Transforming Email to deliver personalized client experiences

“Your brand is your experience and your experience is your brand.” With these words, Ari Sheinkin, Vice President, Global Demand at IBM, expresses a truism of the digital economy and a guiding principle behind IBM’s recent marketing transformation.

“You can do all the advertising you want and be on all the social platforms, but five minutes after someone experiences your product or service, they’ve made up their mind,” says Sheinkin. “If your brand is your experience, and in a digital world your experience drives demand, then you have to start and work backwards from the client experience.”

This insight led IBM marketers to reflect on client engagement across all channels. They found that siloed data prevented marketers from delivering consistent, relevant cross-channel experiences. Say a client from a target account went to an event, but also had visited the website, downloaded a white paper and engaged with an email. Marketers couldn’t easily connect all the touch points to get a clear picture of what that client wanted and where they were in the buying cycle to deliver a personalized experience.

On the technology side, IBM had dozens of marketing tools for managing data, digital assets, content and campaigns. Being unintegrated, they hindered collaboration and data sharing, and manual processes made them inefficient. IBM’s digital assets, for instance, were spread across 40 digital asset management (DAM) platforms, each with its own content, standards and metadata. Such dispersion wasted marketers’ time in finding assets.

Legacy processes and organizational structure led to challenges as well. IBM was running 2,800 campaigns, which reflected IBM’s organization rather than client needs. Across geographies, business units and product lines, everyone was creating without a central vision or control.

Thus began a major project to transform the complex system that was IBM marketing. Explains Sheinkin: “Our work would be to radically simplify—focused on delivering personalized experiences and on the data that supports those experiences.”