Merkle
Assuring a Connected CRM Strategy

In today’s world, creating a well connected, sustainable, and profitable customer relationship management (CRM) is quite essential to keep up with the highly competitive business landscape. Companies need to move ahead from the practice of just selling their products to the customers to a better level of listening and responding to them while gaining a thorough understanding of the new trends and requirements. This would mean utilizing every customer interaction as a marketing strategy and offering data-driven customer experience across every consumer touch point. The Columbia, MD based Merkle, a global data-driven, technology-enabled performance marketing agency provides connected CRM (cCRM) solutions to enterprises in order to help them thrive in the tough and dynamic market. “Our aim is to bring in a true customer experience system to result in a sustainable growth in the marketing domain,” says David Williams, CEO, Merkle.

The company’s CRM enables businesses to manage customers on an individual level or on a segment based level to optimize and drive overall customer value. The MerkleONE solution enables people-based merchandising across leading digital marketing ecosystems by understanding and reaching to actual customers with advertising and relevant content. Offering support to this solution is Merkle’s DataSource consumer database which provides hundreds of attributes that can be appended to customer data, allowing them to extract actionable people-based insights which drive addressable campaigns. This helps in building and executing dynamic campaigns that maximize return on investments (ROI). The solution permits integration with connected orchestration, insights, activation, and measurement toolsets based on multiple best-of-breed technologies including Google, Adobe, Facebook, and Oracle.

The customer strategy, a prime component of CRM and decision making framework ensures greater knowledge and understanding of the customer experience to promote more economic opportunity.

Merkle aims to bring in a true customer experience system to result in a sustainable growth in the marketing landscape

It provides a toolset for management to set, monitor, and adjust against to changing business strategy and market conditions. The enterprise segmentation, a key feature of the toolset helps create a prioritized view of the customer portfolio driven by customer attitudes, values, and behaviors. The portfolio strategy, another feature provides the foundation for developing new customer-focused programs and enhancements to existing media and channel initiatives through effective management of customer information. The segment strategy meanwhile enables improved lead generation, acquisition, cross sell, and retention, by delivering differentiated experiences consistently across all customer touchpoints.

Once, a global family entertainment company planned to expand its CRM activities from a market-level to a corporate-level as the client maintained an outdated and inflexible database. It failed to support new channels or tactics, making innovative approaches nearly impossible. Moreover the customer lacked email response data that prevented accurate response attribution and audience counts thereby creating significant gaps in accuracy and efficacy. Joining hands with Merkle, the entire CRM system was replaced with a holistic solution which comprised of a world-class Foundational Marketing Platform with best-in-the-class technology. This provided the enterprise with sophisticated campaigns, high-level of automation, management, and monitoring across multiple channels. Additionally, the client was also benefited a 360-degree view of their customers with integrated sales, demographics, inquiry, promotion, and response data.

Merkle has been successful over the past years in serving businesses with impressive CRM solutions and will focus on continually improving its products and services. Moving forward, the firm plans to partner with Pegasystems, a provider of strategic business applications to offer a new solution that connects advertising with marketing and customer service channels to drive more personalized customer experiences.