Oracle Modern Customer Experience, Day 2: Oracle Provides Marketers with New Capabilities

CHICAGO: More is expected out of marketers than ever before, but if they use the data they have available from their own resources and from third parties, they can be heroes within their companies, Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Oracle Marketing Cloud, said during the Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2018 conference in Chicago.

"For the first time, CMOs are holding revenue targets in their teams," Seth said. "That is different because if you asked the CMOs two years ago, they would have said brand building was their No. 1 target. Two out of three CMOs already have revenue targets as their No. 1 goal. That never used to happen.

"There is so much changing; we as marketers need to change, too," Seth added. "In 2008, there was a sea change for ad tech, it became focused on performance. 2018 will be that for martech."

To hit those revenue targets, CMOs need data to develop strategies for acquiring customers, engaging customers, increasing [revenue per user] and lifetime value, and decreasing churn, Seth explained. That means understanding customer behavior at all touchpoints, including mobile, desktop, and in physical stores.

"This is the new normal," Seth said. "This is the basis of modern marketing. This is where it all changes and it all starts. To be able to adapt to this change, we have to be laser-focused on making sure that we are picking the right tools, that we are picking the right folks to work with, the right partners to work with, the right strategies and tactics, and hiring the right people."

As those tools, strategies, and tactics evolve,  Oraclepledged to continue to evolve its marketing tools, products, and support structures to help its customers meet their marketing goals.

"The first part of our strategy is going to be based on data," Seth said. "We are going to be living and breathing data because it is the fabric of modern marketing. The more data we employ, the more we can make sense of it, the more we can deploy toward targeting and optimization. The more we can learn from analytics, the more we can help [Oracle marketing customers]."

Oracle's newly released CX Audience is a platform to bring together all first-party and third-party data in real time, enabling marketers to use the information for orchestrated campaigns, according to Seth.

An insurance marketer, for example, can employ CX Audience rather writing a complex SQL query. CX Audience offers a graphical tool so that marketers can develop queries and create target audiences on the fly, according to Seth.

The marketer can combine, split, and recombine customer subsegements for different campaigns, Seth added. Analytics employing data science and artificial intelligence are available immediately to help marketers understand campaign effectiveness and to make refinements.

Within the next year, Oracle expects to release new platforms, including AI Source, to help marketers understand which channels to prioritize and Next-Best Offer to push out offers expected to result in better open rates and better conversion rates, according to Seth.

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