Oracle Marketing Cloud updates mobile capabilities

Oracle announced updates to its Marketing Cloud, which focuses on improving communication between marketers and consumers as well as enhancements to sales tools and testing for marketing content. The news comes following announcement surrounding OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference, that brought data personalization capabilities to the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

The latest updates to Oracle's marketing suite enable greater mobile customer engagement and give business-to-business (B2B) sales reps more access to marketing data. Updates to the Oracle Marketing Cloud include the following:

In-app messaging. This capability allows marketers to send consumers targeted messages through a company's mobile application. A message can display within the app and deliver content based on consumers' behavior, preferences and profiles, encouraging them to get closer to a sale. In-app messaging can be mixed into a larger mobile marketing campaign that includes email, social media, SMS or MMS, push notifications, display ads and so on.

Multivariate testing. Marketers can test up to eight variations of a message and view metrics that identify the success of different kinds of content on customers. A/B testing is already part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, but the update adds multiple variants of a single message and analyzes variables such as subject lines and the message's sender. This capability is also included in email marketing campaigns.

B2B sales tools. Oracle announced updates to Profiler and Engage, which aim to give salespeople access to marketing content and more ways to follow-up with prospects. The Profiler dashboard aggregates prospect activities and preferences with a Google Chrome browser plug-in, giving sales reps a glimpse into which behaviors or content a prospect has interacted with. Engage -- which was previously desktop-only, but is now available to mobile users -- allows a salesperson to deliver marketing content directly to the prospect.

Oracle also announced a new self-service tool that integrates with the Oracle Data Management Platform that enables users to send audience data to other digital media providers and platforms. The updates are generally available as part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud.