Q&A with Taylor Donnell, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at Jebbit
Personalization and data are the name of the game today. For consumers, personalization is everything — it’s what separates an amazing brand experience from a mediocre one and what keeps them coming back time and again. For brands, data is the only way to make this personalization happen.
So how can brands get consumers to share data about themselves to power more engaging, personalized experiences without collecting that data in a boring or, worse yet, creepy way?
Enter Jebbit, a Declared Data Platform that allows brands to easily build interactive digital experiences designed to collect and activate direct-from-consumer first party data. If it sounds innovative, that’s because it is. From making it easy to build these types of interactive experiences to collecting and activating direct-from-consumer data, Jebbit offers a simplified way to meet lofty goals around personalization and data.
Most recently, Jebbit made all of this data more easily accessible for Salesforce customers by launching its solution on the Salesforce AppExchange to make passing the newly collected data back to Salesforce simpler than ever.
On the heels of this announcement, Jebbit and AllCloud are pleased to announce our partnership to help organizations maximize their use of direct-from-consumer data throughout their entire Salesforce ecosystem.
To learn more, I sat down with Taylor Donnell, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at Jebbit. Here’s what he had to say about everything from what Salesforce users can expect from the AppExchange solution to his advice on delivering more personalized customer experiences.
Tyler Holmes, AllCloud: Jebbit just launched its new solution on the Salesforce AppExchange this past month. What does this offer to Salesforce clients?
Taylor Donnell, Jebbit: The Jebbit Platform offers the ability to build fully branded, interactive experiences using any of our eight experience types. This includes product match and personality quizzes, trivia, lookbooks, interactive editorial and even simple lead forms and surveys.
The platform enables anyone (no technical or design skills necessary) to build amazing consumer experiences, fast. These engagements allow brands to capture first party data directly from consumers, which we call declared data. You might have heard this type of data referred to as zero party data as well.
With our AppExchange solution, we give Salesforce clients the tools to quickly create and deploy engaging digital experiences through their Marketing Cloud instance. But the real power lies in the data being fed back into Salesforce that brands can activate to power next-best actions in Marketing Cloud products like Journey Builder and Interaction Studio.
We are seeing natural evolutions as more brands adopt direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategies, and we believe that Jebbit complements Marketing Cloud in a way that will help organizations get there even faster.
TH: Can you tell us about the history that brought Jebbit to work with Salesforce?
TD: Jebbit has been around for a little over eight years, and while there’s naturally been evolutions in areas of our business, we’ve always believed that both marketers and consumers should have more control. Marketers should have more control over creating engaging content (without needing a coding or design background) and the ability to connect directly with their customers. And consumers should have more control over the brand experience itself and how their data gets used. To summarize, there should always be a value-based exchange between a brand and its customers.
As our platform, customer and user-base have evolved, making Jebbit available via Salesforce Marketing Cloud naturally made sense. 84% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services, and the combination of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Jebbit can help brands deliver that outstanding experience.
Salesforce is one of the best relationship platforms in the world, but to establish and maintain a relationship with consumers, you need some additional, experience-driven capabilities like those that Jebbit provides. For example, you have to:
- Get in front of customers and regularly engage them
- Give those customers a chance to tell you their preferences, motivations and intentions
- Show those customers that you listened by delivering value with more relevant recommendations, content, offers, etc.
In partnership with Marketing Cloud, we’re confident that our combined solutions will deliver on these needs to fully meet — and even exceed — customer expectations.
TH: What are you most excited about with this new partnership? What is the most important thing you think Jebbit will bring to AllCloud’s clients?
TD: I’ve been in the marketing and technology space for over a decade at this point and the one constant, whether it was with my team or my client’s team, has been that no one ever has enough resources to get the job done. If a team has design resources, they need help with the development of interactive experiences; if they have technologists, they don’t have any design chops, and therefore creating unique experiences for their customers is challenging and often takes a lot of time and money.
Early in my career I was part of a team that built experiences similar to what Jebbit enables, but from concept to completion it took weeks or months. Aside from the time spent, there were other costs too. The biggest intangible cost of this was the inability to test and iterate on the experience as engagement data came in.
In contrast, with Jebbit and without any formal training, I was able to build and launch an experience that integrates directly into Salesforce Marketing Cloud in an hour. Not only that, but I am not a designer, and I have to say, it looked pretty good! Being able to immediately launch an experience that captures first party data that can directly affect omni-channel campaigns within Marketing Cloud opens up infinite possibilities for leveling up EVERY company’s game.
TH: What is a unique use case that Jebbit and AllCloud’s experts can bring to Salesforce customers?
TD: Jebbit enables so much creative freedom to solve problems that it’s impossible to pick a single unique use case. They are as varied as the organizations with which we work, though a common thread is that a consumer’s first touch with a brand is often through their website. That journey from prospect to customer and beyond lives and dies with being able to track and leverage data effectively, often without truly knowing who someone is until they buy. And the regulatory challenges that third party data is going through make first party data even more important now. Another plus is that, aside from intentional or accidental fat-fingering, first party data is always more accurate and you can capture the unique data points that matter to your business that third party enrichment often just doesn’t have.
The challenge here obviously is to create experiences that are unique, fun, and engaging enough for consumers to freely provide insight (aka data) about themselves for the purpose of creating a more fulfilling relationship with the companies from which they buy. Consumers expect a personalized experience regardless of the size and sophistication of the company they are buying from, and Jebbit makes that process easier. It removes the technical challenges and leaves the fun parts of building something delightful for customers.
AllCloud is one of the few system integrators that can boast Platinum level consulting across every cloud in the Salesforce ecosystem. What that means to our clients is that we understand the possibilities and the data orchestration needed to leverage this data across every facet of their organization from marketing and sales to service and back office. Ultimately, this means our clients can have true omni-channel capabilities without having to work with multiple partners.
TH: What’s your advice to organizations looking to deliver more personalized customer experiences and journeys?
TD: Think about what YOU would want to engage with. What would help you as a consumer buy smarter, enjoy your purchases more, and allow you to control the touchpoints you have with the brands from which you buy? Obviously brands need data to do these things effectively, but nobody wants to answer market research questions about themselves. Why do you think those silly BuzzFeed quizzes are so addicting? Because they’re fun and easy!
So whether you are tailoring product selection to what a consumer is looking for or asking them what their perfect vacation is, make sure that you keep that element of delight to ensure the time they spend interacting with your brand amounts to an improved experience, not just your understanding of how to sell them more stuff. Think about how the data you capture can influence and improve every aspect of customer interaction and enable your teams with the facts that make your customers uniquely them.
Start Building Engaging, Powerful Experiences Today
The combination of an engaging experience for consumers that provides valuable data for brands to deliver more personalized outreach is beyond powerful in today’s competitive, experience-driven market. The ability to build these experiences easily and connect that data to mission-critical marketing, sales and service systems is even more potent.
Ready to get started? Contact AllCloud and Jebbit to learn more about how you can make this type of a solution a reality in your organization today.