This week in martech
News from Singles Day, Insightly, SAP, Terminus, ZoomInfo and Logiq
Alibaba sets another Singles Day record
Alibaba has set another record with its 11-day Singles Day retail event, with the 2020 total of retail sales surpassing $74 billion. As U.S. marketers are finally starting to create revenue from the Chinese-based holiday Singles Day, celebrated on November 11. Singles Day, a random holiday that celebrates singlehood in China, was turned into the world’s biggest shopping event by Alibaba 10 years ago.
While the U.S. takes November 11 to remember veterans, elsewhere across the globe people celebrate this as a day when unmarried individuals are encouraged to buy themselves a gift to celebrate their status of being single. Economists, marketers and investors across the world paid close attention to the sales performance of this year’s holiday as an early indicator of the upcoming holiday season.
U.S.-based brands are now taking advantage of the world’s biggest shopping event by using email marketing and social media campaigns. ProFlowers engaged in a large email marketing campaign, offering a 20% discount on ‘the biggest self-giving day of the year.’
U.S. brands have also added a twist to the marketing of Singles Day by focusing on the entire family to increase revenue. This year Levi’s used the Singles Day holiday to market to the entire family by offering a 22% group discount. Food brands like Long John Silver’s also are appealing to the entire family with an email marketing campaign that offered an 11-piece meal for $11.11.
Why we care. It’s the world’s biggest shopping event, so U.S. marketers should pay it due attention.
New automation features for Insightly Marketing
Insightly, the CRM platform, this week announced new features for its marketing automation offering, Insightly Marketing. The enhancements are aimed at simplicity of management and alignment with sales teams.
The new features include:
- AI-powered prospect ranking;
- Advanced list segmentation based on digital activities (website interactions and downloads, webinar attendance, etc.;
- A drag-and-drop landing page designer;
- A/B and multivariate testing; and
- Enhanced analytics.
Why we care. We’re seeing innovation and upgrades here from one of the smaller players in the CRM/marketing automation space.
SAP survey looks at customer service expectations for the holiday season
A new survey from SAP shows that consumers are expecting more personalized service through omnichannel experiences for the upcoming holiday season. The study also found that 60% of U.S. consumers expect to shop at brick and mortar stores.
Over 90% of respondents expressed the need for a personalized experience, and online chat was identified as the top way of interacting with brands, with phone and in-person service tying for second place. According to nearly two-thirds of respondents speed is the most important factor of successful customer service interaction with brands.
Why we care. Customer service is a key element of customer experience, and may be the great differentiator during this first-of-its-kind holiday retail season.
Terminus acquires psychographic intelligence firm
ABM platform Terminus has announced the acquisition of GrowFlare, a predictive data service provider that uses psychographic intelligence to help brands prioritize accounts and identify lookalike accounts.
GrowFlare uses psychographics (the study and classification of people according to psychological criteria) to better understand target accounts’ intent signals and propensity to buy, as well as identifying new accounts by comparing their psychographic profiles with existing accounts.
It also makes it possible to segment accounts based on psychographic as well as firmographic, relationship, and intent data.
Why we care. Further refining the ability to identify promising or in-market accounts — at scale — should strengthen the foundations of Terminus customers’ ABM strategies.
ZoomInfo acquires B2B data company EverString
Business leads and company contacts provider ZoomInfo has acquired B2B firmographic platform EverString. EverString crawls online and offline sources of firmographic data, using machine learning and natural language processing to ingest information at scale.
Everstring’s 100 million firm records and 70 million professional profiles will be integrated with ZoomInfo’s 15 million firm records and 130 million professional profiles. EverString will also contribute over 120 million business locations. The two companies claim that this will result in the first business graph of its size.
Why we care. As B2B moves further towards digital sales and marketing, at scale, brands need to rapidly identify actual buying centers and understand who they’re selling to.
Logiq completes acquisition of Fixel AI
E-commerce and fintech platform Logiq has completed its acquisition of Fixel AI, an AI-powered engagement-based audience segmentation platform. Logiq acquired Fixel AI, with its campaign optimization capabilities, as a complement to its own AI-powered consumer intent engine.
Working only with first-party data, Fixel supports CCPA and GDPR compliance. Its real-time, AI-based scoring system helps marketers identify consumers with real purchase intent, at scale, thus saving effort and expenditure directed at low quality traffic.
Why we care. The promise held out by this acquisition is speed and agility in identifying and executing on engagement signals, tuned to a third-party cookieless and privacy-compliant world.
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