Bluecore's Decisioning Platform: MarTech's Missing Piece
After starting out as a triggered email tool, in just four short years Bluecore has grown into a SaaS technology provider enabling marketers to take action almost immediately on all of the data they collect, both behavioral and product centric, with its new Decisioning Platform, that debuted at the end of February. To get first hand insight into this new offering, I had a conversation with Jared Blank, Senior Vice President of Data Analysis and Insights at Bluecore.
This platform, which Jared details in the interview, addresses an emerging pain point growing 
alongside the data lakes and warehouses within organizations. Fayez Mohamood, co-founder and CEO of Bluecore expands on that need here: “Marketers don’t need more data. They need help using it - that’s the missing component in today’s marketing stack, the modern marketer needs inferences and insights to make real-time decisions across channels. Speed and depth of customer knowledge are the keys to driving acquisition, conversion and retention metrics in today’s competitive retail environment. We designed our platform to integrate seamlessly with existing marketing stacks, without the help of IT teams, and with beautiful user interface so marketers can build and sync audiences across channels in a matter of seconds.”
Jared brings up the point that while in the past, the focus has been on collecting data from wherever customers are, now marketers are tasked with reversing that flow of traffic to now take action on that data to reach out to their customers, across channels, with this platform helping marketers to do just that: “To be able to say how do we actually make immediate decisions off of all of this data we’re collecting, regardless of channel? That’s what we do for a living.”
Taking action on that data is one thing, but one of the biggest questions I had for Jared was how this platform integrates with other marketing technologies. As Venus mentioned in her article, Marketing Technology Adoption and Investment in 2017: “CMOs are now spending nearly as much on technology as their CIO counterparts, and, in 2017, CMO marketing tech spending seems to be on track to exceed the CIO technology spend”, as per Gartner’s 2016-2017 CMO Spend Survey. For this reason, platforms like Bluecore’s Decisioning Platform must play nice with the marketing technologies that are out there, as the adoption and utilization of multi-facted stacks are only going to grow.
I was pleased to hear that integration was at the forefront for Bluecore in the development of this platform. Jared eluded to a level of respect they felt for their customers in the time and investment they have put into their martech stack, and how developing a platform that worked well with those technologies was important to them: “That’s the approach we’ve taken, that we work with those [technologies] rather than replacing what you’ve got, we just enhance the data that you’re collecting in those channels and make better decisions in each of those marketing channels.”
This platform, said to be the previously missing piece for marketers, or the new “connective tissue in the marketing stack” could in my opinion be a huge time saver for users, freeing them up from decision fatigue while giving them a much clearer picture of their audience as well as where to engage with them. Most importantly though, it will be painting that picture in real-time and taking on the sometimes tedious analysis work, so marketing and ecommerce managers, email marketers etc, can see a shorter span of time in the loop from observation to deployment, as Jared firmly states here: “We live in an instant gratification world; marketers don’t have the luxury of time. The Bluecore Decisioning Platform puts time and control back in marketers’ hands by giving them immediate access to data and tools that they can actually use.”
Laura Myers
A digital business, marketing and social media enthusiast, Laura thrives on asking unique, insightful questions to ignite conversation. At an event or remotely, she enjoys any opportunity to connect with like-minded people in the industry.