Emerson increases email open rates with Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform
The manufacturing automation leaders use Oracle Unity to understand its customers, send more relevant content, and build a cohesive buying experience.
“Our journey with the Unity CDP is not a one-and-done effort. The first step is to start understanding our customers, but it is a multiyear journey to learn how to use this vast amount of data to better support our customers and enhance our business. Oracle is very supportive of both what we're doing and the direction we're headed.”
Business challenges
In operation since 1890, Emerson is a $17 billion technology, software, and engineering company with a presence in more than 100 countries, known for its expertise as a global industrial automation leader.
The company’s portfolio consists of highly technical products in the process automation market, such as control valves and actuators, which are all highly technical products that require custom engineering based on each customer’s specifications. That customization makes selling its products online extremely complex, especially when using online forms to gather relevant information. This ultimately led to high drop-off rates due to the number of fields the forms required. But as more sales shifted from face-to-face interactions to digital transactions, the company knew it needed new tools to more easily understand and configure technical products during the sales process.
Emerson’s goal is to provide a cohesive buying experience, beginning with direct interactions to understand each customer, followed by identifying the best moment to transition them to channel partners where most sales are finalized—helping to ensure an effortless purchase experience. The company turned to Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform to enhance connectivity between its marketing systems and CRM platform and better understand its customers, thereby serving them more effectively. Both systems contained key customer account and contact information, but before using Unity, they lacked integration and a comprehensive understanding of customer interactions. This made it difficult to link a person interacting with content to a specific account. Using Unity made it easier to understand customer needs and interactions, and to provide them with more relevant, personalized information, leading to higher response rates to marketing communications.
Emerson chose Oracle Unity CDP because of Oracle’s continuous development of new features and the ability to easily connect its existing systems.
Why Emerson chose Oracle
Emerson chose Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform for its robust feature set compared to other leading CDPs, including the out-of-the-box data models and customer analytics. The ease of connectivity with existing systems was also a big plus for Unity. Another significant consideration was the option to use Oracle Consulting to get the project up and running and provide ongoing training and assistance.
Emerson has a significant global deployment of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as well as Oracle Sales for CRM, Oracle Eloqua for marketing, and PeopleSoft for human resources. Unity’s ease of integration with these systems, and with non-Oracle applications, was a key advantage. So was the fact that Oracle is investing in Unity by continually adding new capabilities, which are delivered via easy-to-adopt online updates. “Oracle is constantly growing the Unity platform, and that really had a big much impact on our decision,” says Tony Foster, Emerson director of digital customer experience.
Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform led to higher open rates for marketing emails and helped reduce the need for lengthy data capture forms during the sale process.
Results
Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform helped Emerson better understand customer interests and preferences, leading to higher open rates for marketing emails because marketers could provide more relevant content. It also reduced the need for lengthy data capture forms during the sales process by automatically filling in already known information.
Emerson can collect the necessary data, enrich it, and then feed it back into Oracle Eloqua to discern which products each customer is interested in, allowing them to provide personalized marketing information to enhance the overall customer experience. After implementing targeted email campaigns, the company's email open rate rose above the industry average.
“We're continuously improving at enriching customer data, which enables us to deliver the most appropriate content to our contacts,” says Tony Foster, director of Digital Customer Experience for Emerson.
The unified data has also allowed the company to reduce the number of fields in online forms from 12 to just 3, using a strategy of progressive form fills. This approach involves asking customers for only relevant information during consecutive visits rather than overwhelming them upfront. The combination of Oracle Eloqua and Unity Customer Data Platform connects the dots between those visits, providing the data and insights to allow Emerson to take a more strategic, step-by-step approach to learning about potential customers.
The long-term vision is to use Unity CDP as the foundation to deliver the right content, at the right moment, to each of its 1.2 million customers. Emerson is also connecting multiple digital interactions from both prospects and existing customers to signal potential interest to sales teams, with the goal of increasing the number of qualified leads and achieving a seamless integration of marketing and sales activities.
The company is exploring cutting-edge technologies like generative AI to enhance content production and delivery, aiming to exceed evolving customer expectations in innovative and dynamic ways.
Partners
Oracle Consulting provided Emerson with support and expertise that helped the company successfully launch and adopt Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform.
About the customer
A leading global automation company, Emerson combines advanced technologies and industry-leading expertise to create sustainable solutions for its customers.