Oracle Marketing Cloud updated, with focus on data

On the eve of Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle has announced updates to its Marketing Cloud, with a focus on giving marketers access to data to better tailor marketing campaigns toward their audiences. Two of the updates focus on data and one on more efficiently organized campaigns.

Oracle Marketing Cloud enables companies to conduct marketing campaigns for more personalized messaging, and to better target existing customers and new prospects. Updates to the Marketing Cloud are threefold:

1. Offline Data Append. This capability enables marketers to access third-party data on customers in their own databases and target relevant marketing to them. It brings together data on consumers' in-store purchasing information, loyalty information and credit card program data that Oracle gained access to in its Datalogix acquisition, which it purchased for $1.2 billion in 2014.

With Offline Data Append, a marketer can take data aggregated from roughly 100 million households and identify consumers doing back-to-school shopping, for example. Marketers can then target customers in their database. "Now, I'm not limited to all the data I have about my customers," said John Stetic, group vice president of products for Oracle Marketing Cloud. "Now, I have access to all the data Datalogix has about my customers and [can] match it to my customers."

2. Match Multiplier. Oracle is creating a co-op of customers -- within the marketing cloud -- and they can share anonymized data with other customers, with the ability to match those customers in an online world. This enables marketers to present banners that are tailored to the "right person, at the right time," Stetic said. "A company may have data on a certain customer, but not data on their behavior on the Internet." This data isn't personally identifiable information, but instead, an anonymous ID that can be combined with a Web-tracking cookie, so a marketer can find a given customer in the online world by increasing the match capacity.  

Stetic said that, today, systems have roughly a 30% match rate. While he declined to share the increase Oracle is striving for with Match Multiplier, he said the increase in match rate will depend on the number of companies that join the co-op.

3. Consuming content marketing. This enables marketers to focus on the content that is relevant to their campaigns, rather than being flooded with content that isn't relevant to their own campaign.

Oracle's CX Cloud enables integration between the Marketing Cloud and the Service Cloud, which allows marketers to use data from the Service Cloud in a campaign. Marketers could check, for example, whether a customer has an open support ticket and cancel any messaging to that customer until the issue is resolved. "It connects together more pieces of the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud," Stetic said.

Oracle's Marketing Cloud competes with providers such as Salesforce, Marketo Inc. and Silverpop.