Editorial
The Gist
- Data warehouse native analytics redefines insights. NetSpring's integration enables marketers to link siloed data, offering true ROI measurement.
- AI agents streamline workflows. Optimizely's Opal AI agents eliminate silos, enhance consistency, and integrate AI across the entire marketing process.
- HIPAA-ready platform targets healthcare. Optimizely's HIPAA compliance opens martech opportunities for healthcare organizations.
- Composable solutions need a hub. Optimizely's centralized SaaS DXP balances flexibility and integration for enterprise needs.
SAN ANTONIO — In-person conferences allow attendees to reconnect with colleagues and partners, meet new people with shared interests and gain new insights to help them in their professions. A conference like Opticon 2024, the U.S. instance of Optimizely’s annual conference, held this year in San Antonio, Texas, offered all of this, plus a window into the present and future of one of the leading martech platform companies.
As always, there was simply too much to experience to capture in a single article, but I did walk away (or fly, as it were) from this year’s show with four big takeaways. Here they are, along with why each matters to marketers who are keeping up with the latest in martech.
Data Warehouse Native Analytics Helps Marketers Get Deeper Insights
Ever get a “so what” after presenting your latest marketing numbers? Often times that is because your marketing numbers are missing that link to business outcomes that are out of reach within marketing analytics dashboards and reporting. Hence, many a marketing presentation is met with a shrug or talk of “vanity metrics” that are disconnected from tangible business results.
One of the big topics of conversation at this year’s Opticon was the recent announcement of Optimizely’s acquisition of NetSpring, an early leader in data warehouse native analytics. I’ll admit that the first time I heard the team “data warehouse native analytics," I might have given it a “so what” of my own. But that’s before I had the opportunity to sit down with Vijay Ganessan, co-founder and CEO of NetSpring, to dig in and learn more.
To make this more real, let’s take an example from ecommerce. As a marketer, connecting the dots from a conversion through email, SMS or social to an order placed can give a window into the success of a marketing campaign. Yet, with a consumer retail return rate of 14.5% in 2023 according to NRF, an order placed is only part of the picture. Thus, return-adjusted revenue is one way businesses look at overall ecommerce sales success. Yet, marketers would find that nearly impossible to report on with their existing tools.
Why is it so difficult? Because the data about returns is often in a different system, siloed away from marketing data. Yet, with data warehouse native analytics, all of this can be made available to marketers to see true end-to-end measurements.
Think of all the data you wish you had access to so that you could tell the full story of a customer’s journey, and, as long as that data is sitting in your organization’s data warehouse, this opens up new opportunities to measure true ROI.
Related Article: How AI Is Powering Silicon Valley Bank's Comeback Story
AI Agents Are a Marketer's New Best Friend
Using generative AI has already been a game-changer for many marketers, but there are several limitations:
- First, on many teams there are siloed efforts, where each team is using a different Gen AI tool to get results, so one platform isn’t talking to the next.
- Second, consistency is going to be an issue with teams using so many different tools, and each likely has a different definition of what is “on brand."
- Finally, these disconnected AI platforms are used one step at a time, with no real integrations between them. This disconnect means marketers are copying and pasting outputs from one platform to another, wasting time and missing out on greeting efficiencies.
Additionally, much of the focus around Gen AI has been on generating content, which it does very well. But that’s not all it does well, and marketers that aren’t plugging it into their entire workflow are missing out.
How AI Agents Streamline Marketing Workflows
Enter AI agents, and all the things they will soon be able to do for marketers. I had the opportunity to talk with Kevin Li, SVP product strategy & operations at Optimizely, and he shared how all of the above has the opportunity to be streamlined with AI agents built on Opal AI, that sits at the heart of the Optimizely ONE platform.
For instance, by using AI agents on a platform like Optimizely, your teams aren’t siloed, as they are all using the same branding standards, and they are using a platform that has consistent access to your marketing content and data. This eliminates the copying and pasting out of one platform and into another, increases consistency and, because the AI agents can be used across the entire marketing workflow, teams can gain the efficiency of staying in one place, while having the platform learn what works best.
There has been much talk about AI agents and their potential to help a broad-ranging set of use cases, so stay tuned for more on this in the months ahead. That said, marketers should be exploring ways that agentic AI can help them in their work today, so they can plan for tomorrow.
Related Article: Optimizely's DXP Roadmap: AI Integration, Vertical Focus, SaaS CMS
HIPAA-Ready Platform Ready to Serve Healthcare Organizations
Optimizely announced HIPAA-ready solutions at Opticon. This is big news for those in the healthcare space, where consumer data privacy and protection regulations set forth by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have often prevented them from leveraging the best available martech solutions.
With its announcement that its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and SaaS CMS, as well as its Web and Feature Experimentation products are now HIPAA-ready, this sets Optimizely on a path to gain traction in this important industry.
Similarly, Optimizely also announced an industry-specific version for Manufacturing and Distribution, possibly setting the stage for future iterations in other industries.
Composable Approaches Need 'Hub' to Serve Enterprises Well
I’m a fan of composable approaches, and I believe they should extend beyond even a technology approach to the way teams are organized with organizations. This approach enables organizations to be flexible and adaptive to both their unique business needs as well as their customers’ preferences. Yet, taking a composable approach benefits from a central “hub” that connects those composable features together.
Optimizely’s approach to composability has done just that: embraced both the need for flexibility and best-in-class feature integration with this need for a centralized hub to tie it all together. Optimizely announced the SaaS version of its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) last July and that, combined with their composable-friendly approach, both sets them apart from their competition while setting a precedent of how composability can be approached by an otherwise wide-spanning (and continually growing) platform.
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While there was plenty more to see, hear and experience, these four takeaways should give any marketer some insights into where the world of content creation, management and optimization are headed. Exciting times, indeed.
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