Greg SegallOpens a new window , CEO and founder of Alyce, and Mitch FolksOpens a new window , senior manager, product marketing for Marketo Engage at Adobe, share the highlights of their partnership in this Q&A. They also discuss how marketers can leverage technology to create more authentic relationships, earn trust, drive loyalty, and create stronger growth with this integration. They also share their thoughts on the biggest changes they see happening in the marketing automationOpens a new window and personal gifting ecosystem as a result of this collaboration.
In this exclusive MarTalk Buzz interview, we caught up with the duo to understand how marketers can benefit from this collaboration, transform the customer experienceOpens a new window , and deliver meaningful communications.
Key takeaways from this Q&A on personalizing B2B giftingOpens a new window
- Top tips on how to expand an AI-powered gifting strategy
- Best practices for creating relevant, engaging, and personal experiences
- Trends to follow in the customer experience space for 2020 and beyond
Here are the highlights of our conversation with Greg and Mitch on personalizing B2B gifting
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An Alyce spokesperson saidOpens a new window that: “Adobe is an amazing partner for Alyce and is a cornerstone platform within the marketing automation and personal experience ecosystem.†What were the top 3 reasons to expand your AI-powered gifting strategy with the help of Adobe Experience Cloud?
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Greg: Our integration with Marketo allows our customers to create deeper, one-to-one relationships and personal bonds with people. And in today’s current world landscape, helping people create authentic, closer relationships with everyone they do business with has never been more important.
In my view, these are the top three business reasons for the strategic integration with Marketo.
1. Creating Personal Bonds with People Not Just Businesses
We’re on a mission to help everyone create personal bonds with everyone they do business with to transform automated outreach into scaled personal experience-driven moments. This isn’t just “an integration†with the marketing automation leader, it’s a fundamental shift in approach, augmenting a one-to-many platform to include one-to-one experiences.
It’s the perfect extension of Adobe’s Experience Cloud platform and vision. We’re helping companies shift from creating campaigns and experiences between brands, groups, and personas to building bonds between individuals.
2. Supporting our Customers and Providing Deeper ROI
A large portion of our enterprise customer base uses Marketo already. Our integration not only strengthens our relationship with them but opens more ways to drive personal moments throughout their prospect and customer journeys. Pulling in all their Alyce engagement activity directly into Marketo provides a much deeper ROI value allowing them to conduct extensive reporting and analysis across different use cases and multi-channel campaigns. It moves our customers well beyond traditional direct mail and into delivering a personal experience that supports their marketing and ABM programs.
3. Making Typical Use Cases More Interactive
The Alyce personal experience approach can be used inside Adobe Experience Cloud across all use cases of marketing, i.e., virtual event invitations, webinars, in-person side of things. Married together, the two tools create experiences between people, one-to-one, not one-to-many.
Now marketers can effectively and more deeply embed personal moments into different marketing and sales activities. For example, leveraging Alyce for Marketo to automate immediate follow-up triggers from Reps like scheduling a meeting, or thanking a customer for an amazing reference or review on a one-to-one basis with personal gifts.
And new use cases are constantly popping up, which is crazy exciting.
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How do you plan to leverage technology to create more authentic relationships, earn trust, drive loyalty, and create stronger growth with this integration?
Greg: At Alyce, we believe the closer you get to the people you do business with, the better business you’ll do. That’s what Alyce is all about building rapport, earning trust, and driving loyalty. So, we seek to change marketer’s behavior from sending out mass emails that target persona groups to driving meaningful, human relationships by being personal at scale.
The core of the Alyce platform is the ability to deliver a personal experience that is relatable, relevant, and respectful to individual prospects, customers, and partners, every time through one-to-one gifting.
Caring about other people first, their needs, passions, and interests, you inevitably lead with empathy, which is how the Alyce technology and model helps our users deliver relatable gifts. Making sure that the gifts are triggered from important moments in Marketo, makes the gift relevant to the business context of the relationship. And adding a psychological and emotional trigger into the sales and marketing process fosters a sense of respect from the recipient, which is what drives them to want to interact with you.
In addition, the founding principles of the company are rooted in sustainability. Our vision, culture, and approach are all about giving back to others and giving back to the planet. And it’s backed into the product as well. So, our customers, and our customer’s customers, make a difference just by using the Alyce platform.
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What’s the synergy between Adobe’s mission to transform the customer experience and Alyce’s vision of using technology to create more authentic relationships?
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Mitch: Customers want relevant, engaging, and personal experiences. With the current state of the world, authentic relationships are even more vital. This integration allows brands to have even more impactful communications with their customers.
Ultimately, we both want to enable brands to compete using their unique customer experience, not just price and product.
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What are the biggest changes you see happening in the marketing automation and personal experience ecosystem post this collaboration?
Mitch: Adobe sees account-based marketing, which is a popular use case for tools like Alyce, becoming part of core marketing automation.
Why would you not want to use the same application for both lead- and account-based marketing strategies? A lot of the challenges with customer experience management are caused by disconnected data, channels, and reporting.
Additionally, I think you’ll see brands continue to invest in delivering meaningful communications to their customers and using personalized experiences as their main differentiator. Brands will look for more ways to make every customer interaction more relevant through a variety of ways whether its tailoring website content based on real-time interactions, invites to webinars based on past behaviors, or even cat socks because of a customer’s affinity for cats!
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After this collaboration with Adobe Experience Cloud, what’s next for Alyce?
Greg: We are on a mission to help our customers and future customers find more ways to create personal bonds throughout their business. The world needs it right now.
We, as marketers, sales reps, and people in business have been automating the wrong types of customer touchpoints, and there’s a growing backlash to the blanket sending of material. The onslaught of impersonal outreach is causing us all to opt-out.
That must change, so we’re helping create more one-to-one relationships and personal moments for our customers to help them be successful.
We are also continuing to deepen our integrations and do that in unique ways. We’re learning a ton from our customers on how they want to use integrations like our partnership with Adobe Experience Cloud/Marketo Engage.
There are so many actions within our product that can tie into these systems that track and measure how these personal experience engagements are helping drive the relationship and enrich a customer journey.
We are aiming to create a completely new category of digital interactions. By deepening integrations with the other tools that marketing, and sales teams use today, our customers can show their colleagues the success measures of creating personal experiences. Measuring pipeline contributions, opportunities created, and ROI generated is something that has never been done before with traditional direct mail that we want to push to be the norm.
The digital space is getting more saturated than ever before, budgets are shifting, and marketers are looking for the highest impact channels they can find.
It’s time to bring this all together and define a new approach to marketing and sales with Alyce.
About AlyceOpens a new window
Alyce is an AI-powered gifting platform that helps sales, marketing, and customer success teams create personal bonds with everyone they do business with through one-to-one gifting. Alyce bridges the physical and digital marketing worlds to help enterprises better engage prospects, customers, and employees while delivering measurable results.
Founded in December of 2015, Alyce is a venture-backed, privately held company headquartered in Boston, MA.
About Adobe Experience CloudOpens a new window
In the experience economy, every business must be a digital business, and Adobe Experience Cloud is the global company for powering digital businesses. With solutions for data and insights, content and personalization, customer journey management, commerce, and advertising, Adobe Experience Cloud is driving Customer Experience Management (CXM) across both B2B and B2C for companies of every size. Adobe Experience Platform the foundation of Adobe Experience Cloud is the industry’s first purpose-built CXM platform, enabling personalized customer experiences in real-time at scale.
About MarTalk Buzz:
MarTalk Buzz is an interview series where marketing leaders and marketing technology companies that are making a difference, connect with us and share their stories. Join us as we talk to them about their product journeys, insights on the categories they serve, what works for them, and some bonus pro-tips.
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