CDP Institute

It’s no longer news when a vendor adds artificial intelligence to its products. But you’ll probably still be interested to learn that Oracle has added a slew of AI-based apps to its customer experience solutions. The sales and marketing parts use AI to select the most relevant personalized content for individuals.

Ecommerce personalization vendor Dynamic Yield has launched a new product that supports mobile Web sites. The system builds unified customer profiles, generates product recommendations, and dynamically adjusts mobile page layouts. Dynamic Yield also supports personalization, testing, and segmentation for mobile apps, email, and display advertising. As Dynamic Yield points out, mobile accounts for 60% of online traffic but just 16% of online purchases, mostly due to poor mobile ecommerce experience.

Moveable Ink has added a service to display live prices and inventory information within emails, using data read from client systems when the email is opened. This requires direct integration with back-end systems holding the information. It’s especially relevant for industries with constantly changing prices and availability such as airlines, hotels, and entertainment events. Oh, and retail.

Vendors keep seeking the key to serving the vast majority of small businesses not yet using a marketing automation system.

Lead Liaison’s approach is to add a free CRM to its system, which already offers Web visitor tracking, marketing automation, and Web site personalization. Pricing for all three functions starts at $750 per month for 5,000 contacts. The CRM module is set for general release by mid-summer.

Salesfusion is following the theory that small businesses need support services for key marketing automation tasks. It has just launched a package that combines its software with ten hours per month of template building and campaign execution services. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month for up to 5,000 contacts.

Salesforce.com's worst nightmare just came true: Microsoft is making LinkedIn profiles available directly within Dynamics 365 for Sales.

LinkedIn may be the mother lode but it’s not the only source of profile data. ReachForce has updated its data cleaning and enhancement features to include contact intelligence and easier integration with online form pages. ReachForce integrates with marketing automation (Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, IBM Silverpop and HubSpot), not with sales systems.

Local weather is one type of data that even LinkedIn doesn’t have.  But IBM does, through their acquisition of The Weather Company.  They’ve now connected Weather Company data to LiveRamp’s IdentityLink Data Store, making it easier for marketers to use real-time local weather information for personalized marketing and advertising.

Maybe you can be too rich or too thin but surely you can never have enough content. Crowdriff helps travel and tourism companies gather, curate, and distribute visual content from users. They’ve been around since 2011 but just released the latest version of their product, which also manages company-generated visual content.

Books. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. They’re an antique form of content distribution. ContentOro modernizes the concept by making it easy to embed excerpts in a company Web site. They handle pesky details like securing rights from authors and publishers. Right now, ContentOro editors help marketers pick the items they want but they’re working on a self-service marketplace.

Captora doesn’t generate content but it does help you decide which content to generate. Specifically, it examines your own and competitive content across the Web to find how different topics and keywords are being used and identify related opportunities. It just added a content promotion module that automatically offers the most appropriate content to each Web site visitor, based on what they’ve consumed in the past. That’s a big move: it makes them a personalization engine.