SAP Marketing Cloud February ’21 Release is Here!

SAP Marketing Cloud February ’21 Release (2102 Release) is here. Our latest release focuses on innovations that help marketers across B2B and B2C brands to seamlessly scale while gaining deeper insights into their customers that support decision-making and drive action to optimize their experiences.

The February ’21 Release brings together customer-driven innovations, new capabilities and enhancements across the following marketing areas: Dynamic Customer Profiling and Segmentation, Campaign and Journey Orchestration, Commerce Marketing, Lead- and Account-based Marketing and Content Studio.

Additionally, we continue to expand our open ecosystem that makes data and process integration with SAP Marketing Cloud easy and seamless. In the previous release, we shared the news of the integration of SAP Marketing Cloud and nexoya Marketing Analytics to optimize digital multi-channel marketing campaigns with artificial intelligence and case study of Emmi on using predictive analytics to optimize their cross-channel marketing campaigns for better results and make better decision to optimize budget allocation. In this release, we deliver enhancements to the Core Data Services (CDS) integration to enable efficient extraction of planning data, including planned budget, marketing plans, campaigns spend, program and proposed spend based on CDS views.

Below we deep dive into some of the key innovations in February ’21 Release.

Deliver fast insights to enable fast action with SAP Qualtrics Surveys integration using Action framework

Customer feedback is more important than ever. With the increased reliance on digital channels, less foot traffic and shifts in consumer behavior that have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to hear what customers are saying and building confidence and trust with them. Marketers today need to be agile to adjust to new market, competitive and internal realities. Keeping their existing customers engaged – let alone reaching new ones – is one of the biggest challenges facing many brands in today’s uncertain times. Traditional engagement channels are limited, or have disappeared entirely, while customer behaviors, preferences and attitudes have changed too.

Lack of action on customer feedback can impact brand trust and bottom line growth.

4/5 consumers say the experience they get from businesses over digital channels isn’t good enough

 

85% of consumers say it only takes one bad customer experience to stop doing business with a company

Securing a strategic path forward requires quick, nimble action and an understanding of the changing consumer sentiment, needs and behaviors. Taking the right actions starts with getting ongoing feedback on what the customers need to feel confident about doing business with the brand and take rapid action that garners loyalty.

In February ’21 Release, marketers can integrate SAP Marketing Cloud with SAP Qualtrics Surveys using the Action framework to create action from insights automatically and efficiently with no-code drag and drop integration.

See how it works from the openSAP Microlearning video below.

For B2B companies lack of customer insights can be even more risky as 80% of their revenues come from existing customers.

65% of B2B customers say their B2B experiences do not match their consumer experiences

 

80% of B2B companies are at risk of seeing their revenue growth slip away

Create personalized engagement with relevant account insights 

Brands are up against an ever-changing set of customer customer expectations, interactions and engagement channels. The COVID-19 pandemic hit fast forward on customer experience transformation, with people’s expectations, preferences and behaviors changing at unprecedented speed.

Source: IDC InfoBrief: Building an Actionable Understanding of Your Customer

For B2B marketers, the new focus on customer experience is on omnichannel experience and personalized relationships. Today’s B2C and B2B customer journeys share more similarities than differences. Both are data-driven, self-directed, and set a high bar for emotional and contextual engagement. B2B customers want personalized experiences with companies that understand their unique circumstances and can act as advisors instead of strictly salespeople. These relationships are especially important because COVID-19 has changed business models and plans. Personalized engagement help strengthen long-term relationships as companies pivot and adapt.

And that means customers have started to form higher expectations and demand more personalized experiences regardless of whether they operate in a B2B or B2C environment. One of the largest issues facing B2B marketers is a lack of a deep and contextual understanding of the customer. Weaving contextual information around customer engagement and interactions into marketing helps B2B marketers to understand the buyers intent and preferences, and improve personalization, targeting and channel decisions.

Key to changing any experience is building an actionable understanding of the customer. It builds on the foundation of digital engagement and pushes the use cases for account intelligence to provide greater insight into each buyer, and creating personalized experiences that demonstrate deep customer knowledge and understanding. From there, B2B marketers can shape how best to interact with that customer to deliver relevant digital buying experience. The approach is anchored on three key actions below.

Top three actions for B2B marketing leaders to deliver relevant digital buying experience

In February ’21 Release, SAP Marketing Cloud delivers a set of enhancements for B2B marketers to create a more personalized engagement with their customers along the three key action areas, including the ability to handover contextual information from campaign to lead in SAP Sales Cloud, enable lead creation in SAP Sales Cloud through call qualification campaigns for B2B contact-to-account relationships, and identify contacts and accounts using identifier of business partner from SAP Sales Cloud.

Handover of contextual information from campaign to lead in SAP Sales Cloud

Lead creation in SAP Sales Cloud through call qualification campaigns for B2B contact-to-account relationships

Identify contacts and accounts using identifier of business partner from SAP Sales Cloud

Discover how Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. (Konica Minolta) enable true insights into customer behavior and creating a single view of customers to sharpen its marketing impact. To learn more about how SAP Marketing Cloud helps Konica Minolta deliver more qualified leads to its sales team, read the business transformation study, “Konica Minolta: Integrating Multiple Data Sources for a More Meaningful Customer Experience.”

Have ideas for product improvements? Post them on the SAP Customer Influence, or vote for existing ideas so we can help maximize your impact with SAP Marketing Cloud.