Contact us What is New in SAP Marketing Cloud 2008 (Marketing in The New Reality)
Looking at the title of this article, we can guess that this release is different from the previous ones. The world has changed in recent months; everyone is trying to adapt as much as possible to the “new reality” and SAP is aware of this. Therefore, the 3rd release of news for SAP Marketing Cloud is exceptional.
Instead of immediately introducing system improvements, speakers began by recapitulating the events of the first half of 2020 and their implications for business. If your company did not have to use crisis management, it is one of the few. All the developed instructions and strategies can now seem like from the previous world; managers had to react in real-time to a situation with which they had no experience yet. However, every crisis can also be a huge opportunity, and those who use it and adapt to it, instead of crying, will gain a substantial competitive advantage. The key areas are hyper-personalized marketing and e-commerce. When people couldn’t go shopping, they started shopping online. And not just shopping, but a large part of everyday activities moved to the Internet.
However serious the circumstances may be, marketers are expected to produce results, not excuses. And so SAP, as a quality long-term partner, comes to the rescue. He outlined a strategy to help businesses, backed it up with interesting statistical indicators, developed freely available handbooks for businesses, and, last but not least, conducted inspiring interviews with business managers from various fields who have successfully transformed a pandemic crisis to their advantage – yet learning from successful.
One of the biggest news is the introduction of SAP Marketing Cloud Accelerator. It is a bundled offer for companies that want to quickly and efficiently deploy a solution that would help them start digital marketing processes and activities. Thanks to this solution, companies can go live within four weeks at a low cost and a fixed range covering the basic settings of 3 areas: Profiling, including marketing approvals, Segmentation, and Campaign Management via Email, Facebook Ads and Google Ads. The purpose of this new sales approach is to start small and fast so that the company does not waste the opportunity with a few months of implementation. Once the basic digital channels are captured, it is possible to work on further improvements and extensions of the system’s capabilities. The package also includes professional workshops that will help the company identify its priorities and build a successful strategy for further expansion.
And now the main thing: What are the new features that came in SAP Marketing Cloud release 2008? The form of the schedule remains the same, and all changes will be deployed on test systems on 1.-2. of August and will enter production systems two weeks later.
Creating groups of objects in the Marketing Calendar
A marketing calendar is a handy tool, but once your company is a larger one, you will easily get lost in so many activities. That is why the possibility to organize these activities into groups based on similar characteristics, focus, etc. has been added. The user can use 3-level integration according to standard as well as custom attributes. Subsequent views of related campaigns and programs will be more clear than ever before.
Personalization of email content with “contract-specific” data
Personalizing marketing content is a crucial feature for keeping customers’ attention without treating our messages as spam. In addition to the existing “contact-specific” personalization options, a new one has been added, using customer contract data. These attributes are based on the Agreement data model, so if the customer uses it, SAP Marketing Cloud can use this new functionality. As a result, emails can contain the type of contract, its number, validity, etc.
Extraction of large-scale data on campaigns and their success
Through Core Data Services (CDS), it is possible to extract large-scale data about the executed campaigns and their success from the system. This functionality will appreciate especially those users who regularly back up all data or send it to other SAP or non-SAP analytical, respectively to the reporting systems (e.g. SAP BW / 4HANA).
Creating B2B leads even without an existing account
Until now, it was possible to create a B2B lead only if the contact had an assigned account, i.e. the company on whose behalf it communicates. If this condition was not met, a B2C lead was created, which caused a problem in SAP C4C if the workflow of automatic sorting and allocation of the leads to individual traders was set up. This problem has been removed in the latest release, and SAP Marketing Cloud will, in such exceptional cases, send the lead to C4C with a command to register it as B2B
Comparison and manual merging of contacts
Although the system includes automatic merging of contacts, if the contacts do not contain a similar ID (e.g. another email used), the system has a problem recognizing whether it is the same person and thus prefers to create a new contact. That is why a new functionality is coming, which, in addition to comparing several contacts, also enables their manual merging directly in the Contacts application.
Extending the B2B Contact-to-Account relationship
The following novelty was in high demand for exceptional cases like when there is a relationship of one contact with several companies, especially if such a contract is to be the addressee of email or SMS campaigns. For such and similar cases, the contact profile has been enriched with a scheme that clearly shows which companies it maintains a relationship with and which communication media are to be used. In addition to profiling, other processes through segmentation, campaigns, content personalization to lead management were adapted to this exception.
Other news:
- It is already possible to display programs in the Marketing Calendar, either in the primary or in the secondary calendar.
- A new Notes tab has been added to the programs, which allows you to add free text. Notes are logged for changes, so you always have an overview of who made the changes and when.
- The recently created Data File Load application for data import has added the ability to add new data types, namely Spends (Actual, Committed) and Survey Loads.
Although the third release of 2020 does not contain major groundbreaking innovations, it brings a solution to the smaller pain points that users have encountered so far. If you are interested to know more about this news and would like to learn more about SAP Marketing Cloud, Anodius provides first-class certified services and consulting in all areas of the SAP Customer Experience. Because Experience Matters.
Filip Žarnovický, CX Consultant
