Summary
- Email marketing hybrid LiveIntent is out with news of an integration with salesforce.com and its Marketing Cloud Active Audiences Platform.
- LiveIntent, for those unfamiliar, is a private company that offers what is most easily described as a real-time bidding platform for email marketing.
- This helps salesforce.com customers avoid banner blindness for prop advertisements, position content with core-content strengthening value-add items, and helps the email itself become more visible in general.
- Because of the uniqueness of the LiveIntent integration this is now another hurdle a salesforce.com customer has to jump to exit the ecosystem.
Email marketing hybrid LiveIntent is out with news of an integration with salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and its Marketing Cloud Active Audiences Platform; this is an integration that I think could be much more meaningful to salesforce.com than many are probably viewing it as currently.
LiveIntent, for those unfamiliar, is a private company that offers what is most easily described as a real-time bidding platform for email marketing – think The Rubicon Project (NYSE:RUBI)/Criteo (NASDAQ:CRTO) but strictly for emails. LiveIntent offers a fascinating (highly polarizing for those determining its value to housing platforms – salesforce.com in this case) platform that uses end-user specific identifiers and data to dial-in email proximity marketing at the time the email is opened, not when the email is sent.
Those are two big differentiators to be clear on, that we’re talking about intent based advertisements and advertising that are not interruption based. I think the salesforce.com integration is big in that the proximity marketing is intent based AND I think that’s the sole reason salesforce.com chose to integrate at all. I’ll clarify.
To be perfectly clear, LiveIntent advertisements come in the form of email skins or whitespace fillers – the advertisements are not disruptive or directly distracting, at least according to feedback data that LiveIntent has gathered. LiveIntent also offers a programmatic delivery of customer owned (in this case salesforce.com’s customers) advertising inventory as well. This means that the customer (again, salesforce.com’s customers) can choose to use LiveIntent to programmatically deliver its own ads or it can choose to create revenue via delivery of outside party ads. In either case, so far LiveIntent has shown metrics that are impressive and that should benefit salesforce.com customers (at least those metrics that have been made public).
salesforce.com doesn’t need help from anybody. I think its market cap and its dominant positioning in the CRM space speaks to that pretty clearly. That said, it still chose to integrate with LiveIntent which means it desired the integration. Again, I think the sole reason for this is that the email proximity marketing offered by LiveIntent isn’t simply guess work marketing. It’s relevant marketing that has higher click through rates, “10X engagement” when skins are deployed, and “28 seconds” of view time (data sourced from a LiveIntent presentation at LiveIntent.com – data gathered by LiveIntent via salesforce.com, HubSpot, Marketo, etc.).
As LiveIntent CEO Matt Keiser phrases it, “it practically rivals television”. That might be a bit of hyperbole but LiveIntent is clearly on to something if salesforce.com is taking notice.
So how does this benefit salesforce.com customers?
Well, the ability to use data and analytics to advertise is never a bad thing. LiveIntent allows salesforce.com customers to not deploy pre-set advertisements but to advertise using all the tools of modern technology in real-time. This helps them avoid banner blindness for prop advertisements, position content with core-content strengthening value-add items (think Microsoft sending an email about the new Xbox while wrapping the email in a new sporting-game skin to a user that has data gathered that says he or she likes sports), and helps the email itself become more visible in general. All are good things.
Then there’s also the fact that salesforce.com customers can recoup costs that are normally sunk in email deployment. With email typically being a loss leader from an advertisement and engagement standpoint the ability to in-email advertise can incrementally contribute back to the breakeven of the effort. Potentially allowing the customer to do more or to simply not have a negative contribution margin from the initiative.
But without a doubt the single largest value-add of the integration is the “integration” of new tech to the old tech emailing. Using those CRM notes, using that collected data, and using the entirety of the customer’s journey to better target and make more effective the actual touch point. The ability for the programmatic, RTB platform from LiveIntent to increase efficacy levels is only as good as the data inputs its pulling from – inputs that are all within the salesforce.com platform. This should do well to strengthen the already strong value-prop of the CRM offered and make even stickier the CRM.
That’s a good thing for salesforce.com and those invested.
So while this might have seemed like just another incremental integration, because of the uniqueness of the LiveIntent offering, it certainly isn’t. This is now another hurdle a salesforce.com customer has to jump to exit the ecosystem.
Continue to be long CRM.
Good luck everybody.
Disclosure: I am/we are long RUBI. (More…)I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
