Earlier this week, IBM announced their plans to acquire Silverpop, a cloud-based marketing automation platform that competes with the likes of Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot.
I was a Silverpop customer in a previous role and, based on my experience with the company, I think this is a good move for IBM. Silverpop enabled my team to build a highly personalized digital experience for our customers across web and email, taking a proven strategy from B2C and applying it to B2B. We were able to build some pretty sophisticated stuff, including dynamic content serving and dynamic content in emails, with persona-based automated programs quickly and easily.
Sure, IBM has a pretty big arsenal of tools in play for marketing, but this move now enables their customers to leverage a proven tactic – personalization at scale – to up their marketing game.
A recent Aberdeen report, Digital Asset Management in the Age of Personalization, supports the adoption of delivering personalized offers. It found that “Best-in-Class” (companies performing in the top 20% across a variety of critical marketing metrics such as revenue growth, response rates, and ROMI) are 85% more likely than All Others to customize offers to individuals, see Figure 1. This means that high performing companies are able to understand their buyers at a micro-segment and even individual level.
While the preference for customized offers intuitively makes sense, the execution of this type of “segment of one” approach requires considerable thinking on the part of content marketers who have been building their systems for scale. Silverpop enables this with their ability to track the engagement activity of a contact (even those that are anonymous), a feature that sets them apart from several other technologies in the space.
IBM’s enterprise marketing portfolio customers are the real winners here as this will expand their capabilities and, I imagine, that IBM will see the newly acquired Silverpop customers as opportunity for cross-sell and upsell. One thing’s for sure, this will be interesting to watch.
