The Modern Marketing Blog covers the latest in marketing strategy, technology, and innovation.

Customer Experience

Your Customers Can’t Wait Any Longer: They Need You to be Data Literate, Too

Data literacy drives more intelligent decisions. And while they might not be saying it, data literacy is what your customers need you to have.

Cross Channel Marketing

3 Tips To Reach More Millennials With Your Social Media Marketing

The social media habits of millennials are constantly changing. Here are 3 tips to reach more millennials with your social media marketing.

Email Marketing

A Tale of Two Sweaters: Why Segmentation Alone Isn’t Enough

Every retailer knows that customer segmentation makes campaigns more effective. When you classify customers according to their interests and desires, it’s much...

Customer Experience

Customer Experience and the Rise of the Micro-Stressor

Streamlining your website or shortening the path to checkout isn't enough. Look at the finer details to upgrade your customers' experience.

Social Marketing

Why Social Media Is Vital To Corporate Social Responsibility

Social media is more than just a new form of PR to message an audience – it’s about activating a core base of fans, customers, and employees to bring real...

Customer Experience

Choice and Respect Don’t Have to Be Mutually Exclusive

Too many choices can sometimes mean you have no choice at all. Are you getting the right customer experience option?

CMO Corner

Getting Down to Earth in Cannes: Intelligent Tires & Bottom-Up Creativity

Senior executives from Oracle, Johnson & Johnson, Lego, PepsiCo, and Pirelli met to debate two topics that have a significant impact on marketing: technology...

Email Marketing

Christmas in July: Consistency is the Key to Email Success

To ensure you get into the holiday inbox, plan now and show ISPs that you are consistent and trustworthy.

Customer Experience

It Takes a Village: Why Self-Service Learning is So Effective

Nearly 70 percent of consumers surveyed said they prefer finding the answers themselves to speaking with a customer service agent. We're making that easier.

Data-Driven Marketing

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018: Do you know where your personal data is?

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the most sweeping consumer privacy legislation ever passed in the US, gives consumers broad control over personal...

Data-Driven Marketing

3 Ways CMOs Are Putting Artificial Intelligence To Work

It will take time for AI to seep into every business area, but CMOs are smart to embrace it quickly, as customers are more vocal and demanding than ever before.

Cross Channel Marketing

Is Cold Calling Dead In The Digital Age?

The conventional wisdom in today’s digital marketing circles is that the cold call is outdated as a method of finding new customers. So, what's the next medium?

Customer Experience

Customer Success: An Instrument for Change

In the era of the cloud, the customer success function should be seen as a company’s most vital instrument for transformative change.

Cross Channel Marketing

4 Things To Look For In A Marketing Automation Platform

Marketers are now being held accountable for revenue targets as their top most priority. To accomplish that, you need more sophisticated marketing tools.

Cross Channel Marketing

How Marketers Can Be Successful with Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology has started to show up in marketing, specifically in the advertising space, but it's poised to go farther.

Cross Channel Marketing

Customer Journey Mapping: The Cornerstone of Cross-Channel Marketing

Ultimately, customer journey mapping puts the customer in the bull’s eye of a marketer’s thinking and demonstrates the need for the entire brand to adapt.

Product News

I’ll Meet You Any Channel, Any Time, With Only One Price

Oracle is making changes to simplify pricing and create greater spending flexibility for marketers while providing a more transparent view of costs.

Customer Experience

A Small Glitch or Evidence of Impending CX Disaster

Knowing the difference between what a customer says (or doesn't say) and what they do is key to creating valuable customer experiences.

Customer Experience

Engagement: The Key to an Effective ABM Strategy

As ABM marketers, we need to support buyers and customers as they travel their journey. It can be a long road, and you need to pay attention to all stages -...

Customer Experience

How Self-Service Help Can Provide Great Customer Service

Zendesk Research found that “As many as 67 percent of consumers prefer helping themselves to speaking with a customer service agent." Regardless of your...

Marketing Automation

Modern Marketing Benchmark Survey: 6 Surprising Findings

Marketers are under pressure to rely on data to improve marketing results. But, that doesn't mean creativity has taken a back seat.

Customer Experience

Why Learning is Now The Hot Word in Customer Enablement

As with so many other aspects of modern business, the cloud has upended software vendors' approach to learning and customer enablement.

Cross Channel Marketing

Two Questions that Lay the Foundation for Effective Cross-Channel Marketing

Setting up cross-channel marketing isn’t easy. Is your team prepared? Are you set up for success? Ask yourself these two questions to see if you will succeed.

Customer Experience

What’s the Key to Improving ROI on Advertising?

Paid media is a powerful tool with plenty of metrics to present. But which ones should marketers pay attention to?

Content Marketing

The Difference Between Wide and Deep Content Explained

Most businesses find that their content marketing strategy needs a mix of both deep and wide content to satisfy their content needs. Adam Torkildson offers...

Customer Experience

High Touch or Low Touch? Maybe That’s Not the Right Question

There's a debate arguing the merits of a high-touch strategy (people) versus low-touch (technology). The answer boils down to doing what makes your customer...

Product News

Oracle Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2018

“Email Marketing: Old salt of your toolkit, and still the most cost-effective promotional channel.” So begins the preamble to this year’s Forrester Wave for...

Customer Experience

Customer Loyalty: Why the Game's Changing & How You Can Win It

Customer loyalty programs are starting to lose their shine. Or are they? Check out these innovative ideas for giving your loyalty program a facelift.

Email Marketing

Mailing to New Customers and Managing Deliverability Risk

Once lost, mailing reputation requires weeks of pristine sending to correct. Ask yourself: Is it worth it? Here are best practices for sending to new...

Customer Experience

Self-Serve is a Great Model for Vendors – and Customers

Smart companies know that a great customer experience revolves around understanding what customers need and to answer that, self-serve removes a lot of the...

Data-Driven Marketing

Campaigns Don’t End When You Hit Send: The Importance of Feedback Loops

Feedback loops connect messages with the outcomes they create, allowing greater segmentation and optimization on the fly. For many marketers, feedback loops are...

Cross Channel Marketing

Have Consumers Bought Into Bots? A Look At The Current State Of Chatbots

It might be too early to proclaim the rise of the global chatbot economy, but the chatbots are something to keep your eye on.

Customer Experience

3 Ways Retailers Can Heat Up Their Summer Email Campaigns

A customer-centric, data-driven approach to email marketing will add sizzle to your summer email campaigns, while generating the highest ROI and lifetime value.

Customer Experience

Can Data be Exciting?

Curiosity about how we can improve the ability for our customers to achieve success is a driving force behind Oracle’s efforts to pay close attention to how our...

Cross Channel Marketing

Why Inconsistent Messaging is Undermining Customer Experience

Delivering a great customer experience isn't rocket science, so why does it still trip up so many marketers? Disconnected data systems and data access –...

Customer Experience

The Music of Great Design

Sara Shuman shares the secret to how her team, much like good musicians, change and adapt the Oracle brand to keep up with tastes while maintaining our unique...

CMO Corner

Talking Talent, Creativity, and AI at Cannes Advertising Festival

Can't go to Cannes Lions this year? Follow along as Amanda Jobbins keeps us updated what Oracle and other modern marketers are doing this year.

Data-Driven Marketing

Putting Dynamic Back into Email Design

You don’t have to compromise on email design to send a relevant, data-driven email when data drives the design.

CMO Corner

GDPR: Why CEOs Need to Lead from the Top Down

The fines for GDPR non-compliance can be significant, but there are less obvious consequences, including reputational cost. Who is responsible for getting it...

Email Marketing

The Cost of Free: Subject Lines and Email Deliverability

Can using traditionally spammy words like free and money in a subject line sink the performance of a sender otherwise adhering to best practices?

Customer Experience

Identify and Rejuvenate Your Inactive Customers

Here are two things you can do to understand your inactive customers and increase the chance that they will reengage with your brand.

Data-Driven Marketing

When Did Data Become So Valuable?

GDPR brings some long-overdue structure to today’s data economy, and the public is clearly eager for greater transparency into how their information is being...

Cross Channel Marketing

4 Ways Chatbots Can Increase Engagement and Improve the Customer Experience

How can you employ chatbots to get consumers more engaged with relevant and personalized marketing messages?

Cross Channel Marketing

Experience, Not Conversion, is the Key to the Switching Economy

Only by getting to know your customers across all of your various channels can you future-proof your brand in the switching economy.

Content Marketing

Whatever Happened to Copyright Laws in Social Media?

The sharing and re-mixing mentality of social media has made it socially acceptable to use someone else’s work without permission. Or has it?

Customer Experience

How Can Marketers Achieve Personalization in 2018?

Why is personalization so hard? In a nutshell, it's because we think like marketers not customers.

Customer Experience

Millennials Are Taking Over, And It’s All Right

Millennials want flexibility, simplification, speed, involvement, transparency - the same things our Voice of the Customer program revealed that all customers...

Cross Channel Marketing

Silo Busting is Essential to Delivering Personalized Experiences

Customers’ expectations have accelerated, fueled by the improvements digital technologies provide. But marketers still struggle.

Cross Channel Marketing

How 1:1 Email Experiences Help Retail Marketers Drive Results

Achieving next-level personalization is a challenge for resource-poor marketers. Consumers expect it, though. What can you do?

Data-Driven Marketing

Segmentation Must Be Connected to the Data and Technology Stack

With an integrated data and technology stack, you will gain customer knowledge to use in segmentation and data-driven marketing.

Content Marketing

3 Storytelling Tips for Marketers in the Age of Social

Here are three steps marketers can take to connect with their audience in a credible and interesting way.

Product News

Oracle Marketing Cloud Named a Leader in Gartner's Multichannel Marketing Hub Magic Quadrant

Oracle is honored to be named a Leader in Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. Being a leader, of the 'Leaders' is particularly...

CMO Corner

What GDPR Means for CMOs: Is All the Hype Justified?

In this Q&A, Oracle’s Marie Escaro and Kim Barlow discuss how GDPR affects marketing teams.

Cross Channel Marketing

How to Speed up Your Cart Recovery, Increase Sales & Revenue

Getting a visitor to add a product to their shopping cart isn’t enough. Statistically, 77 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned before the sale is...

Marketing Automation

From Direct Mail to Predictive Intelligence: Riding the Technology Wave

This week we got to chat with Bence Gazdag about the many shifts he's witnessed in data-driven methodology and customer-centric marketing.

Customer Experience

Picking Up the Pieces: How Companies Rebuild Brands Post-Crisis

Every company makes mistakes every now and then. It’s inevitable. Whether it’s a marketing campaign that falls flat and generates backlash, a serious collapse...

Customer Experience

Great Customer Experiences Rely on Robust Identity Management

This is article is part of our series on customer experience where we focus on topics relating to connecting data, intelligence and experiences. Further...

Content Marketing

Is Content Marketing Still Relevant In Today’s Marketing World?

Over the past 24 months, content marketing has swept over the digital marketing world. Brands have been encouraged to think and act like media companies,...

Data-Driven Marketing

Do Marketers Really Want to be Data Scientists?

It is a challenging time to be a marketer. Consumers demand more personalised experiences than ever, and for marketers if feels like the customer's expectations...

Marketing Automation

Congratulations to the 2018 Markie Award Winners!

Celebrating a Magical Night Honoring Old and New Marketing and Commerce Legends Last week at Modern Customer Experience, we celebrated our 12th Annual Markie...

Day Three From Oracle Modern Customer Experience

The final Day of Modern Customer Experience has come to a close, but not without an energy all its own. On this day, the keynotes focused on what happens when...

Product News

Oracle Eloqua and LinkedIn Deliver Unified Buyer Insight Through New Sales Tools Integrations

We’re excited to share that our highly anticipated new integration between Oracle Eloqua Sales Tools and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is now available for joint...

Day Two From Oracle Modern Customer Experience

Highlights from Day 2 at Modern Customer Experience 2018.

Day One from Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2018

Modern Customer Experience 2018 is officially underway in the great city of Chicago, home to the Cubs, deep-dish pizza and chilling winds sweeping across the...

Product News

Oracle Eloqua Delivers Unified Buyer Intelligence Through New Sales Tools Integrations

Oracle Eloqua is excited to announce ‘Extensions’ for Oracle Eloqua Sales Tools, bringing brand new partner integrations to Oracle Eloqua’s Sales Tools...

Product News

Tomorrow’s Marketing Analytics Today - Oracle Infinity™

Oracle InfinityTM is Oracle Marketing Cloud’s new data analytics platform for capturing, processing, storing and interrogating unlimited datasets for companies...

Data-Driven Marketing

Apply Big Data to Create Irresistible Customer Experiences

In 2013, research by Walker predicted that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the main differentiator. While most organizations and...

Marketing Automation

How To Win The Markie Award

Honoring excellence in marketing since 2007, Oracle’s Markie Award is a recognized global pillar of success. Companies of all sizes share their most innovative...

Email Marketing

How to Convert Consumers into Loyal Customers

Customers are a business’ most valuable asset, which is why they spend a lot of money to acquire new ones and work hard to retain the ones they have. This is...

Marketing Automation

Forget The Hype And Really Understand What AI Can Do For You

  Technology is transforming marketing faster than ever before. Add AI to the mix and marketers experience another layer of complexity. But according to the...

Modern Marketing Resources

Tips for the Right Marketer Mindset in 2018

The new media environment is here. Or really, it’s been here long enough already that we should be used to it by now. The one constant in the marketing world of...

Marketing Automation

Building the Foundation of Digital Marketing Success

Welcome to the first installment of Makers of Modern Marketing at Oracle! A brand new blog series featuring interviews with the creators, architects and...

Customer Experience

What is a Reputation Management System & Do You Need One?

Most Marketers today are looking at new ways to improve brand advocacy through online crowd sourcing platforms. These platforms can be classified under one of...

Modern Marketing Resources

Here are the 2018 Markie Award Finalists

We are excited to announce the Markie Award finalists for 2018! This year marks the 12th year that we have celebrated the best in Modern Marketing. We were...

Customer Experience

3 Digital Trends Driving Improved Customer Experience in 2018

Customer Experience (CX) is not just a buzz word. Businesses are operating in a saturated market where brand loyalty is decreasing, price competition is rising...

Cross Channel Marketing

Why Putting the Business Focus on Experience Pays Off

Despite numerous articles and opinion pieces promoting the need for brands to adopt customer-centric commerce, the business realities and commercial pressures...

Modern Marketing Resources

Five Pre-Conference Sessions You Can’t Miss at Modern Customer Experience (ModernCX)

Modern Customer Experience (ModernCX) 2018 once again offers registered attendees the opportunity to arrive early for a high-value, free pre-conference training...

Content Marketing

Are You Tracking Your Content Marketing’s Effectiveness Yet?

In my recent blog post I shared with B2B marketers 5 Steps to Content Marketing Success in 2018 and the ultimate key to success: a documented strategy. But...

Data-Driven Marketing

Making the Case for a Chief Data Officer to Leverage Your Most Valuable Business Asset

Our approaches to serving customers have become so disconnected that it’s stunning. There’s a real opportunity for companies to gain a competitive advantage by...

CMO Corner

CMOs Should Leverage Identity Confirmation Tools to Validate Stakeholder Sign-Off

As an outside marketing consultant working in the corporate arena, much of my day is spent chasing down approvals for campaigns, ad schemes and promotions. Even...

Email Marketing

What we think about Google’s AMP for Email

Heard about Google’s recently announced AMP for Email project? Currently being tested by Pinterest, Doodle and Booking.com, it’s being used to include dynamic...

Product News

Digital Ad Optimization with Oracle Maxymiser

The customer journey in today’s digital age is anything but straightforward. The marketing funnel is no longer a linear path from generating leads to...

Email Marketing

7 Practical Building Blocks of a Strong Email Deliverability Strategy

Email marketing is a powerful way to connect with people with many marketers still counting it as their primary channel for lead generation. In fact, there are...

Email Marketing

Work Smarter, Not Harder: 5 Steps to B2B Content Marketing Success in 2018

We are only two months into 2018 and I already hear some B2B marketers say that they work harder, not smarter, and only see limited results. So what...

Social Marketing

INFOGRAPHIC: Worldwide Social Network Users

We all know that social media has significantly changed the way the world operates, from the way we interact to the manner in which we conduct business. We have...

Social Marketing

Renting vs. Owning – A Marketer’s Guide

The proliferation of social media, in addition to traditional media channels, has created a seemingly endless list of channels in which brands can reach their...

Content Marketing

4-Step Content Marketing Process to Grow Your Business

Content marketing, which was a mere buzzword several years ago, is now one of the most popular and effective online marketing strategies today, and rightfully...

Customer Experience

When Segmenting Customers, Don’t Forget Your Silent Majority

Richard Nixon popularized the expression, the silent majority, when he used it to label the broad swath of Middle Americans who are reticent to publicly declare...

Cross Channel Marketing

3 Steps to Defining Customer Experience

2017 was the year that brands truly embraced ‘experience’, with Customer Experience, User Experience and even Brand Experience all becoming common terms within...

Customer Experience

Top 10 Reasons Modern Marketers Should Not Miss Modern Customer Experience

Spring is just around the corner. Along with flowers and warmer weather, spring brings a fresh season of marketing conferences. Do you know which ones you will...

Marketing Automation

Going Back to Basics to Achieve True Transformation

Transformation has become an archetypal buzzword. Its connotations are hardwired into technological change, but there’s more to it than simply plugging in a new...

Customer Experience

Three Questions Travel Marketers Should Ask to Create the Right Customer Experience

It is no secret that travel is one of the most mature online markets in the UK. Unlike emerging industries, which are still growing and have yet to settle into...

Social Marketing

Put Influencer Marketing to Work for Your B2B Brand

Influencer marketing is like word-of-mouth on steroids: people trust influencers just as much as their friends and family, but influencers have a lot more reach...

Customer Experience

Capitalize on Success with Change

When is the best time to improve an existing product or service? When customers are complaining about it? When sales wane? When it has become so predictable it...

Content Marketing

How To Use CRM Data Mining For Smarter Content Marketing

Content marketing isn't easy to do. There's no doubt that it's effective, but it's very hard to do it well. It's a little like publishing a book blindly. You...

Email Marketing

What’s on the Menu? A Balanced Email Content Diet

For most people, the key to a healthy and sustainable diet is balance. Eating the same thing every day can be miserable, and it’s usually not effective. Most of...

Data-Driven Marketing

3 Steps to Build Reports that Drive ROI

The combination of data and technology are the fuel behind marketing and sales. One of the challenges for companies, though, is how that data provides...

Data-Driven Marketing

Sifting Data to See the Customer

In a world awash in data about a person’s behavior, their characteristics, and their likes, how can marketers ensure the work they do doesn’t lose sight of the...

CMO Corner

Stuck on Autopilot? Ask These 9 Questions to Shift Gears

Some of my favorite childhood memories are centered around drives with my father. What always surprised me was that sometimes those drives would last for hours...