In the second part of a three-part series, Apoorv Durga of the Real Story Group lays out a strategic approach to omnichannel personalized marketing. His key premise is that omnichannel personalization requires several related capabilities across a potentially wide range of use cases.

The first and most important capability is having unified customer data. That’s a huge challenge, of course, and one that many businesses are on a journey to address. It’s necessary to ingest, manage, cleanse and duplicate the data before opportunities arise to segment audiences within the data and ultimately use it as the foundation for personalization.

The other prerequisites for a successful strategy are the selection of content to present to customers based on behavior, the ability to manage content assets effectively, and a plan to analyze how it performs. Once the key parts of the strategy are understood, the process can begin mapping them to elements in the marketing tech stack that support them.

Read more here.

With a 98% open rate vs email’s average open rate of 18%, it’s obvious that mobile continues to change our expectations and how we want to interact with businesses. To learn just how critical text messaging has become, join Podium for this webinar as they unveil findings from more than 1,000 consumers who shared their sentiment and familiarity with texting, and how ripe the opportunity is for those businesses who leverage it. You’ll learn how messaging has evolved over the last decade and how promotional text messages can be an effective marketing channel.

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Salesforce announced updates to their Service Cloud, including workflow tools powered by AI and contact center solutions.

The new workflows are built into the Customer 360 platform assisting customer service teams. Predictive capabilities allow reps, in some cases, to flag a problem before a customer is aware of it. The release also includes innovations for digital contact centers for video, chat, voice and workforce engagement that accounts for both the customer side and service employees.

The new Customer Service Incident Management offering gets out in front of service issues by allowing teams to identify and track incidents, and manage them from a single screen. 

Customer Service Incident Management also includes “Swarming,” allowing the customer service team to bring in internal and external partners to collaborate on a problem or incident, using Slack. Robot process automation capabilities (RPA) for Service Cloud come courtesy of Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Servicetrack.

Why we care. There are at least two trends in this release that marketers should keep an eye on. One, customer service is a crucial place where brands can gain a competitive edge. It also remains an important channel or channels (chatbot, SMS, etc.) where marketers can engage customers and develop a relationship with them.

In the technology space, this is also an important sign that workflow is paramount for marketing teams and organizations overall. Swarming is one example of how Salesforce is putting its acquisition of Slack to work. In some form or another, work-from-home and other remote work collaborations are here to stay.

Read more here.

Grab your FREE virtual MarTech pass now and get ready to discover 50+ marketing technology solutions — and the actionable tactics you need to leverage them to overcome critical data challenges. Available live — tomorrow and Wednesday, September 14-15 — AND on-demand, so you can explore, learn, and train when it fits your schedule.

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“Ad Strategies uses automation to help you build complete customer pipelines,” according to an email to advertisers. We first saw this in a tweet from Matt Navarra. The idea is to provide an easier-to-use advertising setup that doesn’t require as much effort for advertisers.

In the thread, Navarra shows screenshots of the step-by-step that social media managers would go through to set up Ad Strategies. It’s a five-step process that includes answering questions about your chosen ad strategy including what you’re selling, your sales cycle, whether you want to prioritize sales or leads, and what your budget is. From there, you can set locations, add creative and review the campaign before launch.

Why we care. Facebook has been saying it cares about small businesses for a while now, and this seems to be a step toward demonstrating that. Ad Strategies would make it a lot easier for SMBs to set up social media campaigns. But just like with Google and Microsoft Advertising’s automated tools, there’s potential for humans to lose the control that many advertisers like to maintain. The most common complaint about automation in ad tools is that it prioritizes impressions over conversions, and we’re interested to see if the Facebook Ad Strategies tool follows the same pattern.