Teradata's Aprimo Pursues Marketing Analytics Holy Grail

For years, marketers have been seeking a way to deliver smart, analytically driven campaigns across the Web, call centers, point-of-sale systems, and other customer touchpoints. And the fewer tools and systems needed to do that the better.

Responding to the demand for cross-channel campaign management, Aprimo, a unit of Teradata, announced on Monday that it has upgraded its integrated marketing management applications and will introduce by year end an Aprimo Real-Time Interaction Manager app designed to deliver consistent offers across inbound customer interactions.

Teradata acquired Aprimo late last year to bolster its marketing technology portfolio, but it retained the Aprimo brand and management team as the face to the marketing community. In fact, Teradata's (customer) Relationship Manager application was rebranded as Aprimo Relationship Manager (ARM).

With this week's release, ARM has been integrated with the marketing operations and marketing resource management capabilities that are part of the vendor's core Aprimo Marketing Studio application.

"The integration gives marketers automated workflows and will enable them to get more done with fewer resources," Lisa Arthur, Aprimo's chief marketing officer, said in an interview.

Where Teredata originally had the campaign measurement piece--the functionality focused on analysis of marketing results--the ARM upgrade adds the tools marketers need to create, manage, and deliver outbound marketing offers across websites, email, mobile devices, call-center interactions, and so on. Aprimo says it also has streamlined user-interface navigation and access to reports and dashboards, giving marketers faster access to insight and more time for strategizing and campaign execution.

While ARM is geared to firms that are already running or that plan to optimize on the Teradata data warehousing platform, Aprimo Marketing Studio (AMS) remains a database- and data-warehouse-agnostic choice for customers using third-party products or a mix of data warehousing platforms. With this week's upgrade release, AMS gained mobile access capabilities that will enable marketers to conduct reviews, approve purchase orders, and view campaigns from iPhones, iPads, Blackberryies, and Android tablets and smartphones.

To address inbound customer interactions--customers contacting call centers, interacting with websites, or checking out at point-of-sale locations--Aprimo says the Real-Time Interaction Manager app will instantly present the most appropriate cross-sell, up-sell, retention, loyalty, or service-related offer to each individual customer.

The app will include a content repository that will centrally manage all available offers. Self-learning analytics will continuously monitor the effectiveness of the various offers to help marketers adjust targeting accordingly. A strategy management component will enable marketers to define the business goals and priorities behind the various offers.

Aprimo Real-Time Interaction Manager won't be released until year end, but Arthur said internal tests show that it will scale to support hundreds of thousands of interactions per hour--an essential requirement for high-traffic Web marketers and retailers with hundreds of store locations.

Teradata is not the only information-management and analytics specialist investing in marketing technology. Oracle acquired the technology behind Market2Lead in May 2010, IBM acquired Unica in October 2010, and SAS acquired Assetlink in February 2011. These acquired companies have different strengths: lead nurturing in the case of Market2Lead, e-marketing at Unica, and workflow and digital asset management for Assetlink. Aprimo was best known for its campaign planning and financial management capabilities.

What all these acquired vendors have in common is cross-channel marketing capabilities driven by analytics. Data management and data warehousing capabilities are nice to have and a hoped-for part of the sale, but the ability to analyze the data and put it to work is what's really driving interest from marketers.

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