Cross-Channel Platforms: Mapp Marketing Cloud Redefines Insight-Led Marketing

Cross-channel marketing done right can feel like assembling a dream team of channels and platforms that join forces to help you provide the best customer experiences possible. From email, social media, SMS, mobile apps, websites, and brick-and-mortar stores, you’re able to leverage each channel’s strength and integrate these into a powerful and unified customer experience across the customer journey.

Consumers expect seamless, integrated experiences across all touchpoints as a bare minimum. But if you struggle to manage the complexities of different platforms, technologies, and data integrations, it becomes very messy business. This creates a domino effect of inconsistent brand experience, a fragmented customer view when you can’t track multiple touchpoints seamlessly, and difficulty attributing conversions correctly. Ultimately, lacking cross-channel coordination can result in overlapping messages, over-messaging customers, poor frequency, and poor customer reach.

Cross-channel platforms can help strip these common challenges away from you and supercharge marketing efforts. And just like our customers, PizzaExpress, Ella’s Kitchen, Homebase, JYSK, PepsiCo, and others, many brands turn to cross-channel marketing platforms like Mapp Marketing Cloud to help.

Mapp: A Cross-Channel Platform That Matters

With almost 300 different automation and campaign management vendors for brands to choose from, selecting the right cross-channel marketing platform can be challenging – but Forrester nailed down the best in the business. In The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms), Q4 2019, Forrester analysts identified Mapp as one of the top nine cross-channel marketing platform providers.

How is the Cross-Channel Platform Category Defined?

Analysts define cross-channel platforms in several different ways:

• Forrester defines cross-channel campaign management platforms (CCCM) as “An enterprise marketing technology that supports customer data management, analytics, segmentation, and workflow tools for designing, executing, and measuring campaigns for digital and offline channels.”
• Gartner refers to it as multichannel marketing hubs (MMH), which is “A technology that orchestrates a company’s communications with and offers to customer segments across multiple channels… Multichannel marketing hubs help brands create, orchestrate, execute, and measure their customers’ experiences across devices and channels.”
• G2 uses the term marketing automation platforms, which are “tools [that] provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, helping marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers and prospects.”

All of these definitions have one thing in common: cross-channel platforms evolve around analytics. But analytics as an add-on isn’t enough—it leaves too much room for gut-instinct decision-making. While all analysts recognize the importance of analytics, the main focus is placed on measuring and analyzing results rather than putting insights at the very core of campaign orchestration.

At Mapp, we firmly believe that the true power lies in insight-led marketing, and today’s marketers need real-time insights to inform and improve their marketing programs.

Cross-Channel Marketing Platforms: Key Terms

Before we go any further, let’s quickly clarify some key terms:

• Data: The raw and unprocessed facts that typically come in the form of numbers and text in spreadsheets and databases.
• Analytics: How marketers make sense of their data, uncovering patterns and trends. Without analytics, data is pretty much useless.
• Insight: The value obtained using analytics. Insights provide the all-important “aha!” moment that sparks new marketing ideas, which drive business growth.

The true value of data and analytics is their ability to deliver beneficial insights that can be used to formulate successful marketing strategies. You can have access to almost endless amounts of data, but for it to be useful, you need to be able to digest and organize it in a way that allows you to extract valuable insights. The best insights are actionable, as they help you immediately improve your marketing and will guide your future marketing initiatives.

We feel that the definitions and criteria set forth by analysts are missing a vital piece of the cross-channel platform: insights at the core of the technology. At Mapp, we believe that analytics and insights are more than a simple add-on but critical drivers of cross-channel engagement. More emphasis must be placed on this all-important piece of cross-channel campaign management.

Cross Channel Marketing Platforms: New Definition, New Criteria

A lack of insights equates to a lack of engagement. Insights are the secret sauce that allows brands to truly understand their customers, empowering them to forge meaningful connections and engagements. Consistently better engagement is only possible if marketing efforts are based on real-time insights. Thankfully, the landscape of cross-channel marketing platforms is changing from tools “with analytics” to “insight-led customer engagement platforms.”

What is an Insight-Led Customer Engagement Platform?

Now, an insight-led customer engagement platform sounds incredibly useful and pretty powerful, right? But it’s also quite an abstract concept. Let’s break down the core components of an insight-led customer engagement platform (like Mapp Marketing Cloud):

• Engagement based on a real-time, unified customer profile.
  Example: Sarah is browsing a cosmetics website. She has previously purchased from the website, and her purchasing behavior and product preferences are stored and updated in real-time. If she looks at some makeup but doesn’t buy it, the information is stored in the customer data profile (CDP).
• AI-generated customer insights to learn from the past and the present to predict future customer behavior.
  Example: The cosmetics brand uses AI tools to analyze Sarah’s past purchasing behavior, such as the frequency of purchases, items browsed, and more. It identifies specific periods where Sarah purchases more items from the website, allowing the brand to predict when she’ll next need to restock her favorite products.
• Marketing activation on those actionable insights.
  Example: Based on the insight that Sarah purchases the same products every two months, the cosmetics brand is able to send her personalized emails with links to her favorite products and special offers, as well as new and relevant product suggestions based on previous purchases.
• One-to-one personalization, including predictions, recommendations, and churn prevention.
  Example: The platform recommends products to Sarah based on her past purchases, recent browsing history, and personal preferences, creating a one-to-one personalized shopping experience powered by insights. If the platform sees that Sarah is starting to lose interest, signs like less frequent viewing and abandoned carts trigger churn prevention measures such as special offers.
• Cross-channel execution (email, push, SMS, social, web)
  Example: Sarah receives a personalized email two months after her last purchase containing product suggestions based on the insights in her CDP. When she logs into social media platforms, she sees personalized ads for these products. If she goes to buy but abandons her cart, she receives an SMS with a limited-time offer, encouraging her to complete the purchase.
• Direct connectivity with a multitude of data sources (CRM, eCommerce, loyalty)
  Example: The cosmetics company uses a cross-channel marketing platform where the CRM system, eCommerce platform, and loyalty program communicate. When Sarah makes a purchase, the information is logged into the system, and data is updated in real-time.

Cross-Channel Marketing Platform vs Insight-Led Customer Engagement Platforms

We believe that analytics and insights are integral to cross-channel marketing, and our cross-channel platform reflects that. But first, it’s important to understand how traditional CCCM and MMH platforms look different:

Data ⇨ Cross-channel Execution ⇨ Analytics

CCCM and MMH platforms prioritize data, cross-channel execution, and then analytics, using it at the end to evaluate results and improve future campaigns. But this usually involves setting time aside to assess performance for campaign optimization.

For an Insight-Led Customer Engagement Platform, we propose a different equation that aligns with our new definition:

Data ⇨ Insights ⇨ Cross-channel Engagement

This formula puts insights right at the core of the technology, using data to generate actionable insights that trigger marketing engagements. In a way, this reverses the order of where and how insights are used within a marketing execution platform. Today’s marketers are keen to use a marketing platform that goes beyond cross-channel marketing and analytics but instead uses customer insights as means to drive and boost engagement.

Mapp: An Insight-Led Customer Engagement Platform Changing the Cross-Channel Marketing Game

Our focus is to help marketers generate actionable insights that enable one-to-one personalization for truly customer-centric customer experiences. We don’t like mediocre results—not for us, and certainly not for our customers. So, our core goal is to create extraordinary customer experiences and demonstrate that our insight-led approach works for the brands we support.

Ricardas Montvila, our Senior Director of Global Strategy at Mapp, comments: “What Mapp truly prides itself on is granular marketing analytics and customer insights, combined with cross-channel customer engagement, which is unmatched across the digital marketing ecosystem. In our view, the market and our customers are currently heading towards the area of Insight-led Customer Engagement rather than Cross-Channel Campaign Management with Analytics.” 

Every product under the Mapp umbrella is designed to improve customer experience and cultivate a loyal customer base, driven by repeated purchases that drive up customer lifetime value (LTV).

Our pillars interact seamlessly, forming the cohesive Mapp Marketing Cloud ecosystem:

Data: Mapp Marketing Cloud makes your data understandable, accessible, and actionable by unifying all your incoming data into a single customer view to create unified customer profiles.

Intelligence & A.I.: The “brain” of Mapp Marketing Cloud and the marketer’s go-to for cross-channel analytics and insights. Our powerful analytics capabilities enable you to dig deeper into your data than ever before to provide the most accurate prediction of what your customers are going to do next.

Engagement: Meet your customers wherever or whenever they want to engage with your brand. Mapp Marketing Cloud makes it easy to automate cross-channel campaigns and make every touchpoint count.

Content & Personalization: Create personalized communications based on who your customers are and what they want, making sure that every touchpoint brings them one step closer to action.

Integrations: With Mapp’s open marketing platform, you can easily integrate with the rest of your marketing ecosystem. Data is more readily absorbed and unified with our flexible APIs.

Forrester Total Economic Impact (Tei) Finds 540% ROI On Mapp Marketing Cloud Over Three Years!

Our platform has truly innovated itself through our many product updates and integrations. Mapp has come such a long way since The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms), Q4 2019, report was published, and it’s why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Mapp Marketing Cloud. It found various, including:

QUANTITATIVE BENEFITS for customers using Mapp Marketing Cloud:

• 540% ROI (over 3 years)!
• Increased reach of messaging to over 500K more customers.
• Improved messaging engagement by 25%
• Raised conversions on marketing messaging by 20%
• Greater basket sizes of 10%
• Marketer productivity increased 25%

QUALITATIVE BENEFITS for customers using Mapp Marketing Cloud:

• Usage of Intelligence data across marketing efforts
• Diversification of campaigns
• Growing maturity of marketing team
• Technology spending efficiencies

Wrap Up

While many are building cross-channel marketing plans with analytics, Mapp is breaking away and redefining the category completely by putting insights at the platform’s core. Today’s marketers must move towards an insight-led marketing engagement model to ensure they don’t miss the chance to understand their customers truly and have those satisfying “aha!” moments. Brands that use Mapp Marketing Cloud lay the foundation for genuine differentiation and competitive advantage in a tough marketplace.