SAP Helps Marketers Use Facebook Customer Data

Techies In Advertising: Hits & Misses

SAP announced Tuesday that it will integrate its analytic Customer Engagement Intelligence application with Facebook audience-targeting capabilities to enable marketers to deliver what it says will be more effective, Facebook-powered social, mobile, Web, and email campaigns.

The idea behind the Facebook tie-up is to marry enterprise customer profiles with social profiles to improve customer segmentation information and get closer to so-called one-to-one marketing. A home-improvement retailer, for example, could upload data about 10,000 customers who purchased expensive gas grills into the Facebook Custom Audiences service and the social network company can apply demographic, education, location, and lifestyle enrichment information to drive better social and mobile campaigns.

"The retailer can then do much more targeted marketing to micro-segments and, based on those results, measure return-on-investment on advertising spend," said Kevin Ichhpurani, SAP's senior VP and head of corporate business development, in a phone interview with InformationWeek.

[Want more on SAP? Read SAP Unleashes Major Hana Upgrade.]

With better customer-segmentation information, the Customer Engagement Intelligence application can deliver fine-tuned predictive models to power more effective digital advertising and promotions through Facebook. The idea is to drive better-targeted, more-effective look-alike, cross-sell, and up-sell campaigns.

In the case of gas grills, for example, a look-alike campaign would target Facebook users who share traits with customers who already purchased one. A cross-sell campaign might feature gas-tank refills or deluxe barbeque tools, while the up-sell campaign might feature upscale patio furniture. The integration will enable SAP customers to find more customers on Facebook, measure ad spend, and track social conversations to get a better read on advertising results, according to Ichhpurani.

"As campaigns are executed, you can see the number of clickthroughs, likes, and posts, and based on those results, you're constantly improving your predictive models," he said.

Crossing customer transaction data with social data might sound like a sensitive proposition where privacy is concerned, but Ichhpurani said customer data is encrypted on its way Facebook and data from Facebook is aggregated and anonymized.

The integration will start with Customer Engagement Intelligence and Facebook social and mobile campaigns, but SAP expects to add integrations to its recently acquired Hybris and SeeWhy units to drive "closed loop" e-commerce and email initiatives tied to Facebook users.

"We're using Facebook as a platform for a variety of consumer-facing products that we'll be offering to enterprises," Ichhpurani said.

SAP did not detail release dates for the Customer Engagement Intelligence app upgrade or future Facebook integrations.

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