Silverpop Hopes ‘Universal Behaviors’ Will Have Universal Appeal For B2B, B2C Marketers

Published: May 16, 2013

At last week’s SiriusDecisions Summit, there was a lot of discussion about the role that tight, multi-system data integration will play in the future of marketing technology. It’s an interesting and relevant topic, given some of the announcements being made this week at the Silverpop Amplify 2013 event.

Silverpop recently announced Email Insights — an application, built in conjunction with email analytics provider Litmus that allows marketers to preview and control how their email renders across multiple platforms and devices. In addition, Silverpop has unveiled Universal Behaviors, a much broader data-integration and behavioral marketing platform.

According to Bryan Brown, Director of Product Strategy at Silverpop, Universal Behaviors is a set of technology capabilities, including third-party tool integrations and APIs, which turns data from multiple sources into a single set of insights into customer or prospect behavior.

“Marketers already get a lot of data from a lot of different sources,” said Brown. “But that data often arrives as bulk dumps that preclude real-time analysis and reactions. Universal Behaviors makes it possible to turn that data into a live stream between the [Silverpop marketing automation] core platform and our technology partners.”

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Universal Behaviors also maps and integrates unique identifiers from multiple sources to give marketers a single view of customer behavior. The idea is to take data associated with different identifiers — for example, social media handles, email addresses and mobile app IDs — and to understand when these identifiers all map to a single, unique individual.

Currently, Brown stated, Silverpop integrates with more than 100 partners, ranging from purchasing systems and call centers to web content management and CRM. By aggregating data from these sources in real time, and tying them to individual customers, marketers can craft individualized offers, engage in comprehensive behavioral scoring, and develop more accurate lead-to-revenue metrics.

Universal Behaviors will be available with Silverpop’s summer release, currently scheduled for July.

In addition to the integration and data-management work involved with this capability, there’s another interesting aspect to Silverpop’s technology direction: the fact that it’s equally relevant to B2B and B2C marketers.

Telling the same technology story to both groups, Brown acknowledged, can sometimes be challenging. Nevertheless, he said that the differences between the two, such as their sales processes and customer lifecycles, aren’t as important as some important similarities.

“Both B2B and B2C need that real-time data integration capability,” he stated, and both groups increasingly deal with similar challenges in areas such as campaign attribution, behavioral scoring and one-to-one marketing.

It’s an interesting position for Silverpop to take, and it’s one that will probably generate some pushback — certainly from some other marketing automation vendors, and probably from some B2B marketers. But just because some people don’t like it doesn’t mean Silverpop is necessarily wrong.

 

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