Introducing SAP Hybris Marketing in the Cloud

Mark Kilsdonk, 22 February 2017

SAP has recently introduced SAP Hybris Marketing as a cloud solution, known as SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud or SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud. That is a very interesting proposition with the comprehensive SAP Hybris Marketing integrated platform delivering support on the full end-to-end marketing process without the hardware investment upfront.

As stated, this cloud solution supports all parts of the marketing process. It offers real-time insight into the business leads in all its life cycle stages, from the first anonymous clicks on the company website to a nurtured lead that can be further qualified and converted by a sales team.

This blog contains a first overview of the available functionality of SAP Hybris Marketing in the Cloud. Obviously, there is far more functionality available as listed here, but these are the main bits and it will provide you a good overview of the marketing capabilities of this solution.

Segmentation and Campaign Management

The following functionality is available as part of the segmentation and campaign management scenario:

Customer segmentation on master data, interactions and predictive analytical data with a visualization to slice and dice on all these data sources. The waterfall UI allows you to build segmentation trees with real-time counting.

Campaign management to execute periodic and one-time campaigns using the email, SMS or external (file export) channels. There is also an option to automate these campaigns by defining trigger based campaigns that initiate on events or actions like an abandoned shopping cart or a form submit on the website. Interactions like emails opened and link click through’s within the campaigns are tracked to measure the campaigns success and to initiate the subsequent follow-up. Design tools to author (personalized) email templates and landing pages are provided.

Facebook ad campaigns. Using SAP Hybris Marketing, it is possible to manage campaigns which automatically create a Facebook custom audience. Within such a campaign, one can plan the spend, analyze the people reached and KPI’s like page impressions and page likes.

Consumer and Customer Profiling

Real-time insight is provided about the consumer and customer profiles across all life-cycles, from anonymous contacts to the high value customers. The profile provides an overview of the characteristics, scores and interactions of the corresponding contact. This profile information is continuously fed from internal and external data sources and each profile can be scored against these interactions and their sentiment.

The profiles can be visualized in a number of ways, like the individual profiles as shown in the previous screenshot, but also in aggregated views like the contact engagement, sentiment engagement and a customer journey overview.

Marketing Lead Management

The marketing lead management functionality in the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud enables the nurturing of the leads by the marketing team. Lead stages can be defined and contact profiles reaching a particular score are assigned to one of these stages.

At a particular stage, the hand over to the sales team can be executed by transferring leads from the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud to SAP C4C. From that point on, sales will further qualify the leads and hopefully convert them into ordering customers. The standard integration with SAP C4C enables this transfer. The relevant updates in SAP C4C on these leads will be replicated back to the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud.

Commerce Marketing

This marketing solution provides the functionality to provide product recommendations based on previous purchasing behavior with the option to leverage predictive analytics. These recommendations can be presented as cross-selling options and should increase the conversion rates and the sales order size. These product recommendations can be provided across multiple sales channels and, with the standard integration to SAP Hybris Commerce, can also be directly displayed in the webshop.

Marketing Resource Management

The resource management capabilities support managing the marketing efforts, in time, budget and spend. Direct views are provided on the marketing calendar, the planning of a single campaign, the planning of a program (a grouping of related campaigns) and the budget against the spend (both on planned as well as on actuals).

Marketing Analytics

The analytical part of the SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud solution provides the capabilities to get an overview of the performance of the marketing activities, both on operational and executive level. Standard dashboards on campaigns success, lead conversion, customer interaction, etc. are provided.