Oracle Corp. has agreed to buy web marketing technology vendor Maxymiser for an undisclosed price. Oracle said Thursday that the acquisition will extend its ability to let marketers test, target and personalize what a customer sees on an app or a web page.
The testing, optimization and personalization marketing technology vendor optimizes more than 20 billion customer experiences each month for retailers such as Burlington Coat Factory, No. 606 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Second 500 Guide, and the Tommy Hilfiger brand. Oracle provides its e-commerce platform to 62 retailers in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide that collectively do $51 billion in yearly web sales.
“Our mission is to empower enterprises to use data science to systematically test, discover and predict what customers want and deliver uniquely tailored experiences,” says Tim Brown, CEO of New York-based Maxymiser. “We are excited to join Oracle and bring these capabilities to help extend Oracle Marketing Cloud.”
Retailers ranging from small companies to well-known up-market merchants are constantly seeking ways to make their e-commerce websites and mobile offerings more personalized and relevant to the customer, including using a variety of marketing campaigns to up-sell and cross-sell, says Katrina Gosek, director of commerce product strategy for Oracle Commerce. “It’s a constantly evolving space.”
While 89% of marketing leaders believe customer experience is central to their long-term differentiation, only 20% believe they have an industry-leading customer experience, according to a Gartner study from October 2014 titled “Customer Experience Emerges as the Marketers’ Next Battlefield.”
Peter Sheldon, e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, says, “This acquisition fills a gap in the Oracle Cloud portfolio.”
He says it enables insights, personalization and website-comparison capabilities to allow Oracle to better compete against the Omniture offerings from Adobe.
Alaska Airlines, for example, saw a 12% increase in car-rental add-ons after it tested banner images, rental partner logos, and messaging for reservations and low-price guarantees, according to a case study that Oracle provided. The airline tested more than 400 promotional experiences using different colors, timing, pricing and interaction design to achieve the increase, according to the case study.
Sheldon noted in a July 6 report that “Oracle is going all-out to grow its existing $2 billion cloud business and to compete with market leader DemandWare.
“Cloud revenues were up 47% to $519 million in its fiscal Q2 versus a year earlier, with a total of 460 new customers adopting customer experience (CX) cloud apps as of December 2014 (that’s 53% of all of Oracle’s new cloud clients),” he says.
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