Effective data management and dependence on others:

Anthony Lamot: great. Another thing we talked about and that we found Jonathan, is that effective? You know the the role of effective data management and dependence on others. Can you tell a bit more about that?

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, look these days, managing data. It’s not. It’s not an easy job. Right? You have data in all different systems. And then there’s things like compliance. GDPR, other regulations that you have to be aware of.

Jonathan van Driessen: So there’s data governance. You have to understand the data. Then there’s probably duplicates. You have to merge data coming from different sources. And then these days, you know, the focus on first party data makes it even more important. So yeah, it. It is a big job. It is something to take serious  and often that goes to people that are an expert in those in this matter, but it can create dependency it can create delays. It can create frustrations with the marketers that need that data to to do the day to day job. Which leads to something that we like to call marketing ping pong where it’s between, like the technical person and the marketer going back and forth. And that was one of the reasons we started building the select segments, because we believe that market should be enabled with the data that they need to do the job by themselves.

Anthony Lamot: Yup. Absolutely. That Ping Pong is is a real pain. And with that said, We’ll move on to the next insight.

Data utilization & personalization:

Jonathan van Driessen: Data, utilization and personalization. What’s your takeaway on that one, Anthony.

Anthony Lamot: Yes, thanks. Thanks for asking. So you’ve already kind of set to see. Now about how it’s important to get. Have good data accessibility, but also have good governance. But how are you going to use that? And what we find is that customers are not always able to translate that into personalization. So there’s a few insights we can really share about this. But the one you know, one of the main ones that’s on this slide is that it’s important to try and identify those customer affinities. What are they actually engaging with? So, yes, get demographic data, but also try to figure out if you can build segments around the affinity that your customers have, whether that’s within your marketing automation platform itself, or is data from other sources that you should be feeding into your map such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). So I think that’s that’s a really interesting one.

Anthony Lamot: Another thing that we have seen many times is that when people think about personalization, they typically think about personalizing at the level of content, like dear first name, or even some other kind of personalized content block, and that’s, of course, something you have to do. But you can really go down the rabbit hole there and have very complex personalization rules at the level of your content that may be requiring AMPscript, which is a scripting language for Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), and it can be very complex to maintain. Make it can get very costly over time. An easier way we have found with customers is that you try to do your personalization actually at the level of data. So how does that work? Well, rather than trying to do, for instance, something like a lookup within your email at the level of the content you’re already trying to merge your data from different sources in a new data extension at the level of the data which you can do as part of your segmentation process, and that is something where customers, you know, can do the same on a work usually faster. But the real added value is, it’s way easier to debug, to maintain way easier to collaborate on. So that will be one of our strong recommendations. Alright, but that’s it.

Complexity in systems and processes:

Anthony Lamot: Let’s talk a bit more about complexity, complexity rather. But this time specifically in systems and processes. Jonathan, can you shed some light there on the challenge that we’ve seen, and and what our insights are.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, so we see subject matters expressing complexity in no processes. Marketing technology. And just if you think about the day to day job. Right? This you you’re working on complex projects. You need to coordinate between different teams. There are deadlines that you need to adhere to. And then there’s always last minute changes that make it hard to to meet those deadlines so you need to have streamlined processes and proper project management. And how do you actually streamline within your marketing operations? We see customers using standard email templates or standard data definitions. So standardization is really helpful and making sure that everything is streamlined. And even if I think about how in DESelect segments customers use selection templates. So that’s like the base to the basis to start their their campaign selections, those kind of things templates in any tool that you use. It’s really helpful to make sure that things are streamlined, and that your processes are being executed smoothly. And as we have here on the slide is like the main insight. Sometimes it does mean that you have to take a step back. In advance teams, like, if you’re in an organization where you have different teams, maybe one team is very advanced. Another team is less advanced. Maybe it’s it’s worth it to take. Step back, make sure everything is streamlined to make sure that you can move forward together in a streamlined way.

Anthony Lamot: Little, said.

Knowledge gaps:

Jonathan van Driessen: Moving on to the next one. Knowledge gaps.

Anthony Lamot: Sure well, knowledge gaps is something very real. We are a vendor ourselves. We sometimes see it with customers where there is still this belief that technology will fix everything, and it’s of course, not true. You need to make sure your team is really upskilled and really well trained. And it is a study, I continue to quote. But there was this one Mckenzie study that showed that one of the main reasons IT implementation projects fail, I think, is the number 2, reason, right after lack of leadership support. The second one is lack of training, lack of adoption. So if you’re going to do an investment in any piece of technology, please, please, please make sure people are actually trained. And this is not just a one-off training. You have to keep monitoring, that people are actually adopting the solution, that they maybe get retrained once in a while, and that throughout their their tenure. They can also learn more, and this is great for their career. This is great for your and employee. Retention. That’s a great angle to look at it. But it’s also making sure that you really get the return on the sometimes a very heavy investment you’ve made in technology. So make sure that you know your organization doesn’t always don’t, doesn’t only have the best tag, the best data model whatever, but that your team also know how to use it.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah. And I would add one thing here. So I just want to add one thing. That is, this is a never ending job. You’ll always have new people joining your team or people leaving the team. So you have to continuously be ready to onboard those people and make sure there’s proper knowledge. Handover, when people are leaving the team. So make sure everybody is enabled.

Anthony Lamot: Great. Add on, thank you.

Resource and budget constraints:

Anthony Lamot: And that’s probably a good segue into our next common challenge that we identified, which has to do with resource and budget constraints.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, look, I think this one would always apply. If we had done this survey a few years ago. We’ve we would also have had this answer. But I think now it’s even more relevant than in other periods because many of you have probably gone through app layoffs that you had to do last year. Maybe even people layoffs. Maybe your team has shrunk, or at least your budgets has have shrunk. So you just have to do more with less. That means that sometimes one person has to take on multiple roles. And because all of these things and you probably don’t feel like there’s a lot of spare time to play around with new tools, including AI. You have to make sure it’s you know you get you get the basics done with the with the time and and the money and the resources that you have available. So that was really a common topic.

Jonathan van Driessen: And then the second insight. Here is campaign velocity is actually a good way of measuring how efficient your marketing team is if you’re able to spit out many campaigns. That’s probably an indication that you have good processes, that you have the right people in place to to create output, that you that you want to create.

Jonathan van Driessen: And so, Anthony, I have a question here for you. What would you say is a good campaign velocity for a marketing organization?

Anthony Lamot: It’s a great question. And it really depends on the size of organization, because obviously, in enterprise environments. Sometimes it does take as as long as a few weeks, maybe even longer, to get a campaign live depending on the complexity and the amount of stakeholders. I remember, remember at 1 point contracting for a huge automotive company, and I think for a single campaign that we’re probably up to 30 people involved and so obviously doing it. Then, within a day’s time is hard. But I do think leaders here have an important role to measure and map out all the involvement, and to see if you can actually reduce the amount of people that are required to be involved, because the more people have to sit around the table to make a decision. You know how it’s like is gonna just take exponentially longer. So streamlining processes here is massively important. And one way to think about the added value that this provide is is that when you introduce multiple people and you need to pass on work from point A to Point B, you get more and more communication overhead requirements to make sure that everyone understood the briefing and make sure everyone is aligned on the audience and the timing and whatnot, and you need to have meetings for this, so the more people you involve it can disproportionately increase amount of overhead that’s required. The other part. The other part of this is that you introduce waiting times. If someone is dependent on my work, you know, by the time they get to me I might be doing something else. And you know, it’s gonna take a while before I can pick up that that item that they require me to give input on. So there’s that waiting time, plus every time that you need to ask a task of someone else, they also need to kind of get into it again. So to sort of warm up time to to get back aligned on a task. So try to introduce more nimble collaboration in shorter cycles. With maybe less work in a given sprint if you’re using that edge on topology, but shorter sprints can probably lead to overall more output for the same amount of investment in time. So I think that will be my answer. Jonathan.

Jonathan van Driessen: Cool. Thank you.

Understanding AI use cases and related concerns:

Jonathan van Driessen: Then that brings us to the next one here, understanding AI use cases and related concerns. What did our leaders say about AI these days?

Anthony Lamot: For sure. So here we got a very wide range of answers. But at the time I needed to study, which was late last year, and I don’t have any reason to expect it. Has major majorly changed by now. Is that everyone’s still kind of trying to investigate, to try and figure out, how is this going to work for our business now? The used cases went from someone using ChatGPT in their day-to-day work to actually very toughly using AI tools to write about copy to even very industry specific use cases such as one of our healthcare participants had an internal task force across different functions to think about how HPS so doctors could be supported by AI and giving diagnoses within the hospitals. So that’s you know, that’s going way further. It’s a very industry specific use case. But our takeaway from that was that no one has really figured it out yet but it is still a very exciting technology. It’s more than a hype. It’s here to stay. Everyone’s very serious about it, and you should start to get your hands dirty with it as well, just to get that experience to get a good feel for what it’s about, and to start thinking about how it could really impact your business, your team. Now that said what seems very unlikely to us, and that’s the insight you can see on this slide is that these things will not run auto pilots. In fact, I’ve personally seen horrible implementations of automated AI emails with content that were clearly not curated. Don’t make that mistake. We do believe that at the center of it all there still will be that marketing automation or marketing operations, professional doing, the final decision, making the final curation, the final clicking that send button for that campaign. But having said that, it’s really something that can be a super tool to really amplify your own effectiveness. So look at. Look at it very seriously. If you’re not already. I would add one thing here, so many organizations these days. They have a task force on company level which often reports to the CEO. That investigates how AI can help their organization. So maybe in your organization is, you think, is this you within the marketing department, looking at what’s relevant for you. But there may be a bigger initiative ongoing and where you can probably collaborate. And yeah. Secondly, I’ve also seen that within marketing at this point that is mainly content. Creation at this point, mainly ideation, start off like emails or blog posts. And I’m very curious to see when we’ll make that leap into the next capabilityof AI.

Anthony Lamot: Great. Thank you for sharing those insights. We can see that, you know. We’ve already shared a few insights here, and we want to pause here. We’re halfway or 14 insights, and we want to ask you the audience, what do you think about these 7 insights? Which of the previous 7 challenges plus insights was the most relevant to you, and if everything is alright, you should shortly see a poll coming up.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yes, Paul is coming up. There you go. So our question to everyone is, which of the 7 challenges and insights we have shared so far is most relevant to you. Anthony, which one do you think people are gonna vote for the most.

Anthony Lamot: It’s a great question. Well, I can see the answers in real time, so I’m a little bit biased. But if I think back of the conversations I’ve had. I think all of these were relevant for almost everyone.I do think effective data management. So most people already past the integration usually. So I would go for number 2 effective data management. I’m trying very hard to not look here at what’s actually being answered.

Jonathan van Driessen: No cheating.

Anthony Lamot: Great, I think. Probably most people have answered by now.

Anthony Lamot: So Jonathan spill the beans.

Jonathan van Driessen: Alright. I’m going to end the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2,1…and poll and share results.

Anthony Lamot: So it seems I was not too far off.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, yeah, very well. So you need effective data management and dependency on others was further, the most with, 25% of the votes and then lack of integrated systems, 19.19% of the votes. And then it’s really a tie between 4 others data utilization, personalization complexity in systems and processes, resources and budget constraints and understanding AI use cases. I was really gonna vote for understanding AI use cases just because it’s such a hot topic for right now.

Anthony Lamot: And that’s interesting. I think we see a lot about in the industry but it also shows that not everyone is affected quite yet by the day to day and in hindsight, it’s maybe easy to say. But obviously everyone’s so busy and market operation and automation is just such a demanding task that it can be hard to start exploring new technologies and find and make their time to do that alright. Well, with that.

Internal collaboration and scaling:

Anthony Lamot: thanks. With that poll behind us. Let’s continue our journey, and let’s go into the 7 next challenges that we’ve identified with some insights. And I’ll I would like to start here, Jonathan, where internal collaboration and scaling. What did you hear about that in your conversations, and what are the insights you would like to share.

Jonathan van Driessen: Well, one inside that we that we put on the slide here. This is really relevant, and best practice, I would say, is, having a marketing request form, because you’re going to get requests as a marketing team from many stakeholders within the company, and it’s not easy to make sure that your own team is aligned and that you have priority is a clear view of what the priorities are that your team should be working on and that you have tickets ready to put in your next print so marked the request from best practice. Often connected to the project management tools like Asana or like. So that’s one thing and then another big one is campaign planning.That’s something where we see that especially as organizations get bigger, you have multiple marketers working with different products, different campaigns that they need to promoteand how are you then, going to determine which campaign get can get sent first. And you know, because often the companies do want to enforce some kind of saturation control frequency capping. They don’t wanna maybe send out all of the campaigns that could be going out in fear of spamming people. So what we see is often there are weekly planning meetings where it’s a bit of politics. It’s a bit of fighting to get your campaign out of the door first, because then you’re sure that you can send it and often those. This kind of meetings happen with excel, or a shared outlook calendar as a supporting tool. But it’s still it’s a super tough challenge to try to fix a race control just with like a Google calendar because there is no exact overlap between the different campaigns. Different campaigns can have different audiences, of course. And so that’s that’s really one where Marcus are spending quite some time on as well. For sure. Yeah, having that overlap.

Anthony Lamot: Between campaigns very hard to tell at the level of individual subscribers, and then just practically aligning around that is, is tricky. Were there any surprises there when you learned about this process, or, for that matter, the the tools that people were using.

Jonathan van Driessen: I was surprised that so many people think that you can do this in excel like how, how it’s just it’s challenging, especially so either. You say, Okay, I’m gonna try to do this in Excel. And I’m just going to say, this is one campaign. This is not a campaign, and I wanna make sure that I don’t send more than 3 campaigns in a week, for example. But then you’re not taking into account the potential overlap between campaigns or the other one is you’re going to try to really like. Put all the sense to all contacts as a rose in your Excel, and then you end up with massive excels and and formula magic, to try to make it happen, to to avoid, overlap.

Anthony Lamot: That’s sometimes surprising.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Well, and also because I mean, for this can maybe still kind of work for a midsized company. But for larger ones Anthony Lamot: the spreadsheets will simply be simply be too hard. Excel spreadsheets break at a hundred 1,000 a row. So if you have more contacts on that, it’s just impossible. I know I’ve tried early in my career. I think my biggest surprise was to see Jira in this list, not to bash on Jira. I think it’s a great tool, but I would typically put it for it. Teams was really surprised to hear it’s still being used for marketing teams, even though I’ve used it in marketing. But that’s you know. That was 80 years ago.In case the audience is curious, we’re using Asana internally. We love Asana easy nice to automate, integrate. You name it. So that’s still our tool of choice for marketing. Depends a little bit on what team we don’t use for all our teams. Okay, moving on.

Understanding the customers and their life cycles:

Jonathan van Driessen: Understanding the customers and their life cycles. Anthony, what did we learn.

Anthony Lamot: Right. So many of our contact persons. We’re talking about the challenge in having a good view across the life cycle. So to better understand what is a single customer going through. And I think it’s a very interesting side effect of marketing automation as a whole, because, as everyone started to get really excited about marketing automation. The last 10 years we started to build automated Journeyand all kinds of other automations. But within that forest we’ve constructed between those trees that we’ve constructed or erased. It’s hard to see the forest and having tools that provide more transparency across journeys across that customer lifecycle super important, related to that. Another thing that I would suggest is really interesting to do as an exercise with your team. It’s an investment of time I will not lie. But what is really interesting is to map out that whole customer journey. Not a specific, not a specific, rather journey, but your customer Journeyfrom awareness to interest, but then also the as a boat, not just a funnel, but as a bow tie like, how? How can we maybe expand that customer relationship afterwards. Once you’ve mapped that now you can start doing something really interesting, you can start doing a content gap analysis. And you can start to map. What kind of content would you need at every critical moment, every milestone of that customer Journeyto, then direct your content strategy. So that will be one recommendation we can make.

Jonathan van Driessen: Nice. One thing I wanted to add, there is depending on your industry. This is easier or harder. So, for example, banks, they typically do not register when you go into a physical office, right? So when you visitor like an insurance agency like, unless it’s something that you booked in advance website, for example. Then it’s probably going to be on the calendar. It’s going to be registered somewhere. But if you just hop in. Then it’s probably not registered and similar with sorry with like grocery stores, for example. If you online purchases online purchases, they will be registered. But if you just go into the store and buy something that’s typically not linked to your account and that’s where loyalty cards come in. So if you have loyalty card, then it’s going to be linked to your account, and then they will know the full history of your purchases, and they can use that for marketing purposes.

Lack of actionable insights and changing stakeholders’ mindset:

Anthony Lamot: Awesome thanks for sharing. Now that brings us to the next. challenge that we’ve notified, which has to do with a lack of actionable insights and changing stakeholders. Mindset you, share some on that.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah. Look, you can only have good insights if you have good data, and and you can only have a complete insight if you have all the data. So you need to have all your day relevant data together. So that’s why we see that many customers will have data, warehouses or data lakes, where or Cdp, even where they they gather all the data. And then they do reporting there. If you have all your relevant data within your marketing automation system. Like, if you have the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), you could also use C call we even have customers using these like segments for reporting purposes. As an easy way to to access their data. So that’s that’s relevant. And and on the topic here of the mindset shift. I think that’s where we still see some. The customer struggling with the idea of stepping away from blast email campaigns realizing that they do need to do more personalization and being more data driven and like, recently, that came up in a conversation we had with a customer that was thinking about how they should do saturation control where they have a concern that if they do less sense that they will do less revenue. Well, we know that if you have a more controlled flow of messages that you’re sending to your customers, and you will have better engagement, and you will in the end have better revenue. But the link of more email means more revenue still exists in people’s minds.

Anthony Lamot: For sure, for sure.

Marketing attribution and demonstrating the value of technology:

Jonathan van Driessen: And then Anthony on the next one, the marketing attribution problem still, still a hot topic, I believe. And as a marketer, how do we show the value of of what we’re doing? And our technology.

Anthony Lamot: Right, I think, at the core of this is that marketers sometimes still struggle to demonstrate their value to the rest of the organization, and especially in a somewhat wobbly economy, for many of the industries that we talk to that is something you want to be able to demonstrate. Having said that it is very, very hard, and even with the best marketing attribution setup and the best technology and the best people it’s still not the perfect picture. And it can actually even be misleading. For instance, one of those concepts that has been surfacing the last few years that we think has a lot of merit is the idea of dark social. What is that? Well a lot of your it’s actually just the the newer version of word of mouth, in a sense, but a lot of the most important things that are being said about your product, your brand, the most important referrals you might be getting are what people discussing in closed social groups or closed slack communities or similar. And there’s not a good way to measure that. Because someone clicking, you know, someone recommending your product in a select channel, for instance, and someone else clicking on that link and then going to your website will be attributed as either referral link or even direct traffic. And so you might be misunderstanding your your revenue that way. And it’s almost impossible to to adjust. So we’re not saying that stop measuring attribution, but taking with a huge grain of salt, because you otherwise may end up optimizing for the wrong thing.

And I think it’s important to keep that unknown unknown in mind as you think about your marketing strategy.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, I was thinking about a similar example today. You know, 2 weeks ago we attended the World Tour Paris. We had a bud there with this DESelect. And so I was just thinking, Okay, what if somebody passed by a boot? They saw a brand. They saw the boot.But who didn’t speak to them, or at least they didn’t. Book a demo. And now they get an ad from us, and they, because they recognize the brand. They, you know, they click on the ad, and now they they want to talk to us. That would be attributed to the the campaign that we’re doing with the online ads. Well in the end, it’s the investment in the budget at least participated at least. Yeah. Supported that conversion.

Anthony Lamot: Yup, that’s another great example of that same concept. And and just how misleading marketing attribution can actually be.

Cross-channel marketing and “traffic control”:

Anthony Lamot: Alright cross channel marketing and traffic control. What was that all about Jonathan.

Jonathan van Driessen: So this is a challenge that we see customers have where, especially as an organization becomes larger. As I alluded to before you more marketers, more different campaigns, different priorities, and each market has their own  goals. But in the end everybody is creating campaigns, but targeting that same customer base, or at least to a large extent, overlapping customer base so that could lead to one person receiving 5 emails in one day. And that’s really something that you want to avoid, because then people will unsubscribe, they will not. Maybe they will read the first email, but they will not. I read to the other 4 emails that you send that day. So you just you’re just wasting money that way. And and once somebody unsubscribes, then they’re gone right. It’s very hard to get them back so that’s what companies try to avoid having like what we like to call it a traffic control. We have a system that manages that checks like, what are the messages that we’re trying to send out to make sure that you’re not sending too many messages to one person at one time. Maybe you can still send that message, those other 4. But maybe if you spread them out over the next week those emails will be read and opened and converted. So it’s it’s very important to have a system in place. People expect these days customers. We’d expect that you’ll have something that avoids sending 5 emails in one day.

Anthony Lamot: For sure, and sometimes it’s about reducing sense. But we’ve seen customers. One of ours, for instance, is the brain tumor charity. There’s a story about their implementation of this on our website. They have found that just spreading out the messages better optimizes for donations in their case. So think about this for your own business. Your customers probably have a certain psychological window of opportunity in which they can make a purchase. If you’re going to send all your marketing email hypothetically on one day in the year. Just for argument’s sake. They’re only gonna act on one of those at moments right? Or maybe in subscribe in in this case. But even aside from the unsubscribe and subscribing or not, let’s say they don’t do that, they’re still gonna make only one purchase at best, whereas if you spread it out you might actually be optimizing revenue. And this is where traffic control is so interesting, because, aside from organizationally, it’s very useful to have this, whether you’re small or large. Team just from a marketing driven generation. Marketing generated revenue point of view is really interesting because you can actually optimize the investment you have made in your marketing automation setup and all your more tech. So super cool stuff, really interesting to see this challenge arise so many times. Before we go to next topic. One more thing I wanna add, here is often, organizations have multiple systems that they use to send out messages. So maybe you have Salesforce Marcketing Cloud (​​SFMC) . And maybe that’s the only system you use. You do the email SMS, and so on within Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

Jonathan van Driessen: But sometimes organizations, for example, they also post a mail off, or they send SMS to another system. So in that case it’s important that you have this traffic control system existing outside of your marketing automation system. Otherwise you’re not gonna be capturing everything cause you need to have the full picture of everything that the customer or a contact is receiving to be able to do the traffic control effectively.

Anthony Lamot: For sure.

New systems, legacy systems, and knowledge transfer:

Jonathan van Driessen: Alright. And then that brings us to the next one. Here new systems, legacy, systems, and knowledge transfer.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah. Well, so mark, tech changes so fast. Scope bringers. Latest research came out. I think we’re now with 1014,000 smart tech providers in the space. It’s a busy space. How do you keep up with all of these tools? If you’re professional? Well the simple answer is, you don’t. There’s just too many to to track. But from a team’s point of view, that’s why it’s so important to experiment with new applications and new technologies such as AI. But internally, you also have to make sure you don’t lose that knowledge, and it’s just a fact that there’s way more. Turnover, these days. It is a really real risk that you lose knowledge over time this way. One of the best practices that we’ve identified and apply ourselves is to maintain an easy to read internal wiki, but that really becomes a living resource. Do not make us a piece of documentation that is happening at the end of your project, and just like kind of check the box like this, Wiki should serve as your onboarding content for new employees, for new team members for contractors for vendors. This should be something that’s alive, that throughout campaigns throughout rolling out newer features. Maybe in your marketing automation platform constantly get it updated. It has to be a living resource. That’s probably best single piece of advice we can give on this, aside from training which we already covered in an earlier insight.

Jonathan van Driessen: And Anthony any tips on which tools to use to to maintain a wiki.

Anthony Lamot: It’s a great question. So there’s options here. I think the most well known vendor out there, and I’ve used it, and I was pretty happy with it is confluence. Confluence is especially interesting if you’re already using other products from that same suite, from that same vendor, such as Jira. But not everyone uses that. And everyone wants to implement that. We’ve seen really good implementations, even in Google docs. As long as you have people who are good at structuring that information, and that you have some kind of stewardship inside your organization. Maybe a dedicated person, such as the manager of the team who is the ultimate owner of that document. It can work right as long as you’re structured enough and disciplined enough. So it’s as much a habit and governance as it is technology which is secondary. So that will be my tip. Thanks for the follow-up question.

Economy:

Anthony Lamot: Whoa! We’re almost true. We have one more, Jonathan. It’s a big one. Economy.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, look, I, I would say, we still live in in certain times. We still have higher than usual interest rates high inflation is still a thing. That has an impact on probably your own budgets but also on our customers on their on the money that they have available to spend with us. So uncertain times it may get better, it may get worse. Who knows? Different opinions out there on that. But so let’s just brace ourselves and be ready for should things get worse, I don’t know but we’re probably I mean, and never mind, I’m not going to make a prediction here, let’s just say we’re all in the same boat. It has not been easy last couple of years but we’re gonna get through this and we can do this altogether.

Anthony Lamot: Great thanks for that, Jonathan. And with that we do have another poll for our audience, because we just covered another 7 challenges as well as some insights which I hope you find useful. We we have been a bit opinion bit. Been a bit opinionated on some of these things to offer our own perspective, and I can see the

Anthony Lamot: Poll is already up. Thanks. So people should now be able to see a poll popping up on your screen and would love to hear from you which of these 7 challenges that we just covered? Our big challenges for you? You see, answers trickling in. We have a little bit more time. Same question for you here, Jonathan, like which of the 7, would you say was felt very prevalent during your conversations without looking at the answers. Obviously.

Jonathan van Driessen: I would say, number 10. The lack of actionable insights cause underlying of that is the challenge that data is often not available or it lives in different systems, and that makes it impossible to report on it.That’s you know what you measure. You can improve. And if you’re just acting blindly, then it’s very hard to to optimize your marketing activities.So yeah, getting all the data in one place being able to report on it also not being too dependent on other people. In accessing the data, it’s an important one. So yeah, my vote goes to number 10. What about yours?

Anthony Lamot: Well, I think our audience is pretty curious for what the poll results are. So let’s share those

Anthony Lamot: alright. So I can see the answers.

Jonathan van Driessen: There we go. Alright. Yeah, marketing attribution. That’s the big winner with 43% marketing attribution and demonstrating the value of technology. And then, secondly, we have understanding customers and the life cycles. Yeah, that probably comes back to the the customer. 3. 60. View. Namaste again, having the full picture having all the data available understanding where customers are at.

Anthony Lamot: And regarding the: marketing attribution and demonstrating the value of technology. I have had conversations with customers of ours where it’s actually interesting that we, as a vendor, have the same challenge.

Anthony Lamot: as some of our customers, because customers are trying to justify internally the spend on certain things. And so I do think that if that sounds recognizable, and that’s you. You can benefit from looking at how vendors like ourselves use things like Roi calculators to figure out how you should position the value because we do want to really provide added value. We even, you know, we think a lot about, for instance, making sure our pricing is aligned with the value we bring. That’s really important to us. To make sure we’re actually delivering on value. We’re charging for that sounds self-evident, but it’s it’s something that you need to be very thoughtful Very conscious about. So if that’s recognizable, you can always reach out to us. We actually love to talk about that stuff, and we’re happy to share some of the calculators we’ve built, if only to serve as an inspiration for you. So don’t hesitate to ping us in the chat, or after this conversation, or when you see this recording alright with that said, we’ve gone to all 14 challenges. But we’re not done yet. And you know, Jonathan, we did these interviews because we like to talk with customers first and foremost, but it’s also a huge amount of inspiration to us. Obviously, so.

Anthony Lamot: being our CTO, how has this impact impacted our roadmap? Can you tell a little bit about engage.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yes, so engages a a frequency, optimization and campaign planning product that we built for Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). And we launched it pretty much about a year ago. And has been successfully being used by by customers since, and the interviews that we did were really a confirmation for me that we built the right product. And there’s several topics, several pain points that came up here today that I think we are addressing within gates like one of them was, of course, number 3. Personalization cause. Personalization is not only content, it’s also personalization of the frequency of the messages that you’re sending to people. And if you can optimize both the most relevant messages through a traffic control system as well as the frequency which may be different for everyone, maybe you’re super involved. And you wanna receive 5 emails a week. But I’m less involved and or less engaged. And I just wanna receive one email a week. Then you need to have a system that can that can handle that right. Another topic. Number 9, understanding customers and life cycles.That’s where the 360 view comes in, which is something that we built into DESelect Engage. You can look at each contact individually and see all of their sense that they have received, or that they were going to receive with the decision that Engage has made to send it or not send it to that person at that timeas well as in the future, everything that’s coming up, and whether we’re planning to send it or not. And then the collaboration, as I mentioned the weekly meetings with teams.You don’t want that to be driven by politics, or who has the loudest voice? You want it to be driven by data, making sure that everybody receives the campaign, it’s most relevant to them. So, having a system in place that can enforce those rules.So all of these things in the end will help you increase your marketing efficiency, because more relevant messages means higher engagement in the end.So yeah, for me as a CTO, I’d say, we’re gonna continue building on the building on engage some exciting things coming up.

Jonathan van Driessen: We just launched the capability to automatically apply such race control and also retrying for sending messages are not being sent to an entire Journeywith it. Just a couple of clicks. That’s super exciting. We also have AI capability that we’re working on to determine the ideal number of messages that you should send to each individual contact. And lastly, what we call cosby usage control, which is where we gonna be looking, not only in within one business unit, but across your whole Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) or across your whole marketing stack. and to make sure that we can look at all messages that somebody is receiving even if one contact exists in multiple business units. So if all of that sounds interesting to you, on the next slide, we do have a QR code feel free to to scan it. That brings you to a page where we can give you more information about how engage works. And lastly, the other QR code, there is where you can download the reports that we discussed today. I’ll also be sharing the link in the chat here soon. So then you you can really take your time and dive into the reports and have have a lot more fun.And, Anthony, is there anything else that you wanted to add today?

Anthony Lamot: Well, I would say, as you share the link to the report in a chat we’re opening the floor for some QA.

Anthony Lamot: We do have a bit of time left, and we see one popping up. So let’s have a peek at that.

Anthony Lamot: So here’s here’s an interesting question which challenges, do you think could be resolved, or might no longer be relevant in the coming years? And that’s maybe one that I’ll start by answering, in case you’re still working on that. Yeah, URL Jonathan. So there’s a few things that come to mind. one thing that I think about is the integration bit for many customers. It was a, you know, a process of going through that mostly Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) implementation initially. And for those who have that you can start really having compound interest on your investment. The trend that we also see at Salesforce that over time more and more of the projects keep converging into a more unified platform which really excited about and we think is really great. I think that’s a trend which will you know, the need for integration will never disappear. But integration products are ever becoming more point and click rather than coated, and the suite of sales for itself is becoming more integrated. So that’s something I will think

Anthony Lamot: is going to change. But what do you think, Jonathan? What challenges, do you think could be resolved, or might no longer be relevant in the coming years.

Jonathan van Driessen: Well, I really hope that the economy is no longer gonna be a challenge that we have to face.

Anthony Lamot: At least for a few years or a decade. The next cycle comes right.

Jonathan van Driessen: Exactly.

Anthony Lamot: That’s good answer. I like it alright. Well, take one more question from our audience. So if there’s something still, you want to know something. You’re curious about something that wasn’t clear. Perhaps we’d love to hear from you.

Anthony Lamot: Alright. So here’s one. I think Jonathan has really meant for you.

Anthony Lamot: Someone is asking, do engage rules, work for journeys that are already configured.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, absolutely, so with the capability that I just refer to with just a few clicks, you can basically import the Journeyand apply the the situation, control rules to the entire journey.and then yes, it will apply to journeys that you already build. So it’s not like you have to build all your journeys from scratch you can. Use your existing journeys will apply set race control. We, we basically add a ping link to to it save it as a new version. You activate as version and then you have access control, or the rules that you have set up applied to your Journey–to your existing journey.

Anthony Lamot: It goes without saying, we love penguins but we also love term Key. So our whole philosophy as a company is to offer a platform that with the turn of the key quote unquote can be activated, and you can get value out of it immediately. And granted, you can obviously configure some things in our platform based on your on your specific needs. But the idea is really that people get value out of our products within weeks at most. And so this new feature is super exciting because it really increases the time of a time to value that engage, that is, our saturation control product offers. So it’s a great question. Thank you for asking it.

Anthony Lamot: Alright. I think we’re probably about time to round up. I wanna thank our audience for for the engagement interaction, and for your attention most of all, we hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I certainly have. And thank you to Jolton for being here with with me.

Jonathan van Driessen: Yeah, thanks. It was fun. You should do it more often.

Anthony Lamot: Should do it more often, for sure. Alright, thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of your day.

Jonathan van Driessen: Bye, everyone.