This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Marketing drives profit, not just responses, by intelligently marketing to the total customer/prospect base. By leveraging a single repository of customer information, you can better target and personalize your campaigns, and refine them in real time with powerful analytical tools.
With tools necessary to automate the planning, budgeting, execution, and tracking of your marketing initiatives, Oracle Marketing provides you with:
Customer Insight - With sophisticated customer management and list generation, Oracle Marketing enables you to quickly generate target lists and segments using an intuitive user interface. The easy to use Natural Query Language Builder (NLQB) lets you query for customers or prospects using a natural language while hiding data complexity; fatigue management ensures that you do not over-contact the same customers with marketing messages; and predictive analytics helps you predict customer behavior that you can leverage to produce significant increases in marketing return on investments (ROI).
Sales Alignment - Oracle Marketing’s leads management helps you compile and distribute viable leads so that sales professionals can follow up valuable opportunities and not just contact interactions. Additionally, support for distributing proposals and marketing material drive speedy and consistent setups and collaboration of best practices.
Marketing Insight - While Oracle Marketing Home page reports and Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) for Marketing and Sales provide aggregated management level information in almost real time, operational metrics help in tracking the effectiveness of individual marketing activities.
The Oracle Marketing application is composed of several functional areas. The implementation and use of each functional area depends on your business requirements. Functional areas include:
Campaign Planning and Execution
Oracle Marketing enables you to create, execute, track, and analyze marketing campaigns. Using intuitive interfaces such as the Campaign Workbench, you can quickly define campaign attributes and sophisticated performance metrics to evaluate effectiveness. You can set up repeating activities to automate the complex multistage campaigns, based on customer events (implemented as NLQB for target group selection), and time period. Monitors initiate activities based on conditions, where these conditions can be set to watch the changes in the campaign or activity performance measures (metrics).
Oracle Marketing can also help you execute campaigns across multiple customer interaction channels such as Web, e-mail, direct mail, and telemarketing. You can also set up schedules that will repeat based on customer events and defined conditions. You can set up fatigue rules to define contact limits by time period and by channel.
Concerted media planning may be necessary as part of a marketing plan. You can use the spreadsheet interface of Web ADI to easily create or update large numbers of campaign activities across campaigns.
Segmentation and List Management
The Audience Workbench of Oracle Marketing supports sophisticated segmentation strategies, complex segment hierarchies, and powerful yet easy to use list management. It provides functionality to import, deduplicate, profile, and analyze customer and prospect data. You can use the intuitive natural language query methodology to generate campaign specific target lists from multiple data sources. You can also quickly create lists based on user-defined criteria within Oracle Discoverer or by splitting or merging existing lists. You can import external customer and prospect lists (in CSV or XML format) and refine them with user-defined rules to purge duplicate records. You can also search the customer database (TCA) to find specific entries and add them manually to target lists.
Predictive Modeling and Scoring
Oracle Marketing is seamlessly integrated with Oracle Data Mining to provide a closed-loop process for predicting customer behavior. With this integration, non-technical marketers can use automated templates to build predictive models for common marketing scenarios, including campaign response probability, customer retention risk, and product affinity. Custom predictive models can also be leveraged to predict user-defined customer behaviors.
After building a predictive model, you can evaluate the model's effectiveness and accuracy. By intelligently targeting only those prospects with a high propensity to exhibit a desired behavior (for example, respond to a marketing campaign), you can increase marketing ROI by decreasing the number of contacts and increasing the response rate. If you must operate within a budget or other constraints, you can perform an optimal targeting analysis to identify the ideal audience to target in a campaign.
Web Activities
Oracle Marketing supports the targeting of online visitors with personalized Web advertisements, Web offers, or product recommendations.
Budget and Cost Management
The budgeting feature enables you to create, associate, and manage budgets and checkbooks. The Budget and Cost Management functionality supports a budget hierarchy to define unlimited sub-budgets. You can transfer funds between different campaign budgets, and the marketing checkbook helps you track the budget amount allocated to a campaign.
Promotion Management
You can use Oracle Marketing to create discounts and offers that can be fulfilled across all channels such as Web stores and Oracle TeleSales. You can create a variety of offers, such as off-invoice discounts, tiered discounts, free shipping terms, and buy-one- get-one-free offers. Moreover, offers can have a unique coupon code and a maximum number of usages tied to specific budgets, thereby limiting liability.
Product Creation and Maintenance
Products and product hierarchies are created using Oracle Product Lifecycle Management. See the Oracle Product Lifecycle Management User's Guide.
Pricing Management
In Oracle Marketing, a marketer can create a price list and apply it across the Oracle E-Business Suite. This enables users to respond rapidly to market conditions.
Deliverable and Message Management
Oracle Marketing provides a complete solution to create and maintain marketing-related deliverables and collateral. It also enables the bundling of multiple collateral kits. These collateral and collateral kits can be actual inventory items, and fulfilled by telesales agents like any other inventory item.
Event Logistics Management
As an event coordinator, you can plan, create, and execute events, incorporating relevant information such as invite list, agendas, registration start and end dates, budgets, and resources. You can also define registration rules, "invite only" events. The registration rules can be enforced when a telesales agent or marketer registers a customer to an event. Web-based event registration is enabled through Oracle Marketing integrating with Oracle Scripting. Event invitations can be sent out through event activities and automatic e-mail notifications can be sent to event registrants about changes in event logistics. Marketers can also select event registrants and attendees to generate leads.
Response Management
To initiate and manage customer responses, click-through destinations allow you to easily insert complex, structured URLs in the content of an e-mail or Web campaign. These trackable URLs are used to track customer responses to the campaigns as well as to direct the customers to the appropriate next step. The next step may be to send customers to a specific Oracle iStore page, or to start a Web script. Web scripts are created with Oracle Scripting and are used to establish an interactive, personalized conversation with customers. Sample scripts for lead creation, event registration, and data acquisition are provided with Oracle Marketing.
You can also define and use Web site Response Handler URLs (pretty URLs or Landing Page URLs) to invite and track Web channel responses via advertising activities or to publish Web activities on third party affiliate sites (such as Yahoo or CNN).
Analysis and Reporting
Oracle E-Business Intelligence (Daily Business Intelligence) and Oracle Marketing's Home page provide comprehensive out-of-the-box reports and charts for analyzing the following aspects of the marketing process: budgets, campaigns, events, activities, and leads. The reports provide a complete view of the Campaign to Order business flow by leveraging data from across the Oracle E-Business Suite. Each user can configure the Marketing Home Page to include the most relevant reports for their responsibility. Using these reports, you can quickly see your top and bottom performing activities and take proactive steps to increase marketing effectiveness.
Leads Management
Oracle Leads Management provides a central engine for capturing, cleaning, deduplicating, and grading all sales leads across the business enterprise. The engine then distributes and monitors leads for follow up across Oracle Marketing, Sales, and Partner solutions. The Leads Management Engine encapsulates lead qualification, and distribution logic using flexible, business-specific rules appropriate to different campaign strategies, regions, products, and customers for each stage of the lead life cycle. All rules are tracked and reported against actual lead lifecycle, enabling optimization of lead quality. Businesses can customize the rules to optimize lead quality and predictability.
Marketing to Partners
Marketers can use Oracle Marketing to provide offers and promotions to their channel partners or a select group of partners for new product launches and inventory clearances. Based on contact preferences, customers can notify the partners about these offers and promotions.
Security
Oracle Marketing has a robust security model for marketing objects that enables a central office to manage all high level programs, but that also enables departments or branches to manage their specific campaigns and activities. Marketers can choose to limit access to one or more marketing initiatives to only those resources who are within a given marketing team by setting a program, campaign, or event to be confidential. However, marketers can choose to give limited access to people outside their teams by setting a marketing initiative to be non-confidential. Security for campaign activities and event schedules is derived from their parent objects. Home page reports also adhere to the team access security model.
Oracle Marketing provides the tools necessary to automate the planning, budgeting, execution, and tracking of your marketing initiatives. By automating these processes your marketing strategy is cost effective and intelligent.
Oracle Marketing enables you to accomplish the following:
Create and manage demand
Establish and maintain product, service, and brand awareness
Track and analyze leads and sales activities
Route leads to the “best” channel
Improve customer profitability
Understand customer behavior
Decrease customer acquisition cost
Reduce customer attrition
Automate marketing processes
Create and maintain best practices templates
Expedite time to market
Keep marketing aligned with the overall organization
Align leads, sales, marketing efforts and objectives
Distribute marketing information and collateral company wide
Provide the marketing team with relevant visibility into other parts of the organization
Measure marketing performance
Track spending
Provide performance measurements for leads, responses, and revenue
Understand the competitive landscape
Provide insight into competitor differentiation
Enable price point competition insight
Oracle Marketing integrates with the following products:
Oracle Leads Management
Oracle Leads Management enables users to capture, evaluate, and distribute the leads generated by marketing activities for sales follow up. It provides solutions to automate and optimize prospect-to-sales conversion across the enterprise. It provides a staging area for all prospective leads.
Oracle Content Manager
Oracle Marketing leverages Oracle Content Manager's functionality as a central repository of electronic content to be shared across the E-Business Suite of applications. You can create and store content in Oracle Content Manager. This includes internal content used for team collaboration purposes, supporting content for sales and other enterprise users, and external activity content (such as cover letters, attachments, e-mail deliverables, and so on) that will be fulfilled and sent to the customer.
Oracle iStore
Oracle Marketing integrates with Oracle iStore to enable you to use the Web as a marketing channel and deploy Web Ads, Offers, or product recommendations on the Oracle iStore Web site.
Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment
Oracle One-toOne Fulfillment provides E-Business Suite business applications with a centralized mechanism for managing fulfillment. Fulfillment is the process of compiling and distributing information to customers. Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment consists of an application programming interface (API) and a server. The Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment API is used by Oracle Marketing to initiate a request for fulfillment processing. The fulfillment request identifies the content and the server and the Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment server processes the request. It compiles and sends content, such as product literature, proposal templates, welcome letters, and other electronically stored documents to an output device. Output devices include e-mail, fax, and print servers.
Oracle Product Lifecycle Management
Oracle Marketing integrates with Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps marketers define products, product bundles, and product relationships. This information is automatically populated in the product catalog and is available across the E-Business Suite of applications.
By integrating with PLM, Oracle Marketing leverages on PLM's product cataloging and management system. Product cataloging uses the concept of hierarchy, which provides an efficient and re-usable catalog and product management system. The same hierarchy is used across marketing, sales, and reporting to achieve cohesive product-based reporting.
Oracle Sales
Oracle Sales is an application designed for field sales representatives, sales managers, and executives. The application provides a complete set of tools that enables sales teams to manage the sales cycle from beginning to end. It supports the key functions of the sales cycle, with features such as comprehensive customer management, lead and opportunity management, forecasting, quote generation, order placement, and sales methodologies.
When Oracle Marketing integrates with Oracle Sales, the critical link in the Campaign to Cash business flow is fulfilled, providing the information to analyze the success of company campaigns. The integration also enables sales managers to generate and track leads by deploying sales campaign activities from the Campaign Workbench.
Oracle Scripting
The integration between Oracle Marketing and Oracle Scripting provides marketing managers with the ability to follow-up on the campaigns they design with a scripted flow of interactions (either through the Web or a call center). Customers will be able to register for an event online via scripting integration. There are also sample Oracle Scripting scripts that marketers can use to invite customers to participate in surveys (using the Survey components of Scripting) by linking from an e-mail or a Web campaign. The return data from surveys can be used to evaluate customer satisfaction, improve product lines, target new or improved services, or otherwise improve responsiveness.
Scripting is integrated in Oracle Marketing through the use of click-through destinations (CTDs) that can be enabled behind a banner on iStore, via an e-mail, or even associated in direct marketing collateral.
Oracle Proposals
Proposal templates are used by marketing activities (in the new Campaign Workbench) as collaboration content. This content is used in the downstream flow of lead management. Sales representatives who are processing the leads use a standard proposal template for a specific activity.
Oracle Data Mining
Data Mining is a process used to discover strong, meaningful patterns and relationships in large amounts of data. Oracle Marketing is integrated out-of-the-box with Oracle Data Mining to build predictive models of customer behavior. Marketers can build models to predict campaign response likelihood, determine product affinity, or predict any user-defined 'target behavior' within a data source. Marketers can then leverage each model's predictions to determine which customers/prospects are most likely to display a particular behavior. This closed-loop process does not require any technical data mining or programming knowledge and can produce significant increases in marketing ROI.
Oracle TeleSales
Oracle TeleSales (OTS) is an application designed for inside sales professionals, inbound telesales agents, or outbound telemarketing agents. OTS offers a multi-channel selling solution that manages leads, opportunities, and forecasts. It provides a set of tools to help the sales team manage the sales cycle - from prospecting for customers to booking the order. When Oracle Marketing and Oracle TeleSales integrate, you can use the Oracle Marketing List Import feature to assign lists to Oracle TeleSales Agents. The agents can then use the Universal Work Queue to access the list of customers assigned to them by the marketing team.
Oracle Web ADI
Web Application Desktop Integrator or Web ADI is a tool that brings Oracle E-Business Suite functionality to a spreadsheet, where familiar data entry and modeling techniques can be used to complete Oracle E-Business Suite tasks. Oracle Marketing too uses Web ADI support to setup campaign activities from the Campaign Workbench.
Oracle Student Services
Oracle Marketing integrates with Oracle Student Services to provide features for the entire recruiting process, from campaign planning, budget management, and list creation to execution, reporting, and analysis. By using a centralized and integrated approach, Oracle Marketing ensures that recruiting activities are on budget and executed in real time through the most effective communication channels.