THE TOOLS IN THE TOOLSHED

Data doesn’t equal intelligence and intelligence doesn’t equal success.

—DAVID CHARMATZ, FORMER SVP, STARZ ENTERTAINMENT¹

So far, this book has covered a lot of information, ranging from strategic insights (as they relate to 1:1) to some of the more tactical information. Before talking about tactics, it’s important to understand the tools that are in the toolshed. So this chapter provides information about tools you should consider for your next 1:1 campaign. Not every tool available is included, because that would make the book 1,250 pages long. And nobody wants to read a 1,250-page book unless it’s a Harry Potter, right?

HOW TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE TOOLBOX

When you think about it, the most important tool of all is your brain, which is made up of your experience, your hard work, and your smarts. But good 1:1 marketers also have a great set of tools at their disposal. With that in mind, we’ve come up with a list of the tools you should be familiar with. Table 11.1 will help you understand what each one of the tools can do as it relates to Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Table 11.1  Marketing Tools for 1:1 Marketing Campaigns

6sense

6sense is an account based marketing (ABM) platform that helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by using artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and machine learning to optimize campaigns. The platform uncovers anonymous buying behavior, prioritizes accounts and sales and marketing, and enables them to engage resistant buying teams with personalized, multichannel, multitouch campaigns. 6sense even has a patented AI model that can tell your sales and marketing teams the best time to engage with an account.

Acxiom

Acxiom enables one-to-one marketing with a simple approach that connects systems and data to drive better customer experiences for individuals and greater return on investment (ROI) for businesses. With Acxiom, you can target consumers and measure results across all channels and devices—not just digital channels. Acxiom can also help you map out the best engagement journeys by knowing and analyzing the channels a customer prefers. They’ve been a leader in identity, customer data management, and the ethical use of data for more than 50 years, and Acxiom now helps thousands of clients and partners around the globe work together to create millions of better customer experiences, every day.

AdQuire

AdQuire drives new customer acquisitions and improves customer retention by providing brands with scalable, cost-effective solutions to build out their first-party data set by supplementing what the brand knows about their audience. The platform leverages proprietary technology to understand the audience and makes decisions on displaying the ads that have the highest propensity for engagement. It also captures consumer consent and custom personally identifiable information (PII) data, verifies its accuracy, and transmits the data seamlessly to the marketers’ CRM for immediate activation. Brands can also be sure that consumers have confirmed 100 percent opt-in consent of and have interest in the brand, and they own that data outright allowing for long-term remarketing to the individual across channels and devices without the inherent challenge of the short life cycle of a cookie.

Bombora

Bombora provides intent data for B2B sales and marketing. Bombora’s data helps sales teams base their outreach on the knowledge of which people are actively researching their products and services. In other words, it lets salespeople know exactly who is visiting their website, how interested they are in what they’re seeing, and what products and services have caught their eye. Using this information, marketers can drive more qualified leads through the funnel, and sales teams can prioritize the leads based on actual behaviors.

Cadent

The Cadent Advanced TV Platform is a purpose-built platform created for the evolving world of television. Designed to help at every stage of their customers’ workflow—identifying targets, finding supply, analyzing campaigns, fine-tuning for the future—it provides clients the tools they need to make the most of media investments.

CallRail

CallRail lets its customers track calls, manage leads, analyze conversations, and track form fills on websites. With CallRail, you’ll know which marketing makes your phone ring. You’ll also be able to automate your call transcriptions with AI-powered analysis so you can see what’s working and what’s not working with your campaigns. Whether you’re a brand or an ad agency, CallRail can help you track and manage your campaigns and optimize your results.

Demandbase

Demandbase is an ABM platform that helps B2B marketers identify, win, and grow accounts that matter most. Accenture, Adobe, DocuSign, GE, Salesforce, and others rely on Demandbase to drive their ABM strategy and maximize their marketing performance. (Side note: It’s worth mentioning that while doing research for this chapter, one of the authors visited the Demandbase website and was greeted by his company name on the Demandbase home page. That’s a terrific example of a 1:1 marketing technique at its best.)

Drift

Drift helps companies engage in real-time, personalized conversations with the right customers at the right time so they can build trust and accelerate revenue. Drift uses conversational marketing and conversational sales to help companies grow revenue and increase customer lifetime value faster. More than 50,000 businesses use Drift to align sales and marketing on a single platform to deliver a unified customer experience where people are free to have a conversation with a business at any time, on their terms.

Eloqua

Eloqua is a software as a service (SaaS) platform for marketing automation offered by Oracle that aims to help B2B marketers and organizations manage marketing campaigns and sales lead generation. The platform offers campaign design, advanced lead scoring, real-time firmographic data, and integrated sales tools to help smooth the flow from prospect to customer. Eloqua can deploy campaigns to mobile devices, email, video, and search results pages.

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Platforms

There are hundreds of email marketing and marketing automation platforms available to a 1:1 marketer. Some of these include very large and very well-known platforms such as Marketo, HubSpot, SAP, and Salesforce. Others include some of the more nimble contenders including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, and others. Most of these tools can help you deploy email marketing campaigns, while at the same time are used to score which of the recipients is most engaged with your brand and what they’re most interested in. As with most SaaS platforms, there are a lot of additional features that make each tool unique, so be sure to review them thoroughly to see which set of features best matches your needs.

FollowAnalytics

FollowAnalytics is a new generation of app-centric customer engagement. The company’s app builder turns websites into sophisticated mobile applications in minutes, with a publishable app ready within weeks. The FollowAnalytics framework automatically detects, adapts, and continuously optimizes to brands’ users in real time. The company also lets its customers integrate the mobile app to current ecosystems without writing a single line of code.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer relationship management and marketing automation platform that helps sales, marketing, and customer service work together to manage the customer journey and improve your close ratio. The platform includes marketing, sales, service, and website management products that start free and scale to meet their customers’ needs at any stage of growth. Today, more than 100,000 customers across more than 120 countries use HubSpot’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company’s thousands of employees work across the globe in HubSpot offices and remotely.

Intercom

Intercom is a conversational relationship platform (CRP) that helps businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences. It’s the only platform that delivers conversational experiences across the customer journey, with solutions for conversational marketing, conversational customer engagement, and conversational support. Intercom powers 500 million conversations per month and connects 4 billion unique end users worldwide across its more than 30,000 paying customers, including Atlassian, Sotheby’s, and New Relic.

LiveRamp

LiveRamp is a leading data connectivity platform powered by core identity capabilities and a sophisticated network. The platform enables companies to better connect, control, and activate data to transform customer experiences and generate more valuable business outcomes. LiveRamp’s infrastructure delivers end-to-end addressability for the world’s top brands, agencies, and publishers. The company prides itself on delivering privacy-conscious solutions that honor practices of leading associations, including the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA’s) ICON and AppChoices programs, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF).

Leanplum

Leanplum is a leading multichannel customer engagement platform that helps forward-looking brands like Tesco and Zynga meet the real-time needs of their customers. By transforming data into an understanding of users’ needs and wants, and optimizing engagement campaigns using multiple communication channels, the platform delivers unified experiences that are timely, tested, and relevant—building customer loyalty that fuels business growth.

Marketo

Marketo, which is now part of Adobe, started out as a marketing automation platform. Now that it’s part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, it has been supercharged to help marketers drive growth by personalizing complex buyer journeys and by aligning marketing and sales teams across every channel. Marketo’s platform is feature-rich and cloud-native with significant opportunities for integration across Adobe Experience Cloud. Marketo’s ecosystem includes over 500 partners and an engaged marketing community with over 65,000 members.

Metadata.io

Metadata.io is an ABM platform that helps its clients identify companies to target and analyzes which companies are a best fit for your products and services. It provides an experimentation platform that lets you conduct A/B split tests so you can optimize campaigns. In the end, if you’re looking for a platform that helps you acquire and activate leads, then Metadata.io can help you do that.

Mobivity

Subway, Sonic, Dutch Bros., and 30,000 other food service locations rely on Mobivity’s sophisticated messaging platform to get customers to come back more frequently and to spend more while they’re there. Mobivity’s Unified Guest Engagement Platform comprises Unified Messaging, including text message marketing and SmartReceipt™, Unified Offers, Unified Loyalty, and Unified Insights, enabling brands to know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not working. By tying every message to an in-store transaction, Mobivity’s platform continuously learns over time to begin personalizing offers and message delivery times for each customer to keep and delight subscribers. (Disclosure: Both authors have worked for Mobivity as either consultant or employee.)

Nimble

Nimble helps its customers find prospects, nurture relationships, and close more deals, all without leaving their inbox. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform that’s somewhat more intuitive than Salesforce, then Nimble is for you. It combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights everywhere you work.

Outreach.io

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps companies increase productivity and drive smarter, more insightful engagement with their customers. Outreach can use buyer sentiment analysis to help sales leaders and their teams optimize content performance in real time based on buyer signals. It also provides in-the-moment diagnostic and coaching tools so reps can be coached and brought back on pace to accelerate revenue goals.

Pardot

Pardot is now part of the Salesforce family. It’s a very robust marketing automation platform that can help you run and manage your target market’s journey from prospect to customer. With Pardot, you can deploy campaigns and score leads before turning them over to the sales team. The platform uses AI to help you run and manage campaigns that can generate a positive ROI for your company.

Sailthru

Sailthru helps modern marketers at leading retail and media companies build deeper relationships with their customers. Sailthru personalizes individual customer experiences across digital communication channels—in email, on a brand’s website, and in their mobile applications. The company’s 1:1 relationships with consumers help drive higher revenue, improve customer lifetime value, and reduce churn. Publishers such as the Economist, Business Insider, and Mashable, and the world’s fastest-growing ecommerce companies, including Rent the Runway, JustFab, and Alex and Ani, use Sailthru to help them succeed.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the world’s largest CRM platform. It has every bell and whistle you might imagine, which can make it cumbersome for small- to mid-sized organizations to use. (If you’re a small or medium-sized business, check out Nimble, listed previously, which might be better suited for you.) Salesforce focuses on helping its customers’ marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams work as one from anywhere, so their customers stay happy everywhere.

SalesLoft

SalesLoft helps B2B sales teams close more deals by integrating with your CRM platform. It turns data into easy, actionable, multichannel steps that help your sales team get to “yes” quicker than they have in the past. SalesLoft positions itself as a copilot for your CRM, so it would work alongside your CRM platform to help personalize email, phone, social, direct mail, and video outreach.

SundaySky

SundaySky helps you deliver video-powered experiences at critical moments along the customer journey that engage, educate, and inspire consumers. The platform is used by companies such as Bank of America, MetLife, Staples, UnitedHealthcare, and others. Companies that use SundaySky can increase revenue, reduce costs, lower churn, and generate higher customer satisfaction.

Terminus

Terminus is an ABM platform that gives marketing and sales teams the data they need to understand who their next best customers are, all of the engagement channels they need to get in front of them, and customizable reporting and attribution so they can prove their impact. Terminus uses an embedded customer data platform (CDP), along with first- and third-party behavioral data to provide insights on purchase intent as well as real-time sales alerts.

Vidyard

Vidyard is a platform that helps organizations record and send videos to reach prospects and connect with customers. The platform goes beyond just video hosting and management. Instead, it allows businesses to connect with viewers through personalized video experiences. Customers can also explore analytical insights about their audiences and turn those insights into action through integrations with top enterprise tools. Global leaders and industry pioneers on the Fortune 500 list and beyond rely on Vidyard to power their video strategies and turn viewers into customers.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER ABOUT TOOLS

This chapter provided a list of more than two dozen tools you might use as part of your 1:1 marketing campaign. There are hundreds—well, actually thousands—of other tools you could use to accomplish what you’re looking to do. So be sure to do your homework and zero in on the best tool for your specific use.

Why should you do your own homework and trust your own judgment? Here’s why—one of the authors had heard great things about Salesforce and decided to get a subscription. But Salesforce is best used by companies with large sales forces. In addition, it’s a data-centric platform, so there are a lot of spreadsheet-ish kinds of charts. Salesforce isn’t a good match for smaller companies, so the relationship lasted all of about three weeks (sorry, Salesforce). A much better platform for this user was Nimble. It has a modular, visual, easy-to-use dashboard that is perfectly suited for visual learners and for companies that are smaller than the ones Salesforce caters to.

Does that mean that Nimble is better than Salesforce? Not necessarily. It just means it was better for that particular user. The point is this—do your homework, figure out what’s right for you, and trust your own judgment. By doing so, you’ll be able to put the best tool to work for your business.