SDL plc announces the acquisition of Fredhopper, experts in targeting and marketing software for eCommerce. This acquisition is part of SDL’s strategy and commitment to delivering solutions for enterprises with complex, multi-lingual sales and marketing and customer support requirements. SDL has seen a growing demand for solutions that manage and optimise high value customer engagements to drive online revenue and improve customer satisfaction across multiple channels. The deal will allow Fredhopper, which counts Clarks, Toys R Us, B&Q, Waitrose and Otto Group – the world’s second biggest eCommerce company behind Amazon.com – among its stable of over 100 large international retail customers, to embark on a global rollout of its product suite and expand operations into the US and Asia. The company currently operates in four European countries – the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Fredhopper will become an independent division of SDL that will be named ‘SDL eCommerce Technologies.’ The division will be led by Fredhopper’s current management team, and be focused on providing targeting and marketing software for online retailers. Fredhopper brings technology for effective targeting and personalisation, intelligent search, merchandising and measurement. In addition, Fredhopper brings R&D and Professional Services teams into the larger SDL group. The acquisition will also enable Fredhopper to launch its online targeting technology into new verticals – namely financial services, insurance, and manufacturing, through SDL’s existing Web Content Management solutions. http://www.fredhopper.com/, http://www.sdltridion.com
Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 38 of 75)
EPiServer announced the addition of a complete, integrated e-commerce platform to its existing web content management and community platform. Through a strategic partnership with Mediachase, the EPiServer platform will provide commerce, content and community, and is aimed to enable companies in the retail and B2B vertical markets to deliver a compelling online experience. The Mediachase .NET e-Commerce Framework (ECF) provides an agile best practices architecture, with user experience controls, loosely coupled subsystems, like catalog management, order management, customer management, merchandising, promotions, and a fully exposed .NET developer framework (API). Combined with the extensible EPiServer content management system (CMS) and EPiServer Community platform, .NET web developers can build and deploy online stores, including multi-branding, multi-language, and multi-channel capabilities. Marketing tasks are streamlined through the interface and new capabilities to correlate visitor feedback and experience with store operation and order status at every step of the process. The EPiServer and Mediachase platforms are available now. The EPiServer integrated e-commerce platform is expected in the first half of 2010. http://www.episerver.com
CrownPeak announced the launch of its Online Marketing Management Suite, with content management and marketing tools designed to enable online marketers to more easily and effectively engage target audiences. The completely new Suite of tools empowers business managers to test, target and measure content relevance in Web sites, landing pages, banner ads, mobile devices, social media and other online channels. Users can create “playlists” of persona segments based on implicit data such as referring URLS, external marketing campaigns, paid vs. organic search, geography or even specific IP ranges. Additionally, CrownPeak enables the creation of explicit segments based on what is “known” about each visitor from online registration or other forms (e.g. Webinar or white paper sign ups, polls and/or survey results). Also introduced within the new Suite are new form building tools to make it easier for CrownPeak customers to create any type of data collection form, and use that data for content targeting purposes. CrownPeak’s new tools can be integrated into other online marketing solutions and social media programs. From CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com, email solutions such as ExactTarget, and Web analytics solutions such as Omniture’s Site Catalyst and Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, CrownPeak provides pre-integrated solutions. The new CrownPeak capabilities are immediately available to users. http://www.crownpeak.com
Ecordia has announced the availability of its new predictive content analysis application, the Ecordia Content Optimizer. Designed for copywriters, journalists, and SEO practitioners, this content analysis application provides automated intelligence and recommendations for improving the structure of content prior to publishing. Available for free, this turn-key web application provides a number of features to aid writers in the creation and validation of content including: advanced keyword research during authoring; detailed scoring of your content based on 15 proven SEO techniques; automated recommendations on how you can improve your content for search engines; intelligent keyword extraction that compares your content to popular search terms; sophisticated Keyword Analysis that scores your keyword usage based on 5 statistical formulas. The Ecordia Content Optimizer has been in beta development for over a year and is currently in use by a number of SEO practitioners. The Ecordia Content Optimizer provides content analysis capabilities ideally suited for web publishers who wish to: improve their quality score for landing pages used in PPC campaigns; SEO professionals that want to validate and review content prior to publishing; blog sites that wish to improve the quality of their ads from contextual ad networks; and PR Practitioners that want to optimize their press release prior to publishing. The Ecordia Content Optimizer is licensed on a per user monthly subscription. http://www.ecordia.com/
Sitecore announced the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite for organizations to unify Web content management capabilities, Web analytics and marketing automation for greater customer engagement and personalization. Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS) helps marketers track and better understand their online visitors and initiatives. Sitecore’s new marketing suite provides Web analytics out-of-the-box, without coding. Content editors can profile their content upon creation, establishing the relevancy for segmentation analysis and the delivery of targeted content. The software then automatically develops profiles on site visitors based on browsing behavior, geographical IP identification, and data collected through forms and survey submissions. Using content delivery rules and filters, Sitecore delivers targeted, action-orientated content and offers. The Online Marketing Suite’s A/B and multivariate testing lets marketers define and execute tests. With Sitecore’s CMS delivering the website user interaction and experience, the OMS analytics data now tells the story of a site visitor’s experience. The software measures online advertising campaign effectiveness and increases the agility of the campaign with immediate correlation between campaign initiatives and specific website goals. The campaign tracking is integrated with the site visitor session detail, recording further interests and actions automatically and providing full insight into the actual ROI of campaigns. Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite will be generally available on June 30, 2009. http://www.sitecore.net
Intent, hidden within a search click, lies at the intersection of Search and Business, as in “let’s do some business”. That search click has extra-ordinary value because of the intent to buy — that’s why we’re searching, right?
Perhaps, or maybe we’re just browsing, or surfing, and we’re not in the mood for advertisements. It could be more militant than that; perhaps we’re still trying to research our choices and would see a sales pitch as tainting the honesty of the information. At least that’s what the founders of Google originally believed.
Although the model of the web was a set of stateless pages, and a Google search box certainly fits that appearance, people’s intent is not stateless. It ebbs and flows, from entertaining looking around, to researching choices and comparing possibilities, through sourcing a chosen product (now we’re talking about a qualified buyer), to selecting fulfillment options, and possibly all the way to figuring out how to return a product that we’re dissatisfied with. That last one is probably not the best time to present an ad claiming how wonderful that product is.
This is a “long running transaction,” a series of steps that fit together and flow towards (and past) a purchasing decision, but with back-currents and eddies. And it really is a transaction in the database sense where a failure during one step can cause the entire sequence to be discarded as if it never happened. Though if you believe Sergey and Larry, it will be worse than never happening, you may lose trust in your guide through that transaction.
Has the intent changed? Depends on what that means. On one hand, what has changed across those steps is the mode of the intent. If the intent was to purchase a product, then the research, comparison, purchase, and fulfillment were clearly pieces of that intent, though they call for different approaches: organic search for the research, product focused responses for the purchase, perhaps service-oriented for the fulfillment, and some combination for the comparison.
But what about that “I need to return this product because I hate it” step? The intent has clearly changed, but it is more necessary than ever to connect this new intent to the previous steps. If not, perhaps the search engine will continue to suggest that product to a disgruntled customer with very counter-productive results.
So, what is the unifying concept? Is it intent, organized by modes? Not if what is being unified is a complete user’s story about their purchasing experience.
JustSystems announced that it has successfully completed testing of xfy (pronounced ‘x-fye’), its document-based composite application for the IBM Retail Integration Framework. xfy serves as a management interface, providing retailers optimal management and decision support through real-time views of data in underlying applications and repositories. xfy Helps IBM Deliver Real-Time Visualization of SOA IBM Retail Integration Framework utilizes open standards, including Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), Open Application Group Integration (OAGIS) and Global Standards (GS1), to unlock communications between services, information sources, and business processes, making the store and the retail enterprise one seamless landscape rather than disconnected islands. xfy, among the first solutions to take advantage of IBM’s DB2 pureXML, unifies and processes data from multiple sources within a simple and intuitive document interface. The Retail Integration Framework initiative brings together platform- independent software vendors that deliver proven solutions designed and built for the retail industry. Through this initiative, IBM works with select IBM Business Partners to validate solutions that meet a rigorous assessment of next-generation, open-standards-based store environments. xfy provides an end-user interface that unifies and processes data from multiple sources into a clear, contextually-rich document interface. xfy connects directly to the native information sources that drive the retail environment, allowing the data processing to be done within the document itself and providing a real- time view of information. http://www.justsystems.com/
In a recent consulting project, the Gilbane Group had the opportunity to get a hands-on look at the current version of the Clickability Platform. Several marketing-oriented product enhancements over the past year will be of particular interest to our clients. While the product maintains its strengths in traditional online publishing (due in part to its origins in the publishing industry), there have been major improvements in areas such as analytics and reporting, social computing, and user interface design. In fact, Clickability has re-oriented its Platform to align specifically with the usage and campaign requirements of non-technical online marketing managers. Although product features such as in-context editing, workflow, library services, and user management, remain important and robust parts of the product, the new social computing functionality for online visitor collaboration have done much to bring Clickability to the forefront of Web 2.0-oriented content management offerings. This functionality includes out-of-the-box support for visitor loyalty profiles, discussion boards, visitor ratings, blogs, wikis, and podcasts.
Combining these new social computing components with improvements to Clickability’s analytics and reporting capabilities makes the product a natural fit for companies looking for a Web content platform to support online marketing initiatives. Areas of improvement within analytics and reporting include visitor analysis, profile targeting and reporting, campaign management, A/B split testing, reporting dashboards, ad weighting, and embedded in-context statistics. While organizations looking for a Web content management application to support traditional online publishing can still successfully use the product, they may find the marketing-orientation of the product unnecessary or awkward. And because good analytics and reporting in the service of online campaign management delivers high value for online retailers (in the form of higher average sales prices and better conversation rates among online shoppers), the product may demand a higher price than those publishing static HTML sites can justify. But for at least one of Clickability’s target audiences – online retail marketing managers – the new version of this platform warrants careful, hands-on consideration.
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