A real emphasis has been placed on the collection of first-party data.

Pairing a first-party data strategy with a one-to-one marketing strategy will help your teams remain aligned to ensure messages are both targeted and personalized. This needs to happen from the very first interaction at the point of ingestion.

Join data experts as they share their perspectives on the importance of clean, complete, and connected data to optimize your CRM.

Register and attend “How to Leverage First-Party Data for a Winning CRM Strategy,” presented by AtData.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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This week, Salesforce also unveiled Einstein GPT, integrating ChatGPT functionality with their CRM, sales clouds and Slack.

ChatUX. The ChatSpot app aims at providing an easier way for users to work within HubSpot’s CRM using general language prompts. This technology, which Shah calls “ChatUX,” can help users interact with the CRM and perform various marketing and sales functions in fewer steps.

CRM. Shah shared several use cases for ChatSpot that applied to CRM and other use cases.

For example, if a user wants to add a contact to the CRM, all the user has to do is type this contact’s information into ChatSpot, instead of weeding through menus in the CRM.

The ChatSpot app can also provide answers to help with sales research, fielding questions about contacts that are located in specific markets, or organizations that are a specific size or are part of a specific industry.

Content. The ChatSpot app can generate emails and other messages that pull in contextual information about the company and contact the salesperson is addressing.

With a single click, the user can copy these messages into a clipboard to use in their preferred channel.

Reporting with ChatGPT data sets. While ChatSpot provides an easier natural language interface for accessing data within the HubSpot CRM, it also pulls in additional data sets through its integration with ChatGPT.

In generating a report on global markets, for instance, the user can add columns of data from ChatGPT about populations of countries and other data that isn’t in the CRM.

Why we care. This is an early look at some generative AI and chat functions that have the potential to cut down on a marketer’s repetitive tasks. As Shah emphasizes in the video below, the content that ChatSpot generates for emails is a “first draft” intended for a human to build off of and proofread.

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The company also announced a partnership with OpenAI, out of which a ChatGPT app (currently in beta) is available for Slack. The partnership will also make other “out-of-the-box” integrations between Salesforce tools and ChatGPT.

Dig deeper: OpenAI unveils ChatGPT API at very low prices

Einstein GPT. Billed as the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, Einstein GPT matches Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with real-time data from Salesforce’s Data Cloud. Salesforce customers can then connect that data with OpenAI’s models or other generative AI models, and generate content within their Salesforce CRM.

Customer data in the CRM allows marketers to communicate with their customers, and from that, the generative AI can help create personalized messages. For instance, salespeople using the tool will be able to generate personalized email responses or create other personalized content in campaigns that can potentially drive up response rates.

Integrations. In addition to integrations in all of Salesforce’s clouds, as well as Slack, Einstein GPT will also integrate in Tableau and MuleSoft, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement.

“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI,” said Benioff. “This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated and personalized ways.”

Marketing and sales capabilities. Here are all the Einstein GPT tools Salesforce announced:

• Einstein GPT for Sales. Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.
• Einstein GPT for Service. Generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions.
• Einstein GPT for Marketing. Generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
• Einstein GPT for Salesforce’s Slack app. Deliver AI-powered customer insights in Slack like smart summaries of sales opportunities and surface end users actions like updating knowledge articles.
• Einstein GPT for Developer.: Improve developer productivity with Salesforce Research’s proprietary Large Language Model by using an AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.

Generative AI Fund. Salesforce Ventures also announced a new $250 million generative AI fund, the aim of which is to develop the AI ecosystem and bolster development around responsible generative AI.

Why we care. So far, this has been the year of generative AI. For years, Salesforce has been developing its Einstein AI capabilities. Now, that intelligence is given more pointed chat and content generation functions through its integrations with OpenAI’s Chat GPT.

Of course, AI in marketing has other flavors of functionality. For instance, Petco uses Einstein to generate product and experience recommendations to customers. They also keep a human close by to review many of the personalized templates the AI comes up with.

The post Salesforce unveils Einstein GPT appeared first on MarTech.

“Copilot brings the power of next-generation AI capabilities and natural language processing to Dynamics 365, working alongside business professionals to help them create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions — just by describing what’s needed,” Emily He, corporate vice president for business applications marketing, wrote in a blog post.

CRM. In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing marketers can use natural language to ask questions to explore, analyze and understand customer segment sizes and preferences.

Dig deeper: ChatGPT: A marketer’s guide

“For example, a marketer might want to identify customers that reside in San Francisco, California, with a high customer lifetime value, who have also made a purchase in the last 90 days,” He wrote. “With a few clicks, Copilot produces the results, along with information such as the customers’ average age, product preferences, or average purchase price. These insights can then be configured into a segment to support a campaign. With Copilot, marketers can now get a deeper understanding of their customers in near real-time.”

Sales. Copilot adds capabilities to the AI enhancements announced last month for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales. Those included generating content suggestions based on customer emails with data specifically relevant to the recipient, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. 

New capabilities include putting email replies into general availability and integrations for customizable emails. For example, it can generate an email proposing a meeting time based on availability on the seller’s Outlook calendar. There’s also a feedback mechanism that allows sellers to rate the AI-generated content with a thumbs up or thumbs down, refining and improving future replies. 

The copilot also provides AI-generated meeting and call summaries of key topics, issues and concerns. It can then draft a recap of the discussion with action items and follow-up dates, based on CRM and meeting data. “Summaries can be generated for a range of meeting types in Teams, including multi-participant and internal calls, helping sellers stay organized and on top of critical, content-heavy sales meetings,” according to the company’s blog.

The copilot is included in Viva Sales and can be purchased separately for other CRM systems, including Salesforce.

Customer service. In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the copilot has access to the case history of a customer and is able to help support personnel with customer inquiries.

“With Copilot, agents can quickly craft a draft email or chat response to customers with a single click. Copilot understands the context based on the current live conversation; identifies relevant information from trusted websites and internal documents, including knowledgebase articles and previously resolved cases; and crafts a response that the agent can review and send to the customer.”

It can also help diagnose more complex customer issues, discover resolutions and summarize draft responses across all communication channels.

Other products with AI. 

• Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can flag issues like weather, financials and geography that might impact supply chain processes. Planners can then choose to have Copilot automatically draft an email to alert any impacted partners.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central will now be able to help organizations rapidly create product listings.

Why we care. All of these copilots look to make life easier for marketers, salesfolk and customer support people. That’s a good thing. They automate tedious, repetitious tasks and enhance them with data and integrations with other Microsoft products. Never mind the hype about what AI may do in the future. In the here and now it is already providing tangible benefits to businesses and workers.

The post Microsoft unveils AI “copilots” for sales, CRM and customer support appeared first on MarTech.

“We implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the platform alone is great, but it’s not going to do all the hard work for you,” said Andrea Mathews, Petco’s vice president of CRM, at The MarTech Conference. “Those things are paying off for us, and the campaigns that we’re building are over-delivering on engagement goals, on click rates and ultimately revenue.”

Hyper-personalized email campaigns

In 2021 and 2022, Petco built out a hyper-personalized email program that sent monthly “health reports” to pet parents in their CRM. Early in the implementation, they also ran standalone personalized campaigns for some quick wins, Mathews said. 

“What we hear continuously is parents want to do a good job, but half of them don’t know what that means or what that looks like,” she said.

The health reports include areas where pet parents are doing well, as well as education on areas for improvement.

“The fact that we have such a rich database allowed us to really use that data to inform this communication and really make it completely relevant from top to bottom for the customer,” said Mathews.

Dig deeper: 5 paths to post-cookie personalized advertising

Using data in the CRM to run campaigns and experience

Petco partnered with Jam, a CRM-focused agency, to get the most out of its CRM. Customer data comes in from user interactions (making purchases on the app or website, for instance), gets aggregated in the CRM, and then used in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for activations like email campaigns or digital experience on Petco’s properties.

“It all starts with data, and on the Petco side there’s a rich data set from multiple platforms,” said Brad Bettinson, vice president enterprise solutions, Jam. “We can bring that platform data directly into Marketing Cloud, but ideally it goes into a central CRM or CDP, and then we get that aggregate data every day into Marketing Cloud.”

He added, “On the back end, there’s development language in Marketing Cloud, and anyone on your team who’s a developer who knows pretty much any standard language could pick it up pretty quickly. But we’re also making templates and content blocks that are really smart, and that makes them reusable…Now Andrea’s team, or our team, as they’re building that next message, they can just drag, put in [the reusable blocks] and then all of a sudden their email has huge chunks of personalization that have already been tested and worked out.”

Using the rich data from customer interactions, Petco no longer looks at emails as a single message. Instead, they are building conversations through a series of emails and digital experiences.

AI-powered recommendations

“We just keep adding to that library of really smart modules that we have,” said Bettinson. “Some of those modules include AI.”

He added, “Using Einstein to do product recommendations is one of our really smart modules. And then you can end up with this complexity. So we’ve got these great messages, but now there are hundreds of thousands of versions. So how do you actually test those?”

Dig deeper: How AI can help your marketing right now

The Petco and Jam teams use a preview tool so recommendations generated by the AI can be vetted by humans.

“Our humans could look and infer when Einstein’s getting it right and when Einstein needs a bit of help,” Bettinson explained. “And then in scenarios where we thought Einstein needed a bit of help, we could see that in the data and we would override those recommendations. Maybe 80% to 90% of customers will get our best performing Einstein profile and then 10% will have a manual override, where Einstein has a blind spot from maybe some data issues.”

Having good customer data to back up the AI is crucial.

“The modules that have Einstein in it are very well performing because you’re talking to a customer about what they purchased and what makes sense for them,” said Bettinson. “So it’s really helping that level of personalization and relevance that clients are learning, hey, I should open Petco emails because there is something in it for me.”

Register for The MarTech Conference here.

The post How Petco boosted emails and customer experience with a new CRM appeared first on MarTech.

The data on data isn’t all bad. Some 49% of marketers agreed “somewhat” they had enough data for personalization efforts. However, 26% disagreed to some extent, according to the survey of 355 marketers. 

Why we care. It’s surprising at this late date to see how much of marketing’s digital transformation is still a work in progress. The problems are familiar and aren’t all technological. It doesn’t matter how good your CRM is if you can’t get the data for it. Business units may balk at sharing information because they don’t understand why it’s needed and because controlling it can be used as leverage within an organization.

The tech side may be “suffering” from too much innovation. There were, at last count, nearly 10,000 martech solutions on the market. On the plus side, with that many it’s almost certain one of them does what you need. However, the more you use the more likely you are to encounter integration and/or interoperability issues. 

Dig deeper: How bad data can spoil good personalization

Tech is good, could be better. It’s reassuring that 60% of those surveyed agreed somewhat when asked if their marketing technology allows their organization to execute effective personalized experiences. While 21% disagreed with the statement, only 5% did so strongly.

Budget continues to be top of the list as the biggest challenge to executing a successful personalization strategy. Some 43% of marketers cited it, up five percentage points from 2022. Although managing customer expectations is second on the list at 37%, that’s down from 39% last year. Rounding out the top five are: creating/delivering relevant content, 32% in 2023 versus 31% in 2022; tracking customers through the entire journey, 31% / 28%; and having the technology needed to execute, 26% / 21%.

The post Only 25% of marketers report having all the data needed for personalization appeared first on MarTech.

“We believe connected TV advertising is undervalued, and there’s so much that digital, data-driven marketers can do with connected TV advertising that goes beyond the scope of any other ad channel,” said Hooman Javidan-Nejad, director of performance marketing for CTV advertising platform MNTN, at The MarTech Conference.

Why we care. Hit shows on streaming services get the credit for the CTV surge. But within these mass audiences there is data for targeting and segmentation. B2B marketers ahead of the curve have also experimented with streaming for delivering on-demand video content to prospects. 

Serving prospects ads on ad-supported Netflix, or managing your own video programming like a kind of B2B Netflix, is a much different experience than traditional whitepapers that recognize professionals’ changing media consumption and self-serve research habits.

CTV data. “Data-driven marketing has picked up in the last decade because the nature of all those digital channels are enabling you, and empowering you, to have access to the data and to act on it,” said Javidan-Nejad. “This is something that we never had for a TV — [traditional linear] TV advertising has always had limited or no reporting.”

Because of CTV’s digital infrastructure, ad campaigns on that channel have performance and measurement data that can be used as a market research tool.

“The beauty of approaching connected TV just like another digital channel is that you can apply the same targeting criteria you are applying today on LinkedIn, or on Facebook,” he added. “The insights that you’re getting from connected TV advertising can be applied to all the other channels, or the insights that you’re getting from the creative can be applied into the other channels.”

Dig deeper: Bringing your ABM strategy to CTV

Finding audiences on CTV. When advertising on CTV, B2B marketers should execute multiple campaigns, or target different audiences with a single campaign.

For example, a B2B marketer could run one campaign based on job titles, and another one based on firmographic criteria. You could also launch a retargeting campaign, based on first-party data acquired from those who have visited your website and shared their info.

“For each of these audiences, you will get audience segment reporting,” Javidan-Nejad explained. “So you will be able to see which of these audiences have performed better, which of these audiences had a better verified visit rate, and all the other metrics [to discover] which audiences are performing better. And then you can take those audience insights and apply them to the other channels.”

Matched audiences. B2B marketers can also use existing customers and prospects from their CRM and match them with a CTV adtech partner, in order to deliver CTV ads to those prospects when they’re watching streaming TV.

“This is the same audience that you’re using across all the other paid social channels,” said Javidan-Nejad. “The insights and learnings that you get from CTV can be extended and implemented across the other channels.”

Testing creative. Before committing a large budget on a robust TV campaign, B2B marketers can test different kinds of creative on CTV to determine what messages and visual cues stick with customers and prospects.

While every digital ad channel has its own sweet spot for what works in video ads, some of these insights about what works best on CTV can be applied to other channels.

“We are all familiar with A/B testing,” Javidan-Nejad said. “As digital marketers, we always try to leverage this feature or functionality across all the other digital channels. Now you’re able to do that for your TV advertising.”

Register for The MarTech Conference here.

The post How CTV can deliver market research for B2B marketers appeared first on MarTech.

Nearly half (47%) of marketers are using clean rooms for data privacy, regulatory compliance and audience activation, according to the IAB’s “State of Data 2023” survey. However, 52% of DCR users say they are challenged when it comes to leveraging results and proving ROI. 

Dig deeper: How companies are leveraging clean rooms and first-party data as cookies vanish

This explains why only 27% are taking advantage of DCRs’ attribution capacity and even fewer are using them for ROI/ROAS measurement, media or marketing mix modeling, and propensity modeling.

The report also found that the high cost and expertise needed to operate clean rooms is preventing smaller agencies and businesses from using them. 

Nearly half (49%) of the companies surveyed have six or more employees dedicated to the technology, 30% have at least 11 people working on it. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of users spent at least $200,000 on clean rooms in 2022, and 23% spent more than $500,000. Those costs are expected to increase by 29% in the coming year.

Why we care. Clean rooms’ importance is clear and will increase as third-party cookies go away. Because of their expense and complexity, it’s essential marketers get all they can out of them. This will require all data providers, including walled gardens, to make their data easily interoperable for measurement and ROI.

Also, smaller agencies and companies provide great value to the marketing ecosystem. Their agility allows them to create and innovate faster than larger operations. We cannot afford to have them shut out of using clean rooms. Making that possible will also lower costs for everyone.

The post Failure to get the most out of data clean rooms is costing marketers money appeared first on MarTech.

Bad stack features to avoid

But first, what does a bad stack look like?

“Number one, an ineffective martech stack is incomplete,” said Darrell Alfonso, global marketing operations for Amazon Web Services  at The MarTech Conference. ”You don’t have the tools and you don’t have the services to actually achieve the objectives that you’re trying to hit.”

Or, you have several tools that are used for the same task, making your martech stack cluttered.

“A martech stack that has multiple tools that do the exact same thing is ineffective,” said Alfonso. “It’s extremely costly, and to be honest, can cause chaos within the marketing organization.”

Lastly, a bad martech stack has tools in it that are underutilized. They might have been acquired by well-intentioned executives but were never fully implemented in marketing processes and strategies.

“Organizations all over the world buy tools and they sit on the shelf,” Alfonso explained. “It’s sometimes called shelf wear because these tools are not being properly utilized, again causing waste and chaos.”

1: Start with the customer journey

So how does your organization get on the right path? Start with who matters most — the customer. Begin to think about all the important actions that the customer takes when interacting with your company.

“Start with the customer journey,” Alfonso said. “What does their experience look like? What are the different types of touchpoints that they’re experiencing with your business? 

Dig deeper: What is digital transformation?

He added, “And then from there, map it out to the specific solutions that you need to support the customer experience that you want. That’s why starting with the customer journey and the overall customer experience is the most important part.”

2: Identify core business needs

The martech stack needs to conform to the specific needs of your business. It shouldn’t include solutions that look good on paper but don’t support core business operations.

“Many marketers make the mistake of building their martech stack like they’re building a set of golf clubs,” said Alfonso. You don’t need to add a putter or a driver just for the sake of checking off those boxes.

Instead, map out your core business needs and make sure you have platforms that fit.

“For any marketing team, there are some jobs that really need to be done,” said Alfonso. “We need to engage the customer, we need to get in alignment with sales, whether that’s from a B2B perspective, or whether that’s capturing their credit card information.”

Dig deeper: More than 60% of B2B marketers say martech stack is too complex

Often these core functions are carried out by a marketing automation platform (MAP) or email service provider, in addition to some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system. A work management platform will help teams collaborate and carry out marketing-related projects.

Then, to serve business intelligence functions, the stack should include an analytics platform. Data visualization tools also help team members gain insights and make informed business decisions.

Understanding the core needs behind these tools is a top priority before picking out the right solution for your company.

3: Make sure data is unified

As your organization assembles the stack make sure that marketing data is accessible by all these different tools.

This goes back to customer experience. If different parts of a campaign help move a customer smoothly through their journey, that’s because data like customer preferences and personalization are also unified to help power the experience.

“In order to send you that perfect email, we first need to know who you are, what your preferences are,” said Alfonso. “This is where demographic and behavioral information comes in…We can make better decisions, update our segments and then improve the process once again in a sort of cyclical fashion.”

Alfonso added, “Great marketing feels like magic, but in reality it’s great martech and great marketing operations.”

Mapping out core customer and business needs, while making sure your data is unified, will help you build out an effective martech stack, and closer to making your own marketing magic.

The post 3 steps to building an effective martech stack appeared first on MarTech.

We took the opportunity to sit down with Rob Garf, VP and GM retail, to talk about prospects for retail and ecommerce coming off of a booming Cyber Week in late November.

Why the World Tour? The Salesforce World Tour is not something new, but it’s less familiar than Dreamforce, of course, and arguably Salesforce Connections, the annual conference with a focus on marketing and commerce.

“It’s really about bringing the magic to areas where we have a high concentration of customers,” Garf said. “Not everyone can get to some of our cornerstone events, so we just want to bring our community together. It’s also really nice for our partners too because they haven’t necessarily been able to get out there in the world and see their customers — or our mutual customers — so they’re using this as a bit of a halo event and having other peripheral events around it.”

The retail roller coaster. While ecommerce soared during the pandemic, brick-and-mortar retail faced challenges. Since then, despite the ongoing supply chain crisis and rumors of recession, ecommerce and retail seem to be resilient. Cyber Week saw a record-breaking $281 billion in global online sales.

This insight, and others described below, is based on aggregated data from the online activity of over 1.5 billion global shoppers in more than 60 countries powered by Commerce Cloud, as well as Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud data from retailers.

Dig deeper: Online retail kicks off holiday season with record sales

“A roller coaster is a good way to describe it,” said Garf. “We saw a real surge in digital because people, unless it was essential, were unable to go into physical stores. Over the course of 2020, we saw a 40% increase in net new digital shoppers according to our Shopping Index. These were people who would go online, send emails, check out social, but they weren’t clicking the buy line. And these people were buying whole new categories as well — think about grocery.”

There’s been a levelling off in digital commerce over the last year, but Garf doesn’t believe digital and physical stand in opposition any more. “What I’m talking with retailers about more and more is how they streamline the experience the consumer has on mobile out of the store, to when they actually come into the store so it’s not this disjointed experience.”

The journey works in the other direction too. “Our research shows that 60% of digital orders are now influenced by the physical store.” As an industry we’ve looked at it the other way, which makes sense; but we’re now seeing the reverse phenomenon.”

A quiet start to the holiday season. After a spike ahead of Amazon’s Prime event — likely caused by other retailers discounting ahead of Amazon — there was a dip in sales approaching Cyber Week. Over Cyber Week itself, however, there was a 9% increase in sales YoY in the U.S. (2% globally).

“The reason was that retailers started the season with lackluster deals,” Garf explained. “Consumers noticed; they waited and were patient; and it paid off.” Garf regards this as a game of “discount chicken.” Retailers start the holiday season with a planned discount calendar. “After the first weekend, they rip it up, call an audible and chase the deal — which is a race to the bottom.”

After the last two years of delivery and inventory problems, retailers thought consumers were now conditioned to buy early. That’s why they didn’t kick-off with their best deals. “Consumers snapped back to their pre-pandemic buying. With the aggressive deals we saw during Cyber Week, there was a correlation, more than we’ve ever seen, between discounts and purchases.

Mobile and social commerce trends. “People weren’t on the go the last couple of years during the holidays,” said Garf. “We saw a re-balancing toward desktop. This year we saw a spike, compared to the last two years, in mobile traffic and purchases — and traffic referrals through social on mobile devices.”

Around Cyber Week, roughly 75% of traffic was mobile, and — dependent on category — around 60% of orders. The reason? People are traveling again. “On Thanksgiving, we saw a spike in sales between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. and on mobile in particular.”

Dig deeper: What is ecommerce and which trends are shaping its future?

Slack for retail. Salesforce now sees a key role for Slack, acquired two years ago, in the retail space. “We see retailers taking it beyond the technology function for collaboration and bringing it into the store for collaboration and communication,” said Garf. Not only can there be in-store communications, but stores can communicate with each other.

“We’re seeing some stores and service agents communicate with suppliers to establish visibility into when products will be available. They’re swarming on it immediately; you don’t have to wait two weeks for an email.”

Why we care. The lesson for all marketers, not just those in commerce is, first, that the pendulum is still swinging; second, that it’s a multi-dimensional pendulum. During the pandemic, it swung from mobile to desktop, and — okay — it’s swinging back again. But although it swung from physical to digital, it’s now swinging in a different direction, towards a bidirectional relationship between physical and digital (research on mobile, buy in store; or, see in store, buy digitall).

That pendulum is going to keep swinging. That is, unless we’re on the brink of an extended period of peace and well-being for the planet — and who’s betting on that? It’s incumbent upon marketers to observe very closely the direction in which buyers are headed and understand that the customer journey still has levels of complexity yet to be achieved.

The post Salesforce: The trends underlying a record-breaking Cyber Week appeared first on MarTech.