Next Best Action (also known as best next action, next best activity or recommended action), is a customer-centric approach to marketing that considers multiple different actions that could be taken for a specific customer and then decides on the best one to provide. Moreover, Next Best Action commonly requires the need for automated self-learning decisions, using machine learning, to make a decision in real-time that will improve the chances of a conversion at the moment that a customer is making a purchase decision.

The BlueVenn Marketing Hub combines two powerful omnichannel marketing tools - the powerful BlueVenn UNIFY Customer Data Platform to unify customer data into a single view of the customer, and BlueVenn ENGAGE for customer analytics, segmentation and advanced omnichannel marketing automation.

Each year, BlueVenn releases 4 major software updates and we’re delighted to announce a range of new and updated functionality in version 2020.2 to help our customers on their path towards personalized, 1-to-1 marketing.

Customers expect to be able to mold their personal experience with a brand to meet their exact requirements, and in the current climate that means a seamless online buying experience. As they go meandering through seemingly unlimited marketing channels - perhaps browsing on a mobile device, hitting independent review sites, heading into a store to examine the product (remember that time?!), before summoning up a discount code and placing an order over the phone - the marketer's challenge is to keep up with the customer, and predict these outcomes in advance so they can deliver the best customer experience at scale.

How can marketers stay one-step ahead of this seemingly random journey to push the customer towards a purchase? How can they measure what effect marketing efforts are having on the customer experience?

BlueVenn, the award-winning Customer Data Platform and Omnichannel Marketing Hub vendor, has been chosen by Voluntary Service Overseas, a not-for-profit organisation and the world's leading development charity fighting poverty through volunteers, to help the organization achieve its mission through a better understanding of its database and improved targeting of supporters to maximize revenue and donations.

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

A use case is a statement of what a marketer wants to get out of a project, system or platform. Whether they work for a single or multi-brand retailer, if the business operates on at least two channels, marketers are going to face these use cases as the Top 5 requirements for a Customer Data Platform (CDP):

A core focus for the 2020.1 release of BlueVenn Engage centers on the official release of a new, embedded email editor and email marketing engine. This new email marketing module enables BlueVenn users to design, personalize and execute email campaigns and triggered messages directly from BlueVenn, thus removing the need to work in multiple platforms.

For our multi-brand and multi-national clients, we’ve also enabled new channel security features in BlueVenn Engage that ensure marketing teams working with multiple brands can manage the various data caches and campaigns and keep them separate within one system.

Finally, we’ve made some enhancements to the real-time engine for triggered campaigns, along with a host of other performance updates.

When it comes to data protection, a storm has long been brewing. First came worries about Alexa eavesdropping in people’s homes and recording conversations (in November 2018 a New Hampshire judge ruled that audio captured in the home of a murder victim could be used as evidence in court). Then the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal broke, with data harvested off people’s Facebook accounts being used to drive political advertising, potentially affecting the U.S. election result. Consumers’ growing concern has led to harsh new data protection regulations – GDPR came into force in Europe on 25th May 2018, then the California Consumer Privacy Act became effective in the state on 1st January 2020.