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Attentive.ly’s Social Marketing Taps Customer Interests

Attentive.ly recently released its application on the Eloqua platform, digging a deeper foothold for itself in the CRM enterprise space. Attentive.ly provides social marketing automation functionality in the form of a plug-and-play toolset that works with a CRM overlay.

Using its tools, companies can organize customers in specific groups, listen to their online conversations, react to certain predetermined triggers, and send personalized marketing messages.

Attentive.ly offers a direct integration with a number of CRM platforms, according to CEO Roz Lemieux. For other applications, users can integrate Attentive.ly via Zapier.

It also can be used as a standalone tool, although its best use comes when it is integrated with a CRM-based platform, Lemieux said.

“Either way, we focused on building a tool that is incredibly easy to use,” she told CRM Buyer.

Building the Data List

Consider the hypothetical use case of a company with Salesforce.com as its CRM backbone. The user first would deploy the Zapier integration to connect Attentive.ly to Salesforce.com.

“Zapier has a great interface that allows you to drag and drop and set up the sync very easily,” Lemieux said.

The entire process takes about an hour and requires no support from IT or developers, she added.

Following the prompts, a user could pull in the desired data from Salesforce.com. The company could be interested in setting up a marketing campaign with customers who haven’t engaged with or bought anything from the company for set period of time, for example, or it could be extending a special offer to its best clients.

“Basically, you bring in whatever segments of your customer database that you want to target,” Lemieux said.

With that complete, the first piece of the operation — building a targeted list — would be in place.

The next step would be to run a social match, digging deeper into the list to find customers based on whatever criteria the user specified, Lemieux continued.

Criteria could include Klout score, age, gender, social media activity, posts Liked or specific keywords used by a customer.

Social listening by the company is also an integral piece, Lemieux said.

“Once we have defined the audience, then we start listening to know what they are talking about,” she explained. “We want to know what kind of language they are using when they talk about their interests, their everyday lives, national or world events.”

This is to give the company a sense of what a particular customer might spark to — family issues, entertainment, sports or cooking, for example.

The application also has a dashboard to give users a sense of what is trending for each segmented list, Lemieux added. “The user can look at what is bubbling up and what resonates over time with this group.”

Then Comes Engagement

The last key piece is aimed at engagement — that is, creating personalized emails or social marketing messages.

After monitoring the segmented list and its conversation topics, the company might notice certain customers respond to mentions of household Do-It-Yourself projects, for example, while others do not, Lemieux said.

“We have tools that let you create a campaign around that,” she noted. “It could be a multichannel campaign or specifically for one channel like email.”

Other features allow the user to set up triggers for certain subjects that automatically send communications to the customer.

These are watch terms, Lemieux said. The system can be configured to send off a Facebook message for people who talk about, or Like, a certain product or term.

Other options allow the company to configure the system to check if a person has a high number of followers or a high Klout score, and then use that information to invite the customer to join an insiders’ type of loyalty program, she suggested.

“Basically, there are many different actions you can take,” noted Lemieux. “You don’t even have to have a campaign in mind. You can mark a group as interested in a particular topic and see where it goes.”

Erika Morphy has been writing about technology, finance and business issues for more than 20 years. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.

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