket”) and action. The lists are created in the source systems, independently of 5Buckets, and then imported. Existing integrations are available for Salesforce.com, Exact Target, Avectra netForum (association membership), and RealPage (property management). The system can also execute SQL queries. Although the lists are defined using the source system's own selection tools, 5Buckets’ itself does let users include or exclude one bucket from another. This makes it easier for records in a campaign to flow from one bucket to the next. But time intervals between steps must still be built into the external selection rules. Additional selection capabilities are also planned by year-end.
5Buckets hasn't made list selection a priority because it assumes that source systems can already do it. Instead, it has focused on making it simple to send messages in any channel. The vendor has standard connectors for ExactTarget, Salesforce.com and Delivra email; Vontoo voice messaging; PremiereGlobal fax and fax mailmerge; XpressMessages postcards and sales letters; MessageBuzz text messaging and ConnectiveMobile voice and text messages. Most marketers would find it very difficult to run on-going campaigns through so many channels without 5Buckets or the equivalent.
Pricing is also intended to make things simple. 5Buckets costs $6,000 to $12,000 per year depending on the number of schedules and connections. This is much less than conventional marketing automation systems like Unica or Neolane. Although some demand generation systems are in a similar range (see my ever-popular post Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation ), they don’t have 5Buckets’ prebuilt connectors.
Indeed, Right On Interactive VP Marketing Richard Cunningham says he considers 5Buckets to be complementary rather than competitive with traditional marketing automation systems. I’m not so sure, but do suspect 5Buckets will be attractive to marketers who want to automate multi-channel campaigns without other marketing automation functions. Since 5Buckets itself will probably expand its features over time, automated campaigns are a good place to start.
5Buckets was introduced in early 2008 and currently has about 30 implementations shared by about 300 organizations. (The difference is that several implementations are used by multiple entities, such as franchisees and business association members.) Right On Interactive is a marketing services agency but is shifting its focus towards software: of the 5Buckets implementations, only five to ten also use unrelated Right On marketing services.
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