A Fortune 500 building materials retailer was looking to increase the effectiveness of its B2B sales force by leveraging a combination of a new marketing database, analytics services, and automated next best actions.

Utilizing cleaned and consolidated data within the clients newly built marketing database which included a fully integrated campaign tool set and customized analytic scoring algorithms, next best action (NBA) processes were developed to drive customers whom the sales team would contact as well as the content of the conversations with the customer.

We developed a modern marketing platform, including a 360-degree view of the customer, complete with rich third-party data appended. Utilizing deep industry and cloud technology expertise, robust technology implementation methodology, and our Adobe alliance partnership, Merkle designed, built, tested, and deployed a marketing platform. The platform included a customer database, tracking both B2B- and B2C- level customer data, engagements with the brand including transactional, digital, and personal contacts both inbound and outbound.

In addition, Merkle supplemented first-party data with a rich set of third-party data to inform a more complete customer profile. We then set up Tableau, a visualization tool to generate reporting and insights, as well as Adobe Campaign to leverage insights and drive outbound marketing communications.

We implemented a data-driven approach to understanding customers to engage in a given time period, utilizing prior actions taken by customers like: specific products purchased, lifecycle metrics, preferences, etc., to construct business rules for next best actions. This adds value and personalizes the customer experience.