Making Digital Intelligence Work for You

December 1, 2020 Stan

In some of my prior blog posts, I’ve championed the idea that marketers should look at engagement as one of the primary indicators when targeting for marketing purposes. ‘The right content, at the right time, for the right audience”, has been one of my mantras throughout those posts. While this is the holy grail for many marketers, there is still a significant challenge for ‘how’ to do it.

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) are able to support this to a degree. MAPs are likely sending out your content to targeted individuals, but are often limited by integration bottlenecks that rely on scheduled batch processes to trigger the communications. Furthermore, these platforms have their own limitations for how quickly or frequently they are able to process, evaluate and reevaluate data.

The goal for a marketer should be to reach an individual at the time they are evaluating or making a buying decision, and depending on the product sales cycle, the window of opportunity can be only a matter of minutes, or even less. Even when the sales cycle is longer, it can still be more effective and impactful to reach someone when their attention is already focused on your offerings than to try to regain their attention later once they’ve already moved on.

The secret is to listen for marketing opportunities where individuals are engaging with your content and sending a real-time notification to your MAP to trigger the right message to the targeted individual. The right content, at the right time, for the right audience.

In steps Infinity, Oracle’s real-time data analytics and activation platform. Sure there are other similar tools and self-developed solutions, but unlike many IT- or BI-centric tools, Infinity enables marketers to control the configuration, management, and actions necessary to orchestrate a seamless marketing experience.

With Infinity, marketers can see what individuals are doing on their websites and mobile apps in real time and configure ‘Streams’, or filters, to identify specific actions and behaviors that can then be used to trigger ‘Actions’ or integrations with other platforms and systems. Infinity solves for the issue of the integration bottleneck that prevents many from achieving the real-time nirvana that we seek.

Infinity works by having a lightweight javascript tag placed on your website (or SDK for mobile app) which sends all activity and event data to Infinity. Every page load and event is registered in real time and the associated data is able to be filtered and when an event meets the desired criteria, the data is immediately sent to the downstream platform to trigger actions in the MAPs. The tag is typically deployed by IT or whoever manages the web/mobile sites as part of the initial setup, but from there, the marketer can manage the data collected by the tag, as well as the Streams and Actions from Infinity directly and with no changes to the tag on the web/mobile site.

By listening to events as they occur and responding in real time, marketers are better enabled to target individuals for all kinds of use cases including remarketing, cross-sell/upsell, shopping cart abandonment and other time sensitive efforts.

Integrating your MAP with Infinity can be done via several different methods depending on the capabilities of your platform. For Oracle Marketing Cloud customers, Infinity includes pre-built connectors for both Eloqua Contacts and Responsys Supplemental Tables. For other platforms, Infinity also supports integrations via webhook/API, Form Post and SFTP. For all the integration methods, the structure/format of the data load is preset by Infinity, other than the specific data passed, so you will need to be able to adjust for that on the side of the system receiving the data from Infinity.

As an example, the Form Post from Infinity was not able to be accepted by Eloqua, but it isn’t necessary since there is a pre-built connector for Eloqua, whereas if you were posting to a traditional webserver you could alter how the receiving form collects the data sent from Infinity. If using SFTP, be mindful that while Infinity can still push the data to SFTP in real time, SFTP processes are usually scheduled batch processes and the import frequency into your MAP will be important to consider to create the desired marketing experience.

While getting set up is certainly no simple task, the benefits are clear. Infinity, and similar listening platforms, provide marketers with the ability to to segment and target in real-time based on behavior. The right message, at the right time, to the right audience. If you need any assistance, Relationship One is always here to help.

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