Salesforce pushing marketers to look at apps as it turns attention to ‘customer journey’
Salesforce’s digital marketing automation arm ExactTarget is launching a new push around the customer journey, and is pushing marketers to think “differently” about the way they use apps as part of that experience.
Overnight Salesforce also announced a tie-in with Omnicom globally to create an “integrated customer journey platform”, in a bid to make more personalised communications for clients. Two weeks ago Publicis Groupe completed a similar deal with Adobe.
The launch of a new Journey Builder for Apps platform by the company is also a push, with director of product marketing management Derek Laney telling Mumbrella the customer journey is an ignored part of the brand experience.
“Marketers are spending a lot of money developing apps, but they need to think of that as the beginning of the customer experience,” he said. “They still need to think about it in terms of developing content to keep customers engaged, as that’s where the behavioural data will start to emerge.”
“What brands aren’t realising is many customers visualise their relationship with brands through their app experiences,” he added. “But it’s an easy way to think about the customer journey.”
Laney said brands need to look at applications in an online and offline capacity, pointing to the rise of beacon technology, which triggers alerts on enabled phones when they are in the appropriate range, as an emerging way brands can use them to enhance the in-store experiences.
He also pointed to the rise of wearable technology as “closing the loop on digital marketing”, allowing offline data and behaviour to be merged seamlessly with connected devices. “Think about the one-to-one customer experience, think about what you need to do to move customers to the next stage of the purchase cycle,” he added.
Laney also suggested there would be the emergence of a new role in marketing “the customer journey engineer”, tasked with looking at how the customer experience of the brand was being delivered.
Alex Hayes
this reminds me I must get on to Salesforce and put all those opps in I have on my to-do-list
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