Activating the social experience

After investigating the market, SDL chose EngageSciences as our partner in the social engagement space. Their market leading platform has comprehensive apps for creating the right social content, and their ability to hold and provide data is highly relevant for campaign managers.

The EngageSciences platform has specific elements including:

Engagement.

You can launch interactive applications that will attract and engage fans on social networks, microsites and your website. With the most configurable campaign builder on the market you can create exceptional social apps and targeted messaging that leverage best in class viral mechanics.

Audience

You can see a customer profile for every person that connects with your social campaigns, and a detailed timeline of how they are interacting with your messaging, campaigns and content. You can then use social data to segment your audience and personalize your marketing across multiple channels. This data is then available to pull through into your SDL solution.

Advocacy

With the advocacy tools, you find the very best posts, images and videos that your fans are publishing across the social web. Filter, curate and publish content from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, lnstagram, You Tube, Flickr and blogs directly to your website and other social channels. The built-in sharing components are guaranteed to give your web page a social boost.

Loyalty

By implementing loyalty programs using gamification principles, including badges, points, levels, challenges and unlocks you can drive long-term engagement among your fans. With user journeys optimized for both a desktop and mobile experience, your fans will become your greatest ambassadors.

Insights

The lnfographic style reports with real time analytics will make you the star of the department. You get detailed analytics on how your campaigns, messaging and pages are performing, including demographics and audience insights that will show how you are increasing brand advocacy over time.

How social data can supplement the customer experience

By linking your social data with your customer, purchase and campaign data, you are in a strong position to improve the performance of all facets of your marketing.

By including social data to your database, you can:

• Improve the targeting of your email campaigns
• Boost personalization of your website
• Increase the volume of new prospects
• Provide a better understanding of your important customers and advocates

The rich data source available from EngageSciences is by its nature fast moving. By making use of this data to supplement your existing customer data, you can react faster to changes in customer behavior.

6 steps to combine Social Data with your SOL Solution

The great advantage of the EngageSciences platform is that it enables companies to access the data. This means that you can pull out the social interaction data and combine it with other customer, purchase and campaign data you hold in your SDL Solution. This provides an opportunity to broaden the knowledge you have about each customer, but also deepen your database by adding new prospects.

1. SDL and EngageSciences Data Connector

The EngageSciences data is held in its own database. To access this, we built the SDL EngageSciences Data connector to make it easy to grab the relevant data on individuals and their participation in social media campaigns.

This connector lets you rapidly pull relevant data on your campaigns as frequently as you require. Built in Pentaho Kettle, an Open Source ETL platform, this is just one of a series of off-the-shelf connectors SDL are developing to make data integrations even easier for clients and partners.

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2. Pulling your data into your SDL Solution.

The EngageSciences Data Connector can either be used to simply pull through files for loading using the SDL ETL tool iloader, or you can use Pentaho Kettle to build a process to manage the whole data connection and data loading process.

The data you pull through consists of two main tables, Audience and Participation. The Audience table (see Figure 1) contains information on individuals. As the data contains First name, Second name and Email address it enables you to link the social data to existing data in your database, or add new prospects to your database.

The Participation table (see Figure 2) contains information on how an audience member has interacted with social media campaigns. Therefore, you can start to see how involved they are with particular campaigns. Where you run campaigns which capture survey or preference data from customers, then this data is added into the data field.

[Download PDF to see Figures]

3. Visualize the data

Once the data is loaded into the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite or your existing SDL solution, you can use the marketing friendly analytics tools to begin visualizing and segmenting your data. You can create charts comparing your socially active customers vs. those who aren't as active, and identify any key differences between them as shown in Figure 3 (right).

Or, you can start to understand the overlap between your most valuable customers in terms of spend, and your most valuable customers in terms of their advocacy. The Venn Diagram on the right (see Figure 4) is an example of this.

[Download PDF to see Figures]

4. Enhance your campaign selections

With the data you gather from your social engagement activities you can begin to refine the targeting of your campa1gns.

For example, a wine retailer running a social media survey to understand wine preferences, and consumption levels, would be able to create clearly defined segments in their next campaign (see Figure 5 below). For those who didn't take part in the survey, you would still be able to target based on past purchases.

By combining social and purchase data, you are able to expand your customer understanding and ensure that the most relevant offers are made to individuals. This is particularly useful when you are targeting prospects where you lack any previous purchase history.

5. Monitor results

Once you run campaigns using your social media data, being able to monitor how this improves your campaign performance is essential. This provides clear metrics on the worth of your investment in social campaigning.

By comparing the performance over time of those customers who are socially engaged with you provides usefu I information to assess your return on your social media spend.

As you start to bring Social Media data into your customer database from EngageSciences, you have a real opportunity to include this data into your customer reports. By combining this data together with your customer, purchase and other campaign data, you start to create an all-round view of the customer experience.

6. Clear Data Capture Strategy

Finally, while a platform such as EngageSciences provides plenty of scope for capturing data on customers, we encourage organizations to identify a clear data capture strategy.

By identifying the core data you'd like to know about your customers, perhaps 6-10 pieces of information, you can focus your efforts on ensuring that you can build good penetration levels of this data. If you do this you will be in a far stronger position than if you capture small pockets of data on 40+ different questions.

By developing a data capture strategy to identify the most essential data, you are better positioned to make the most of the right data across multi-channel campaigns.