On Monday Facebook made an announcement around the relaunch of Atlas. It’s an exciting milestone for marketing technology for one primary reason: personalization.
Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) have taken immense amounts of first and third party data, created interconnections between them, and enabled marketers to use that data to serve personalized marketing messages. The ultimate goal of these platforms is to foster true 1-to-1 marketing where every ad, promotion and customer touch point is individualized to the human (not device) on the receiving side of it.
The technology is getting better. It shows real promise. The proliferation of programmatic buying around display ads connected to mobile, social, apps, games and other channels is evidence of it. But the cross device/cross channel problem continues to be a tough nut to crack since many technologies rely on cookies that are inherently tied to a device, not a human being.
Enter Atlas, which has an incredibly powerful asset in the Facebook network. Being logged into Facebook much or most of the time on multiple devices takes the DMP story to the next level by providing accurate (not probabilistic) data around a person versus a device. This supercharges the ability to personalize marketing messages and optimize programs based on their impact, even as people switch devices, shift from online to offline, and do all of the other things common in today’s mobile world.
One of the most personalized touch points a brand can have with a customer is a phone conversation. It starts with leveraging the wealth of data we have on callers to provide unique, personalized phone numbers to a specific customer or visitor. When the customer calls, that information is inputted into a cloud-based routing engine that makes intelligent decisions regarding the optimal endpoint for that call. All of the information surrounding that experience can be factored in campaign information, web session information, first party data from a CRM or analytics tool, or third party information from a myriad of data sources. All of this is used to get the call to the right person in an organization, and to then arm him or her with contextualized, personalized information to provide an amazing customer experience and close a sale.
At that point, the phone call itself becomes an additional data point marketers can use. For example, the data around what happens on a call keywords and phrases mentioned on a call, responses to IVR questions, the quality or score of the call, and the like can all be used to do additional segmentation and targeting.
The benefits are endless: personalized service, increased customer loyalty, improved brand awareness, and increased conversion rates at every step of the sales cycle.
This is not science fiction this is all possible today. What’s exciting is the new capabilities Atlas promises to deliver take it a step further and give marketers even more transparency into the customer journey.