Acorel
Gratis demo

Lead nurturing with SAP Customer Data Platform

Maurice Rootjes, 11 mei 2022

In the current competitive market, where almost every product or service can be ordered in just a few clicks, it is crucial to stay relevant in every step of the buying journey. Listen to the needs of your prospects and provide them with the information and answers they need, while building trust and brand awareness. This is nothing new, yet many organizations are still struggling to realize this. But why?

To stay relevant in every step of the customer journey many organizations have invested in customer facing processes (and related applications) like:
• Customer Relation Management
• Digital sales channels
• Marketing automation
• Online personalization and recommendation
• …..

Each process has its focus on a particular step in the buying journey. Seamlessly connecting the steps together is the true challenge. Each step on its own is working fine, but how do we collect all relevant information for a prospect and make it available in each process and system, assuming that these steps can be run in any arbitrary way. Traditional integration scenarios lack flexibility and agility to support this.

The SAP Customer Data Platform is offering the solution for this. The Customer Experience (CX) orchestration functionality allows businesses to configure CX flows to streamline campaigns and processes across front- and back offices.

This sounds nice, but how does it work?

This blog describes how a simple scenario can be configured that shows how the SAP Customer Data Platform supports lead nurturing.

The environment:

For the scenario I am using the following products:
• SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) – Used for CX-flow orchestration
• SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC) – Online customer profile, identity, and consent management
• SAP Commerce Cloud (CC) – Digital sales platform
• Emarsys – Marketing automation

The scenario:

We would like to increase the trust and brand awareness of our ‘AwesomeBrand’ with the final goal to convert. For this, we have created a Social Media campaign to attract potential customers to the ‘AwesomeBrand’ landing page on our website. As soon as visitors land on this page the nurturing will start.

Track visitors

The first thing we would like to do after the visitor lands on our page is to track his behaviour. This information should be captured and made available for use in the future steps of the journey. To do so, the ‘Web Client Application’ is configured in CDP. This application allows our website to send any relevant information to the CDP.

In this case, we have configured it to send all product searches and views to the CDP.

image001

After configuring the application, the behaviour is tracked in CDP. Visiting the website from two devices will then result in the following report in CDP:

image002

image003

Identify potential visitors

Based on the behaviour of the visitor we would like to define the interest of the customer, in our case the interest for ‘AwesomeBrand’. To do so, an indicator for this interest should be created in CDP. In this case the indicator holds the number of times visitors have searched for ‘AwesomeBrand’ in the last 7 days.

image004

This indicator is then used to create a new customer segment. This segment includes all customers that have searched at least one time for ‘AwesomeBrand’.

image005

image006

At this point in time, we only have anonymous tracking data of these visitors. If visitors are coming back, we can use the created segment to personalize the visit. By using personalization we try to attract the customer to buy our product or to leave an email address.

Now we must wait until the customer returns……

Visitor to contact:

Looks like the personalization worked, we have managed to persuade the visitor to leave his email address!

We maintain consent and subscriptions in CDC. To get this information into CDP we have configured the ‘Customer Data Cloud Application’ in CDP.

image007

After running the application, the profile data is pulled into CDP. During the import the profiles are merged with the existing profiles. Based on the device ID of the visitor, the tracking profile and the profile coming from CDC are merged.

image008

image009

Start marketing campaign

Now that we can contact the visitor, the next step is starting a campaign.

To start the campaign, we should send the collected information to Emarsys. Again we have to configure an application in CDP, in this case the ‘Emarsys’ application. This application provides the services to upload the information to this marketing platform.

image010

Next to the profile information, we also send the interest indicator to Emarsys. This can be used by Emarsys to trigger a relevant campaign. To send the interest this data should be mapped.

image011

The remaining step is to tell CDP when to send this data to Emarsys. This can be done using a CX-Flow. The CX-Flow will trigger on customer update and checks if both the email address and consent are available. If that is the case, it will create or update the customer in Emarsys.

image012

Now we can start configuring a campaign in Emarsys and, hopefully, increase conversion!

Conclusion:

This example scenario shows how SAP Customer Data Platform can be used to orchestrate lead nurturing processes by streamlining processes and campaigns across applications.

Interested how your customer journeys can be streamlined within your processes? You can always contact us for a conversation or a demo about the possibilities of SAP Customer Data Platform.

Maurice Rootjes

Read all my blogs

Receive our weekly blog by email?
Subscribe here:

More blogs