What exactly does this mean? Let’s look at an example…

You have a new children’s range, which you want to promote through both retail and e-commerce channels. However, you have different teams autonomously managing each one, with all the data collected in separate nodes. But you really need this information aggregated in one place, to have a comprehensive overview that facilitates successful, unified and coordinated promotional activities.

Of course, you could create separate campaigns for the contacts in each node. But it would be far better to use the strengths of an aggregate node, to bring together all the available data in one place and unite the separate customer profiles.

Then you could use the new node with all the Marketing Cloud features to create an individually tailored, precisely timed and effectively targeted campaign that:

• Reacts to every individual contact’s preferences, actions and responses.
• Minimizes message duplication.
  By combining otherwise separate campaigns, and concurrently managing and communicating with both channels.
• Makes information contained in one node available to everyone, increasing targeting effectiveness across the channels.
  For example, imagine the details you have in the retail node show that someone doesn’t have children, but this small detail is missing from your e-commerce data.

The Aggregate node

!!! Does your company have information stored in silos,  due to its organizational structure?

!!! Do you have difficulty integrating different databases and uniquely identifying who is who?

!!! Can’t you determine one key for all channels, to identify each individual contact?

We’ve thought about all of this with aggregate nodes, … let’s explore them together.

If you have already adopted the platform, you know and appreciate the many benefits that you can realize with Hub and the other modules in the Contactlab Marketing Cloud family. Now imagine elevating the success of your communication activities to an even higher level.

You may already have all your contact data from diverse sources well organized in a Hub workspace, according to how you do business – with, for example, retail and e-commerce nodes. And each node in turn contains the individual customer profiles – the available demographic and event data for each contact that has bought from you, shown an interest in your products, or even just subscribed to your newsletter.

But perhaps you have different teams managing the individual channels and nodes independently, in effect, as if each one is the only customer base you have. Maybe technical limitations prevent you from creating totally unified contact records.

Or it could be that the information required to successfully combine contact profiles has not always been available. For example, while the e-commerce node may include an email address for each contact, the retail node only has a few – a situation that has made it almost impossible so far, to have a single node with integrated customer data for multiple channels.

That is where the power, capabilities and flexibility of Hub aggregate nodes comes in. They provide:

• A complete and comprehensive view of each customer in one place.
  Still individual profiles, but ones that bring together the data from two or more entry nodes, into readily accessible and understandable summaries.
• Combined profiles that are constantly updated in real-time, with the latest customer data, events, purchases, subscriptions and consents.
• The ability to combine apparently separate profiles using multiple field values.

And if, for whatever reason, it is not possible to completely unify all the data for certain individual customers right away, it will still be available in one place, ready to use now, and to be merged as the opportunity arises in the future.

The new Hub aggregate nodes – putting all the power and possibilities right at your fingertips.

Mix and match…

A simple matching policy is all that is needed to combine two or more entry nodes into one aggregate node. Your contacts’ individual properties – such as their email address and first name, or perhaps the first and last names, date of birth and postal code – which together determine if people in the different nodes are actually the same person… And if so, enable the separate profiles to be merged into an aggregated one.

But that is just the beginning…

Now think about how you could apply all that combined information – promote your retail stores to those who have exclusively bought online? Entice your subscriber-only contacts with a discount coupon to use on their first in-store purchase? Reward the loyalty of your best cross-channel customers with an invitation to a private preview?

Whatever your idea, Hub aggregate nodes enable more accurate deliveries in Send, even better segmentation in Plan, and enhanced personalization of automatic campaigns in Flow.

Now comes the best news of all… You just tell us your requirements, and we’ll configure the new aggregate nodes for you! Need some changes? We’ll do that too, leaving you free to focus on your strategies, plans and above all, results.

All we need to know is which of your entry nodes you want to aggregate, and the matching properties you want to use. That’s it.

To summarize…

With an aggregate node, not only can you avoid potential problems, you can also tailor your communications more precisely by using the combined information from two or more nodes, rather than relying on just one. And even if the profiles of some contacts cannot be merged at the moment because of missing data, they will still be included in the campaign, as appropriate.

Why not talk to our customer care about aggregate nodes today, and start to reap the full benefits of all your data combined in one place?