“Where marketers once talked about the customer funnel, they now talk about the customer journey. That is a good development. It recognizes that customers aren’t cattle moving through a chute.”
Those were the first words out of the mouth of Steve Krause, Group Vice President of Product Management at Oracle Marketing Cloud not long ago as I sat down with him on a far-ranging discussion on the topic of customer journeys, orchestration and technology.
He is right that marketers are referring to it as a journey rather than a funnel and it is indeed a good thing. It’s equally good that, as he puts it, “marketers also now realize that today customers take unique paths from awareness to consideration to purchase and those paths are anything but linear.”
At Oracle Marketing Cloud we think those paths taken by the customer is selected by that very customer. A novel approach, huh? It's why we announced yesterday enhancements to Oracle Cross-Channel Marketing for consumer marketers and in particular important changes to the tool that was first to market for customer journeys, Program.
Below, it in its entirety is the conversation I had with Steve minus of course the exchange above. I think you’ll find it to be a very intriguing and enlightening conversation,
OLENSKI: In a world of customer journeys, what is the marketer’s role?
KRAUSE: Orchestration. The marketer can’t force a customer down a single path, like an old-school funnel. And it’s not enough to say, “Hey, I can make two paths. Problem solved!” That’s just a better cattle chute.
You need technology that can listen and respond to what a customer does across multiple interactions—all those zigs and zags, stops and starts. The result should be a single relevant experience, adapted to that customer’s context and goals. When it’s done right, what used to be a bunch of disconnected campaigns now plays well together.
OLENSKI: Can you give an example of that?
KRAUSE: Let’s say an email campaign is promoting a particular offer. Orchestrated with the email campaign is a digital advertising campaign, showing displays ads for the same offer.
Now, let’s say you are a customer. You respond to the email campaign and take the offer. Because the email and ad campaigns are orchestrated, you won’t see the ads because you’ve already responded to the email and taken the offer.
Now ask yourself, when was the last time you were followed around the Internet by ads for a product you’ve already bought.
OLENSKI: Probably this morning.
KRAUSE: Exactly, a bad customer experience from a lack of orchestration.
OLENSKI: Okay, I get it. But doesn’t every vendor that claims to do orchestration solve that problem?
KRAUSE: I would hope that most vendors can handle that particular example, because it was very simple. I was trying for conceptual clarity, like explaining chess by taking most of the pieces off the board.
The challenge with orchestration is to handle a lot of complexity in customer paths—a lot of different journeys—while keeping things simple for the marketer to configure, run, and analyze. The technology also needs to be fast, so it can respond to customers’ actions in real time. And for bigger brands, it needs to do all this at large scale, such as tens of millions of customers in a single orchestration at once. Put these challenges together, and you’ve got a hard problem.
At Oracle, we believe we’ve gone farther in solving this problem than anyone. Whereas some of our competitors are new to customer journeys and orchestration, we’ve been in-market with Oracle Responsys’s Program, our B2C orchestration system, for more than five years. On the B2B side, Oracle Eloqua has been doing orchestration even longer.
Also, it’s worth noting that orchestration is a core part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Cross-Channel Marketing Platform. It’s not an add-on or an option. It’s at the core. Other vendors say how important journeys and orchestration are, but if you look at the fine print, those capabilities are often optional extras. That should tell you something.
OLENSKI: I’ll bite. What does it tell me?
KRAUSE: If you care about orchestration, you want it at the core, not hanging off the side.
OLENSKI: The number of consumers who use more than one channel to shop is growing every single day. Beyond orchestration, how is the Oracle Marketing Cloud addressing the need?
KRAUSE: Because Oracle has so many products across various channels, we are in a position to not only provide the orchestration technology but also to pre-integrate it with various channel systems.
For example, in the digital-advertising channel, we have a new integration with the Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP). The integration enables audiences to go from the orchestration system to the DMP for look-alike modeling—which is a way of advertising to new prospects based on their similarities to your best customers. The DMP generates the lookalikes, and they can be activated into ad campaigns managed by your choice of ad partners, including using Oracle’s own full-service capabilities.
We also released an integration with Oracle Social Relationship Marketing, focused on Facebook-based advertising.
And we recently announced an integration with Oracle Commerce. It allows events in the Web channel, like an abandoned shopping cart, to trigger an email or mobile-app push notification, orchestrated with a display-ad campaign—or a test that tries combinations of these and automatically goes with the best-performing.
Of course, we have integrations with non-Oracle products too. But we want to make sure that clients who choose or already have multiple Oracle products can easily orchestrate across those products.
OLENSKI: Hardly a day goes by without a hundred articles or so being written about the use and importance of data for marketers. I have a two-part question for you on the subject of data.
First part: How does the Oracle Marketing Cloud deal with and handle all the data that is being generated literally every second of every day?
KRAUSE: The Oracle Marketing Cloud has been operating at “big data” scale for a long time. So, as with journeys and orchestration, this is another case where competitors are attaching themselves to a new buzzword, but we’ve been doing it all along by handling trillions of consumer events and terabytes of data.
OLENSKI: Your examples are about data in silos, right? Before acquisition, BlueKai kept its own customer data, which was anonymous and cookie-based. Responsys kept its own customer data, which was tied to email addresses. Under Oracle, are those silos breaking down?
KRAUSE: It’s not as simple as pouring all the data into one big system. There are privacy and technical issues to contend with. There’s also the increasing use of third-party data, which by definition exists primarily outside the marketer’s enterprise.
As a result, the better way to think about it is connecting the data wherever it is. In fact, we recently announced a new technology to help that process. It’s called ID Graph. It helps marketers connect identities across marketing channels and devices—a cookie here, an email address there, a company’s alphanumerical identifier for its customers there—to individuals. And it does this while preserving the privacy of anonymous channels, like advertising.
You need to make this connection at the level of identifiers if you are going to effectively listen and respond across channels. For example, a few of the orchestration integrations I mentioned earlier already use the ID graph.
OLENSKI: Some argue that it’s not the data per se but the RIGHT data that is most important and the speed at which the RIGHT data can be best utilized. How does the Oracle Marketing Cloud help in this regard?
KRAUSE: Well, it’s hard to argue with the right data’s being more important than the wrong data. Maybe the better way to put it is, all data is not created equal. We prefer the data that is most likely to be actionable. And this is where the second part of your question—the part about speed—comes in.
Often, the most important data is the customer’s in-the-moment context: what he or she just did. However, that data is most actionable in the moment; it quickly gets less valuable as the hours or even minutes tick by. That is why an orchestration system needs to be able to listen for important events and respond quickly.
To help marketers be more responsive, we recently introduced Rapid Retargeter, a module for Oracle Responsys. It directly monitors clicks at a marketer’s Web site, and processes them in near real-time. In the processing, it detects events like abandoned carts and immediately notifies Oracle Responsys Program, which can kick-off an orchestration.
The capability to do this in-the-moment is a big deal. Many marketers’ best alternative has been a batch process from internal IT or a third party that takes many hours, sometime days, to do the same thing. With Rapid Retargeter, a marketer can quickly and politely ask if the customer would like to finish an order. The marketer can even ask differently based on where in the cart-to-checkout process the abandonment occurred.
OLENSKI: I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, about keeping things simple for the marketer. How do you keep things simple?
KRAUSE: If we recognize that orchestrations can have lots of different paths, then we need to make it easy for marketers to test orchestration logic, to make sure the orchestration is doing what the marketer wants. For example, we recently introduced a feature for Oracle Responsys called Program Proofing, which allows a marketer to run an accelerated version of an orchestration only for a test list of recipients, typically from the marketer’s own organization.
The simplicity here is in the directness of the testing: in how it can be run just like the real orchestration, on real recipients, who can see the actual messages, respond to them, see what happens next, and so on—all in a safe environment for testing.
OLENSKI: Do marketers understand the need for this? Testing is not very sexy.
KRAUSE: Any marketer who does orchestration appreciates the virtues of testing. It only takes one mistake that went untested to convert the unbelievers.
Now, is it sexy? I don’t know. But I like the fact we’re talking about it. In the trenches of making this stuff happen, it matters.
OLENSKI: Final thoughts?
KRAUSE: Orchestration is hard to do well. But it’s worth doing well because when you do, the customer gets a better experience. When that happens, the marketer is rewarded with more revenue and loyalty. Everybody wins.
We are continuing to deliver new orchestration capabilities so marketers can get closer to that ideal. And if you just look at the examples we talked about today—the integrations, Rapid Retargeter, ID Graph, Program Proofing—they are all from releases within the past four months. So I hope it’s clear, in deeds not just words, that orchestration is core to what we do, and we intend to remain the best at it.