ITechnology Interview with Michael Diestelberg, VP Product & Marketing at Mapp

Hi Michael, please tell us about your current role and the team / technology you handle at Mapp.

I’m the Vice President of Product and Marketing at Mapp. My role is all about helping customers grow their business with the world’s first insight-led customer engagement platform, Mapp Cloud.

How much have Mapp’s digital marketing technology offerings / services evolved through the pandemic months?

In response to the pandemic, we are registering increased interest in our customer intelligence solutions. Insight-led analytics enable targeted and long-term customer activation through personalization. Especially retailers, eCommerce and DTC brands, benefit from a significant increase in traffic and are faced with the challenge of retaining consumers and triggering regular conversions. Across all industries, it is apparent that as a result of reduced marketing budgets, the criteria of effectiveness and cost efficiency are crucial. Marketers are, therefore, well advised to realign their strategies and focus more on data-based approaches fueled by actionable insights. I see the greatest potential in companies that avoid wastage through marketing analytics and implement a holistic cross-channel strategy. 

Tell us more about your latest ‘Winter Update’. What can your customers expect from the latest releases?

In our conversations with marketers around the world, it has become clear that the requirements for successful customer communications have increased significantly over the past year. It is more important than ever to be able to successfully implement data-driven strategies. In particular, the seamless linking of customer insights and personalized communication has become an essential skill that every marketer must master. Therefore, with the Winter Product Update, we are implementing numerous requests from our customers so that they can do their work even more efficiently and profitably.

We have placed a special focus on mobile push within our cross-channel m*****************, Mapp Engage. Complex contact scenarios can easily be mapped and analyzed in the marketing automation module to ensure consistent exchanges with consumers and more revenue-creating interactions. To boost customer engagement, Mapp Engage now also offers the option to create and automatically send reminders to those abandoning their shopping carts and wish lists. In addition, we completely revamped the export management for reports and analyses in our customer analytics solution, Mapp Intelligence.

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Could you throw some light on the recent customer analytics trends and how centralized data intelligence platforms improve their performance?

Improved performance hinges on the ability to truly know customers. It’s time to break away from decisions based on gut-feeling and traditional campaign thinking. Marketing teams have a responsibility to understand who their customers are, instill a culture that leverages customer insights, and represent customer interests throughout the company. That’s the only way to meet expectations for the customer experience and deliver real value.

For successful one-to-one personalization, unified customer profiles are indispensable. This empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on real-time customer knowledge from all available data sources. It provides marketers with a 360-degree view of every individual customer by visualizing their attributes, transactions, and engagement in one single place. This CDP functionality allows complete contact profiles to contain purchase and engagement information, which is extremely valuable for advanced segmentation and automation. This means that end users can be addressed holistically.

How do you use AI ML and data science to improve your overall product line?

With the help of AI-powered tools, customer behavior can be predicted, customer satisfaction increased, and sales boosted. The basis for this is data collection and the precise evaluation of actionable insights from your own first-party data. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables marketers to act on specific customer behavior. But to do this, companies need to know their customers and understand their needs. This is where AI tools come in, creating unified customer profiles and patterns based on first-party data.

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Key predictions for your industry / technology domain?

It’s about AI, as well as effectiveness and efficiency. Our industry is benefitting from a massive acceleration of digital transformation and has “forced” online business models in marketing. The necessity of constant online exchanges with consumers through a targeted strategy makes it indispensable to invest heavily in marketing analytics, personalization, automation, and digital customer activation.

One thing we can predict with a degree of certainty is that 2021 will continue to see an overriding focus on marketing efficiency due to incredibly tight budgets. The best way to service this need for efficiency is with insights – ones that can be seamlessly used for digital marketing. Such insights enable a holistic understanding of the customer across all channels and help to optimize and further develop one’s own marketing strategy. At the same time, they help to avoid ineffective targeting and ensure effective use of your budget. Only in this way can marketers increase their marketing ROI across all channels.

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