5 reasons why SAP Emarsys could be your next marketing automation tool

SAP acquired marketing automation tool Emarsys at the end of 2020 and things are looking very promising for this new product in the SAP Customer Experience suite. In 2021 Emarsys was recognized as leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for personalization engines and as visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. Both positions are comprehensible, since SAP Emarsys holds a lot of nice features for marketeers to approach their customers with personalized content via various channels. Here are five reasons why SAP Emarsys can be considered the next-gen marketing tool in the SAP Customer Experience suite.

Tactics library

First of all, SAP Emarsys is out-of-the-box equipped with a tactics library, a true paradise for the marketeer who wants to work with ready-to-use automation programs that are built as best practises at other well known Emarsys customers. Over 70 pre-built automation programs are available as tactics in the system. For instance tactics to set up an abandoned cart or lead conversion campaign in only a few minutes.

Those tactics are categorized in Acquisition and Conversion Tactics, Product Data Tactics, SAP Customer Experience Tactics and Customer Lifecycle Tactics. Especially, the SAP Customer Experience Tactics category will be extended with new tactics in the near future to deliver out-of-the box automations with other products in the SAP CX suite like SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud.

Strategic Dashboard

SAP Emarsys has a strong understanding of what the most important drivers and KPI’s are for marketeers nowadays. It guides the marketeer through the marketing process by visualizing those KPI’s in the strategic dashboard. Based on the objective of the marketeer, a set of strategies are shown which are supported by the earlier mentioned tactics.

As a marketeer your most important objective could be revenue growth. The strategic dashboard below shows that the strategies ”Increase Active Customer Revenue”, ”Reduce Customer Churn” and ”Drive Purchase Frequency” are all important to reach that objective. The dashboard shows that the strategy ”Drive Purchase Frequency” is underperforming, so that might be a strategy to focus on. The marketeer can pick one of the tactics from the tactics library to increase the performance of this strategy, for instance the “Abandoned cart tactic”.

Extensive Automation Tool

It is easy to use the predefined tactics in the system, but sometimes you want to build your own automation. For this purpose SAP Emarsys has a great automation toolkit that offers the possibility to adjust automation programs from existing tactics, but also build automations from scratch. Three different types of nodes can be used:

• Entry points: What is the trigger to start the automation? This can for instance be a change in the data, a filled-in form or a newly created contact.
• Actions: What should happen with which customer? With action nodes it is possible to define a segment, schedule an action or exclude a customer from the automation.
• Channels: Through what channel do you want to reach the customer with your campaign? Various channels like Email, SMS, Facebook, Google Ads and WebChannel are supported in SAP Emarsys to create the best omnichannel customer experience.

Reach the right customer with segmentation

Another reason to go for SAP Emarsys would definitely be the segmentation possibilities. With SAP Emarsys a marketeer can segment on contact data, behaviour data, mobile engagement data, sales data and all other relevant data that most marketing automation tools would offer. Where SAP Emarsys really stands out is the AI-based segments.

SAP Emarsys is packed with some really cool algorithms that learn on the behaviour of your customers to help you with targeting the right customer at the right time via the right channel. A good example is the AI-based segment ‘’Customers that are likely to engage on email in the next 30 days’’. This segment can be used to determine whether it would be wise to target the customer via email or better use another channel like Google Ads.

The Visual Content Editor

A great marketing tool also comes with a state of the art content editor and so does SAP Emarsys.

UI experts can define Block-based templates to give marketeers the right tools to easily set up email content for campaigns. Some styling variables can be set read-only for the marketeer in order to ensure the corporate identity of the styling objects in the content.

Some nice features in the Visual Content Editor are:

• Personalization based on Emarsys Scripting Language: based on a set of rules a marketeer can use really cool personalization features. For instance to set the first name to ‘’Birthday Boy’’ when gender is male and current date equals birthdate.
• Block targeting: based on a condition an email block is shown or hidden to a specific contact. For example a block with a registration for a webinar targeted on CEO’s can be shown to contacts with the function CEO only.
• Predict recommendation: a product block can show a product based on Emarsys Predict Recommendation logic. This function is used for instance to show recently viewed items to increase conversion.

The mentioned functionalities are just a small preview of what SAP Emarsys can offer to you as a marketeer. Take a look at the extended documentation of SAP Emarsys to get a more detailed view of those functionalities and keep an eye out on upcoming blog posts.

Read more about SAP Emarsys and its implemetation here. Or watch our ”Inspired in 90 Minutes” webinar about SAP Emarsys here.