Cloud CRM stalwart Salesforce.com and agency holding company Omnicom Group are extending their love affair.
The companies on Tuesday revealed a CRM data-sharing initiative (they’re calling it a customer engagement platform) extending across Omnicom. This means Salesforce.com will pipe data from email, sales transactions, call center/service requests and mobile data into Annalect’s data-management platform.
Previous partnerships set the stage. Last summer, Omnicom revealed it would roll out Salesforce.com’s social advertising tool Social.com agencywide along with social publishing and listening tools Buddy Media and Radian6.
The goal is to bring first and third party data together to enable more precise messaging, Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital told AdExchanger: “We wanted to then follow that through to commerce, and then post-purchase in social media through what they say after they buy. It’s sort of a recursive loop.”
Salesforce.com sits on tremendous first-party data insights. In early spring the company inked a partnership with Datalogix to access third-party data and run CRM matches against greater audience attributes. The alliance pushes Salesforce.com slightly into paid media, a move experts said Salesforce.com needed to make to get past email list-based targeting.
While Nelson called Salesforce.com a “great partner” on the social media side, “marketing is really the connection between the customer demand chain and the media getting much more intelligent about consumer behavior.” He added that huge overlap between Omnicom agencies and Salesforce.com clients influenced the holding company’s decision to integrate lead and sales data.
Moves In Mobile
Gordon Evans, a senior VP of product marketing for the Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud, said a separate launch Tuesday of “Journey Builder for Apps,” gives ExactTarget users tools to drive mobile app downloads and retention, as well as an in-app content publisher with marketing analytics.
Analytics is a growing point of interest for Salesforce.com. CEO Marc Benioff reportedly leaked plans late last week for an “Analytics Cloud,” expected to drop at its Dreamforce conference next month. Benioff has also talked up Salesforce.com’s role in a connected device future and on Tuesday the company rolled out a mobile developer platform dubbed Heroku DX to tie CRM data into customized mobile apps.
“There are some new opportunities we’ll work with Omnicom on [to build] innovative Web and mobile apps using our Heroku platform,” Evans said. “Brands are looking for technology to connect the dots between marketing interactions, sales and then post-sales transactions.”
