CDP Institute

Surveys are nice but how about some real data on personalization’s value? The folks at ecommerce personalization vendor Qubit analyzed two billion customer journeys and 120 million purchases to find what worked. They found messages that highlight low-stock items, trending products, and time limits were most effective. Product recommendations were less so. But the main news is that messages driven by individual-level behaviors and preferences were three times more effective than non-targeted messages. Fascinating.

Not every retailer has the resources to design targeted marketing campaigns. Womply is there to help with an email marketing engine that automatically sends welcome, winback, loyalty, and survey campaigns. Womply captures credit card transactions to build a customer database, which it then leverages for analytics and marketing. It also provides small retailers with other online marketing services including directory listings, advertising, and reputation management.

As if the marketing landscape weren’t confusing enough, grocery giant Kroger has created 84.51°, an agency that runs marketing programs for packaged goods manufacturers wanting to reach 60 million Kroger-buying households. Channels include in-store advertising, co-branded Web advertising, and a private social network for Kroger’s most engaged customers. Are retailer-based marketing networks the next big thing?

You don’t need to be a retail giant to reach your customers. Aislelabs has just released a free version of its in-store WiFi marketing product. Customers can sign in to free in-store WiFi and retailers get customer data analytics and limited user profiles. A paid version gives more detailed profiles and allows targeted marketing campaigns via email, SMS and social posts.

Is it even news when a company raises money to apply machine learning to media buying? I’m not sure, but let’s give QuanticMind the benefit of the doubt and mention their $20 million Series B. QuanticMind helps companies buy paid search and social ads. The new round brings their total funding to $30 million.

What’s that? You just can’t read enough about artificial intelligence? Ok, then here’s more: a very good Forrester study, sponsored by Amplero. General finding was marketers see AI as helping overcome otherwise-unmanageable data volumes. But attitudes are mixed: while 86% believe AI can provide value, 78% think human intervention is necessary to guide AI, 42% fear AI could make their job irrelevant, and 36% don’t think AI in marketing is “currently real”.

Here’s another good study, although it’s not about AI.

When Microsoft paid $26 billion for LinkedIn last year, the possibilities for leveraging LinkedIn data seemed endless. Yesterday the company filled in some of the details with product announcements including CRM data validation and integration of Sales Navigator with LinkedIn advertising campaigns and nearly two dozen business intelligence, marketing automation, sales acceleration and other vendors.  While Microsoft had already integrated Sales Navigator with its own Dynamics CRM, these announcements make clear that competitive products won’t be frozen out.

Speaking of data integration, we also have news that B2B Customer Data Platform and Account Based Marketing vendor ZenIQ has a new partnership to ingest Bombora’s intent data. It’s an interesting example of loading third party data into a CDP to supplement a company’s own first party data.

Switching to consumer data integration, we have a very interesting study from cross-device identity vendor LiveRamp about how marketers are using individual-level identity resolution to better measure performance. Nearly everyone (94%) said cross-media identity resolution is needed to accurately assess marketing performance, while just 21% had people-based measurement in place. Almost half (42%) didn’t know how to get started. Other interesting data too.

Today is 10/10, which makes it Duopoly Day and thus a good time to indulge my obsession with Google/Facebook and walled garden vendors in general.

More bad news for the duopolists: Apple’s latest Safari update makes it easier to block third party cookies used for cross-site tracking. They’re especially important for Facebook and Google. Decide for yourself whether Apple is being an altruistic protector of consumer privacy or cementing control over its customers by blocking out competitors.