Integrating marketer-controlled targeting with automated recommendations to optimize online engagement.

Customer expectations for online interactions have increased dramatically. When individuals go to an organization’s website, they expect that the organization understands who they are and what their touch points with the organization have been. [...]

Customer expectations for online interactions have increased dramatically. When individuals go to an organization’s website, they expect that the organization understands who they are and what their touch points with the organization have been. They expect to instantly be provided with a contextually relevant and personalized experience that will meet their needs, regardless of the online channel or device they are using. Thus an online marketing strategy that employs targeting to deliver optimized online experiences is an important driver in achieving customer loyalty and maximizing revenue. A 2009 Forrester survey indicated that 62% of consumers found personalized content such as recommendations useful, contributing anywhere from a 2 to 20% lift in revenue.
Strategies to deliver targeted content can range in complexity depending on the goals of the marketing organization. In some cases, marketers may have a clear idea of customer segments and which content to present to those segments. In other situations, determining a targeted marketing campaign can be complex. Factors driving this complexity include the volume of available content (e.g., products, media, and offers), the dynamic nature of content, and the difficulty in discerning meaningful customer segments. Furthermore, targeted content could include not only recommended products (or media, articles, etc.) but also selection of different presentation styles (e.g., varying website stylesheets), custom navigation, and more.
Proliferation of customer touch points or channels creates a new complication in creating a contextually relevant online experience for the site visitor. Customers can now interact with the business over the web, email, mobile devices, social networks, call-centers, and in-store kiosks. In summary, creating an optimal multi-channel experience for customers necessitates understanding customer touchpoints and data across different channels and driving effective cross-channel campaigns.
Oracle WebCenter Sites together with Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) provides a solution that marketers can use to implement strategies that solve any level of targeting from deterministic to fully automated. WebCenter Sites is a complete Web Experience Management solution with business user friendly tools to create and manage large-scale and multi-lingual websites, target content based on customer segments, drive social interaction with user-generated content and gadgets, and manage the mobile channel as an integrated part of the traditional web presence. RTD enhances WebCenter Sites targeting features with predictive targeting that uses powerful statistical-based data modeling.
This paper will discuss the following:
• Overview of content targeting capabilities in WebCenter Sites
• Using Real-Time Decisions with WebCenter Sites to add automated predictive targeting
• Business-user friendly controls for defining a targeting strategy
• Key marketing reports used to derive insights on the targeting strategy
• Examples of WebCenter Sites-RTD usage