SmartFocus
Contextual Marketing to Enhance the Customer Buying Journey

Customers no longer distinguish between different marketing channels—the modern ‘connected’ consumer is looking for convenience, immediacy and availability that eases their buying journey. Marketers need a cross-channel approach that is deeply rooted in live data in order to be able to meet the demands of the modern shopper and retain an advantage in a world where attention is scarce and cut-through is dwindling.

“Our context-aware marketing helps organizations truly know their customers and engage them with the right message, at the perfect moment, wherever they are – in-store and online, across all of their preferred channels,” remarks Rob Mullen, CEO, SmartFocus.

By combining real-time data, content and channel selection, SmartFocus’s Message Cloud makes the complex simple by bringing together cross-channel personalization in one seamless platform. SmartFocus enables a business to listen to and learn from its customers, using patented algorithms and unique location-based marketing tools.

“WithThe Message Cloud, our clients access rich visual personas, advanced personalization and tools for contextually unique engagements with their customers, through any digital channel. So many brands have complex vendor eco-systems in an attempt to deliver real-time marketing, but there is value pouring through the cracks. With one Message Cloud, SmartFocus solves that problem,” says Mullen.

SmartFocus’s Message Cloud includes proximity technology that knows when a customer visits a store; it gives real-time predictive recommendations generated at the precise moment a customer opens an email or visits a website. It also provides powerful insights that use smart analysis of Big Data without delay, complex integration or APIs to effortlessly generate a truly personal experience. SmartFocus, to further enhance marketers’ contextual marketing efforts, has now enabled the Message Cloud to integrate with SAP’s hybris.

“The integration will enable users of both SmartFocus's marketing platform and hybris's commerce software, to use the best of breed systems in conjunction and utilize their customer data seamlessly across the cloud-based technology,” says Mullen. This extension will connect a user’s hybris environment with their SmartFocus application suite - enabling them to access product, customer level transaction and activity data.

Our context-aware marketing helps organizations truly know their customers and engage them with the right message, at the perfect moment

Marketers can then make up-to-the-minute decisions based on that data and to use it to create smart, personalized content for their email, display, web or proximity marketing campaigns; ensuring their customers only receive content that is truly relevant to them at any given time.

SmartFocus, in integration with hybris, also allows SAP clients to smoothly and quickly provide personalized omni-channel engagements to its customers. The Hadoop based data lake allows customers to interact with all their data and gain actionable insights.

SmartFocus has an enhanced solution on hybris’s commerce software that can be used to ensure Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) are modeled against customer profile data (RFM, propensity and affinity) to drive the recommendation and personalizations for each and every customer. In addition, voucher redemption codes from hybris can be used in the SmartFocus environment to match redemptions across all channels.

SmartFocus provides real-time context aware marketing for over 2000 customers worldwide– including HP, Nestlé and Mercedes-Benz – connecting them with their customers whether that be via web, mobile, email or social channels. Every year, the company executes more than five million marketing campaigns, manages more than five billion customer records, and delivers more than 65 billion personalized interactions.

“Customers rely on SmartFocus to deliver business-critical, joined-up marketing campaigns that make a difference to their customers and to the growth of their business,” extols Mullen. Looking forward, SmartFocus will continue to focus on the importance of contextualization of experiences and how brands can send relevant, real-time messages to their customer to strengthen consumer relationships. “Our technical and consultancy team will continue to innovate to future proof our customer’s marketing strategies and avoid losing sales to competitors,” concludes Mullen.