If you’re marketing a consumer brand today, you know that personalization is key if you want to build brand loyalty and maximize customer lifetime value. But how do you personalize when your customer data is siloed all over the place?

Well, you do it with master data management, and that’s our topic on this Martech Minute with Patrick Reynolds from SessionM.

Thanks for joining us, this is Colin White from Martekrs with another Martech Minute, and today I’m pleased to be joined by Patrick Reynolds, he’s the CMO at SessionM. Thanks for joining us today Patrick.

Q: So Patrick, tell us a little bit about what you guys do at SessionM – who’s your target market and what problems are you trying to solve?

Patrick Reynolds: We’re a SaaS play for enterprise marketers. What we do is we are a customer data management and orchestration platform. So the challenge that we solve for B2C marketers is that they have all this data in all these different places right? You might have your campaign engagement thread, you have your point-of-sale data, you have social data, you have web data you have all these different sort of views of the customer if you will. Customer service data and all these different disparate views of the customer are seldom ever threaded together into a holistic profile that you can actually work with so if you ask someone in customer service what they know about the customer it might be very different than someone who was looking at lifetime value according to POS data as an example.

So what we do is through API’s, we ingest all these different silos into one single view of the customer that we store in the cloud. So that all systems have the same view of the customer at all times and it’s always up-to-date because we’re streaming events as they happen. So that’s sort of the core of what we do.

Q: And you also have some solutions for loyalty and offers and campaigns – do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Patrick Reynolds: I do, so once we have this single view of the customer we then do what you might refer to as orchestration. So based off of what the customer is doing right this second, and what they’ve done historically, what is the next best experience that we should recommend for this customer? So that could be serving a certain message – it might be calculating a personalized offer that calculates and factors in the customers lifetime value. It could be literally a physical experience when we’re working with a lot of retailers. Or in some hospitality companies they might actually send a physical human out to greet a customer when a beacon gets tripped. So it doesn’t have to live in this ephemeral world of messages. And then once it zeros it could be a physical experience.

So whatever that next best experience is, we recommend that. So that’s the orchestration component. And then the third element of that is, we can then either deliver that kind of experience by sending them a push notification, by sending them an email, by serving them some content, etc. Or we can work to just sort of orchestrate that through other parts of the marketing stack.

Q: Okay, so you’ll integrate into other marketing stack components as well if that’s the way your customers want to do it. Now personalization is obviously a big part of this so how are you orchestrating the personalization aspect of it?

Patrick Reynolds: So that’s where actually loyalty becomes kind of important so to us. We have a slightly different take on the kind of the notion of loyalty. So what we’re not talking about sort of emphatically is, buy four and I get a fifth free, or join our program and get 10% off of whatever for life. So most loyalty programs frankly are pretty bad, and that they’re just math discounting for no apparent reason. They’re a road to nowhere but margin impairment.

What we’re trying to do is say, we’re going to give you something of real value. In exchange you’re going to give us some information. And that information is going to enable us to deliver better experiences for you, better offers that actually factor in what you buy and what you should buy next, which you may or may not know, but you know we could give you a real perspective on that. That’s where machine learning, AI, and these sort of notions come into play too. So there’s a lot of stuff going on under the water if you will. And then we can deliver something that is actually accretive rather than diluted to things like margin. And what I mean by that is instead of discounting, let’s say you go to Starbucks every day. So instead of saying, okay the fifth one is free you are going there anyway. So I’m just discounting the fifth thing and maybe I get a little bit of a halo effect of, well you gave me something.

But wouldn’t it be better that on that fifth time when you go, hey I’m going to give you half off a pound of your favorite coffee that you buy every day by the cup now. Wouldn’t that be smarter? Isn’t that more actually constructive for the business? And frankly a surprising thing for the customer that they may not have thought of. So that’s kind of how loyalty comes into play. Loyalty for us is very definitively two-way, and it’s a way for first the company or the brand to demonstrate that they get the customers’ needs. And then when they do that really elegantly, then the customer demonstrates loyalty through increased frequency, spend, etc.

Q: Right, so you mentioned artificial intelligence. Is there anything you want to expand on on that topic?

Patrick Reynolds: Yeah we are hiring PhDs at frankly almost an alarming clip and these guys are doing amazing work at looking at these enormous data sets that we’re ingesting. Based off of what people are buying and how they’re behaving and then we’re really running some really sophisticated algorithms that would help predict what they would enjoy next. And it’s not like what they should buy necessarily a little. Look this is marketing so obviously that’s a component. But it would be, hey this would be a really cool thing that they may not know of – let’s serve that up. And by the way, let’s make that calculation in real-time. So to me the genius is more about the timing of delivery than oftentimes the specifics of the delivery. It’s being able to take action, you take this action the company has this reaction and it’s in milliseconds. People can’t make those calculations at scale, so that’s where the AI comes in.

Q: Okay, so you mentioned you’re hiring a lot of PhDs – what percentage of your business is around services as opposed to the actual platform itself?

Patrick Reynolds: As a percentage? You know I don’t really know, but we do definitely wrap services around the platform. We help people come up with the right kinds of programs from the get-go. We onboard them, we provide a lot of feedback about, hey this is our observation about what is working what’s not. And obviously they get a lot of that in their dashboard as well. But we do believe that at the end of the day we have people that are our clients, we want to make sure that they’re getting the support they need. Whether it’s creative recommendations, strategic recommendations, and so on. So we wrap everything in services. But we’re definitively a SaaS platform.

Q: So what’s the best way for interested companies to get started with SessionM?

Patrick Reynolds: Go to www.SessionM.com. There’s a lot of great content in there. There’s videos, there’s white papers, there’s all kinds of tutorials. I’m always accessible personally at PReynolds@sessionm.com, and we’d love to talk to you about how you can make hay with your data instead of just collecting it. It’s the age-old how do you turn it from a trophy into a tool. Instead of saying, look at all this data I have it’s actually like leveraging that data.

Q: Thanks very much – Patrick Reynolds, he’s the CMO at SessionM – thanks for joining us on the Martech Minute!

And thank you for joining us for another Martech Minute. If you’d like a complimentary consultation about how to optimize your demand gen and marketing automation systems and processes, please contact us today.