Demandware is one of the hottest up-and-coming ecommerce platforms for midsized companies. There’s good reason for that. Demandware was the first to offer a cloud-based software-as-a-service ecommerce platform. By hosting its platform in the cloud, and offering it as SaaS, Demandware opened up a truly powerful ecommerce software suite to a whole group of retailers that had big plans and growth potential to match–but didn’t have a ton of in-house technical expertise. These up-and-coming retailers wanted to be able to concentrate on what they do best –- merchandising, building community, providing an excellent customer experience, and optimizing customer lifetime value. Not writing code.
Sailthru has a similar vision, of providing best-in-class technology without requiring our clients to go out and adopt and entire IT team to support it. Using our cloud-based, SaaS platform, we also enable brands to do what they do best, and to escape the headaches of systems upgrades and other IT work.
So it only makes sense that we would develop an out-of-the-box Sailthru/Demandware integration, and become an official member of Demandware’s LINK partnership program.
This integration has been designed so that joint customers of Sailthru and Demandware can get the most out of both platforms, with a minimum of technical fuss. For those who have just recently chosen Demandware as their ecommerce platform, or will in the future, the integration makes Sailthru an even more attractive solution for marketing and analytics, and for developing and leveraging the all-important single customer view. We estimate this integration cuts the time needed to join the two platforms in half, but more important, it helps clients easily leverage the most advanced capabilities of the platform they’ve chosen.
Ecommerce platforms such as Demandware provide a wide range of functionality, of course, such as a front-end user interface, inventory management, user registrations, and shipping and fulfillment. If you’re an ecommerce marketer, the choice of platform is one of your first, fundamental decisions.
But we’d humbly suggest that the choice of a digital marketing infrastructure needs to be right behind that of your selection of an ecommerce platform. Because these platforms, as powerful as they are, are not built to connect customer experiences across different channels. Nor are they built to offer product recommendations based on a holistic understanding of customers as individual. Without these, it’s impossible for that choice of platform to pay off as dramatically as it deserves to.
Demandware, for instance, is not an email service provider. We expect that some of the first clients to take advantage of our integration with Demandware will be brands that are looking to send personalized emails to their ecommerce customers. Our new integration will make it easy for customers who buy an item on the Demandware platform to be known to Marigold Engage by Sailthru, and for Sailthru to be aware of their behavior across channels. It will also ensure that purchase information, including cart abandonments, flows into Sailthru. And Sailthru will have complete, real-time updates on the entire range of inventory offered on the brand’s online channels. All this will now be turnkey.
This data will form the backbone of Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s efforts to construct a single customer view around each customer, to email her with relevant information about the brand and its offerings, and to consistently improve her customer experience. Once a robust single customer view has been created, joint clients of Demandware and Marigold Engage by Sailthru can use Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s powerful predictive technology, combined with its recommendation capability, to optimize each client’s long-term value to the brand—which, we hope, is what every ecommerce marketer, and merchant, aims for.