Everything you need to know about SAP’s new CRM product: C/4HANA

SAP SE (NYSE:SAP) today fulfilled its ambition to disrupt the marketplace for customer relationship management (CRM) with the formal introduction of a new suite of applications, SAP C/4HANA, to help businesses serve and retain customers. SAP also announced the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the industry’s first comprehensive data management solution that enables companies to turn data sprawl into business value.

The announcement was made by SAP CEO Bill McDermott at the company’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

SAP C/4HANA is an integrated offering designed to modernize the sales-only focus of legacy CRM solutions. Following the completed acquisitions of market leaders Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud, SAP now ties together solutions to support all front-office functions, such as consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.

“SAP was the last to accept the status quo of CRM and is now the first to change it,” McDermott said. “The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain.”

Building on the company’s reputation as an end-to-end business solutions provider, the new SAP C/4HANA suite will offer full integration with SAP’s business applications portfolio, led by its market-leading ERP suite, SAP S/4HANA. The combination of assets features new machine learning capabilities from SAP Leonardo, a set of intelligent technologies the company introduced last year, as well as the new SAP HANA Data Management Suite, which enables companies to gain visibility and control of their highly distributed data. The company’s overall strategy, focused on helping businesses run as intelligent enterprises, highlights the demand for a balanced approach to automation in the workplace.

Expanding its customer service solutions offerings, SAP also announced it has acquired Switzerland-based Coresystems FSM AG to improve field-service customer experience, especially in the manufacturing, energy, high-tech and telecommunications industries. Coresystems’ platform service provides real-time scheduling for customer-service requests and uses artificial intelligence-powered crowd-service technology. This  broadens the service technician pool to include company employees, freelancers and industry partners to assign the best-qualified technician to each call by taking into account expertise, location and availability of the individual service expert.

These announcements come on the heels of Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect on May 25. The massive regulatory change has caused businesses to take a critical look at their legacy CRM investments.

Managing Data to Reach Customers

All systems rely on data, yet the challenge facing companies today is distributed data — data that is not just in transactional systems but scattered across products, machines and people. It is about data that must be ingested, prepared and made enterprise relevant. SAP HANA Data Management Suite enables enterprises to turn massive amounts of data — both structured and unstructured — into valuable, usable knowledge, no matter where it resides. SAP HANA Data Management Suite allows customers to maximize the potential of their data safely, simply and efficiently.

More About SAP C/4HANA

The SAP C/4HANA portfolio includes SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud (including the acquired Gigya solutions) and SAP Sales Cloud (including the acquired CallidusCloud solutions). Additionally, SAP Sales Cloud unites the SAP Hybris Revenue Cloud solution and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (comprised of SAP Hybris Sales Cloud and SAP Hybris Service Cloud solutions).

These cloud solutions — formerly on the market under the SAP Hybris brand name — as well as SAP’s commerce and customer engagement organization are now consolidated under the SAP Customer Experience business unit to support a consistent brand experience.

Hybris Marketing Cloud: How to prevent contacts from getting the same email from the same Campaign

You want to send Campaign Emails only once to each contact. For example, there is an Welcoming Email Campaign that runs daily (recurring campaign). The requirement is that only the New contacts get the Welcome Email.

Solution

1. Create a Campaign first without a TG. Let’s say the Campaign number is 10.
2. Create a Segmentation Model and a Dynamic Target Group. Let’s say for example, you want to send welcome emails to all Contacts in Canada. So this Dynamic Target Group has all contacts from Canada.
3. Create a Live Target Group just beneath the Dynamic TG with an additional filter “Exclude Campaign 10”. (This is why the Campaign was created first without any Target Group). IMPORTANT: Note that you can only select Campaign ID in segmentation after the campaign is released, so you first have to execute step 4 and 5 and release the campaign. After that, you can select the Campaign ID.
4. Add the Dynamic TG in the Campaign.
5. Add the Live TG in the Filter Condition of the Campaign. This allows the email is sent only to the contacts in the Live TG, which excludes all contacts that already have received an Welcome Email from CPG 10. Therefore, all the contacts that already received the email will not receive the secondary email because they won’t be present in the Live Target Group.

Improve customer engagement with Facebook advertising in Hybris Marketing Cloud

As a marketer one of your objectives can be to improve your customer engagement with Facebook advertising. What if you could select your best customers and create a target audience that is based on these customers and also represent people who show similar behavior? And what if you could deliver only relevant messages to this target audience to improve brand awareness, reach, lead generation and conversion?

Paid advertising on Facebook is one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Most advertisers understand the real value of Facebook Advertising as a way to generate traffic and real business value. More than 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business.

Some figures:

• Over two billion people use Facebook and over 700 million use Instagram every month.
• Over 1.3 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users
• 1 of every 5 minutes people spend on mobile is on Facebook or Instagram.

What are Facebook ads?

Facebook ads are paid messages from businesses that are written in their voice and help reach the people who matter most to them. Advertisers create campaigns that have specific goals, which we call advertising objectives, and they create ads within those campaigns to help them reach those objectives.

For example, a business may create a campaign because they want to get more people to visit their website or webshop. When they create ads within that specific campaign, they’ll choose images, text and an audience that they think will help them get that increase in visitors.

The following objectives are available within Facebook:

• Awareness: Objectives that generate interest in your product or service
• Consideration: Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it.
• Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.

How to target the right people?

To target the people who are right for your business, you can use the information that is available about your customer(s), such as interests and behaviours, to choose your audience on Facebook.

In Hybris Marketing Cloud it is possible to select your best customers as a target audience and upload them to a Custom Audience in Facebook. Custom Audiences in Facebook help you find your existing customers and contacts on Facebook. Connecting with the people on Facebook who you are already connected to, can help you improve relationships and drive sales.

Furthermore, after you have created a Custom Audience in Facebook, you can also create a Lookalike Audience based on that. Lookalike Audiences helps you find people on Facebook who are similar to your customers or contacts. It uses the insights you’ve gained from your Facebook marketing and increases your chances of reaching people who might be interested in your business.

How do you setup a Facebook Campaign in Hybris Marketing Cloud?

Let’s say that you are a wintersports company that wants to do a Facebook advertising wintersale campaign on last year’s snowboard collection. For this, you have to carry out the following steps in Hybris Marketing Cloud:

1. Plan your Facebook advertising campaign
2. Build your Facebook advertising campaign by selecting your target audience and creating the Facebook ads campaign
3. Execute your Facebook advertising campaign by uploading your target audience to Facebook and creating your ad in Facebook
4. Monitor and adjust your Facebook advertising campaign to maximize results

* Prerequisite: You already own a Facebook Business Manager account with Facebook and have setup the integration between Hybris Marketing Cloud and Facebook for authentication purposes.

1. Plan your Facebook advertising campaign

Use the Hybris Marketing Cloud Marketing Calendar to plan your campaign at the right time by choosing a timeframe and filter to view which campaigns are currently active and which are planned in the future.

2. Build your Facebook advertising campaign

Select your target audience for the Facebook advertising campaign by selecting your best customers in Hybris Marketing Cloud via the Profile Dashboard.

In the Profile Dashboard you can analyze contact data to determine the interests of certain groups of contacts, the sentiments related to these interests, and the channels in which the contacts are active. You can also directly create Target Groups or Segmentation Models from within the Profile Dashboard.

Select your target audience by choosing a specific Timeframe (Q3-Q4 2017), Country (Germany), Interest (‘Snowboarding’ for our wintersale) and preferred communication channel (Social).

Now you have selected your target audience, you can create a target group. Choose the ‘Create Target Group icon on the right top of the screen to create the target group for your Facebook advertising campaign (for example ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’).

Choose ‘Save and Open’ to go to your created Target Group and ‘Release’ it.

Now, you want to create the Facebook Campaign in Hybris Marketing Cloud to send your selected target audience (Target Group) to Facebook as a Custom Audience. Go to the ‘Campaigns’ app, select ‘Create’ and choose ‘Facebook Campaign’ as campaign type.

Define a name and description (Wintersale Facebook Campaign) for your Facebook advertising campaign and select Facebook ads as Category. Also, select the previously created Target group ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’ and choose ‘Create’.

The flow-based campaign designer is opened and here it is possible to maintain general details for the Facebook advertising campaign, such as Schedule time (Immediate) and Frequency (Recurring), Media type (Social), Priority (High), Interests and Tags.

After the general settings we choose the Facebook campaign action block in the flow-based campaign designer to choose the Facebook advertiser account we want to use and our Objective for this campaign (Reach).

Choose ‘Authenticate’ to authenticate yourself with Facebook.

After a few seconds, authentication with Facebook Ads is carried out successfully.

Choose ‘Done’ to close the flow-based campaign designer.

3. Execute your Facebook advertising campaign

Choose ‘Start’ to execute the campaign and send your target audience to Facebook to create a Custom Audience for your Facebook Ads campaign.

How does this work?

Facebook users are identified by email addresses or phone numbers. Before the transfer to Facebook, data is hashed (one-way encrypted) so that personal data can not be traced. This is also in the context of the new GDPR privacy law which will be effective as from May 2018. In Facebook the hashed values are matched to known email addresses and telephone numbers and corresponding Facebook users are added to the Custom Audience.

Go to Facebook by clicking on the ‘Custom Audience on Facebook’ or ‘Campaign on Facebook’ tile in the campaign and login with your business manager account. Check if your just uploaded target audience is created as Custom Audience ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’ in Facebook Ads.

Within this section it is also possible to create Lookalike Audience(s) in Facebook, based on the Custom Audience.Now, we want to create our Facebook ad. Therefore go to the Ads Manager via the Facebook menu and choose ‘Use existing campaign’ to select the just created ‘Wintersale Facebook campaign’.

Within the Ad configuration, section Ad set, you choose the created Custom Audience ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’. If created, it is also possible to select the Lookalike Audience(s) and you can select the Location(s) to show your Facebook Ad.

Final step of Ad creation is creating the Ad which will be shown in Facebook.
It is possible to add only text or also use photo or video content. After your satisfied on how the Ad looks in the preview, you choose ‘Confirm’ to start the Facebook Advertising Campaign in Facebook.

Monitor and adjust your Facebook Advertising Campaign

While your Facebook Ad campaign is running or after it has finished, it is possible to check the success within the campaign. Therefore go to the ‘Success’ tab in the specific Facebook Advertising campaign to check the KPI’s such as: Reach, Impressions, Likes and Costs and use this information to improve the results of your campaigns.
It is also possible to view the pre-delivered Facebook campaign operational report ‘Campaign Success for Facebook’ in SAP Analytics Cloud to analyze multiple campaigns at once. This report is available via button ‘Analyze’ in Campaign app.

Enjoy creating your own Facebook Advertising campaigns in Hybris Marketing Cloud and stay tuned for more on building and executing highly effective marketing campaigns in Hybris Marketing Cloud.

Hybris Marketing Content Studio: Not able to create Email Templates, Emails, Confirmations and Text Messages

The Hybris Marketing Content Studio does allow to create Landing Pages only but no Emails, Confirmations, Email Templates and Text Messages.

Reproducing the Issue

1. Log on to Fiori Launchpad in Hybris Marketing or S/4 Hana Marketing Cloud environment.
2. Open the Content Studio App.
3. There is Landing Pages Content available but no Emails, Confirmations, Email Templates, nor Text Messages.
4. Creating new Content does allow to created Langing Pages only. There is no option to create Emails, Confirmations, Email Templates, nor Text Messages.
   

Cause

There is some Campaign Communications related Configuration missing. Emails and Text Messages require a Sender Profile to be sent out – if there is no Sender Profile available in the System the option to create Email Content and Text Messages is not available.

Resolution

SAP Hybris Marketing On-Premise Installation:

1. Maintain connection to the Email or Text Message Provider in the Provider Configuration using the following Customizing path:

   SAP Hybris Marketing > Campaigns > Campaign > Define Provider Configuration

2. Create a Sender Profile for the Provider Configuration using the following Customizing path:

   SAP Hybris Marketing > Campaigns > Campaign > Define Sender Profile

For testing the configuration there is the check report CUAN_MKT_EXEC_CHECK_CONFIG available. Further information about the test report and how to handle the check result is available with the following SAP note: 2375193 – Errorhandling of campaign execution issues

S/4HANA Marketing Cloud:

1. Create Communication Arrangement for the predefined Campaign Execution Scenario for the relevant for the predefined Email or Text Message Provider. This is done in the Communication Arrangements App available in the Communication Management.

   
   The following Communication Scenarios are available in the standard Content:

   SAP_COM_0016  Marketing – Campaign Execution Amazon SES Integration (together with SAP_COM_0039  Marketing – Campaign Execution Amazon E-Mail Bounce Integration)
   SAP_COM_0040  Marketing – Campaign Execution SAP Mobile Services Email Integration
   SAP_COM_0041  Marketing – Campaign Execution SAP Mobile Services SMS Integration

2. Maintain the Access Key in the Provider Credentials for the Email and Text Message Service Provider and Maintain the Sender Profiles using the Provider Credentials App and the Sender Profiles App available in the Segmentation and Campaign Configuration.

   

How to create response e-mail templates in Hybris Marketing / S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

SAP S/4HANA Marketing Cloud allows you to design and send highly personalized, dynamic and device independent e-mails.
You can:

• Manage responsive e-mail templates to enforce layout and corporate identity.
• Design, test and upload HTML templates from external editors
• Restrict layout editing by E-Mail authors
• E-Mail Editor with text formatting, tables pictures, links etc.
• Simplified and flexible search and linking of pictures in Digital Asset Management (DAM), Web Content Management (WCMS) or Product Catalog Management (PCM) like Hybris Commerce or OpenText (only in private cloud or onpremise)
• Tracking of events like open mail, click link etc. directly in S/4HANA Marketing Cloud

The responsiveness of a mail template is controlled by an inline CSS which provides styles which determine how text, pictures and tables behave on the various mail clients and form factors.

Here you can download the source code of responsive HTML mail templates. You can use it as a starting point for building your own mail templates or just to test the responsive mailing capabilities of SAP Hybris Marketing and S/4HANA Marketing Public/Private Cloud.

• Fashion and retail template
• Sports and enteratinment template

SAP Hybris Marketing – Execute Facebook campaigns

As from release 0611 it is also possible to execute Facebook campaigns, in SAP hybris Marketing, with ad spend visible as a key figure in the charts of the detailed spend planning application

With this feature, when you are executing Facebook campaigns, ad spend is now visible as a key figure in the charts of Detailed Spend Planning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further enhancements include:

New Campaign User Interface (UI)

You are now provided with a new campaign UI to create and access your campaigns. To open it choose ‘Campaigns’ under ‘Campaign Management’.
From here, you create a new campaign using the plus sign (+) on the right and then choose the required campaign in the popup:

• Blank Campaign opens the previous UI. From here, you have access to all campaign categories.

• Email Campaign opens the new campaign UI for an email campaign that enables you to design your campaign by dragging and dropping the required triggers and actions to the corresponding places.

• Facebook Campaign opens the exisisting Facebook Campaign UI (see above).

• Paid Search opens the existing Paid Search campaign UI.

• Transfer Leads opens the existing Transfer Leads campaign UI.

• Trigger-Based opens the new campaign UI for a trigger-based campaign.

Managing Email Templates, Emails and Text Messages

The following new functions are available:

• You can now create content for messages (emails, confirmation emails or text messages) in different languages. This enables a marketer to send messages in different languages in a single campaign. If no matching content is available, content in the default language is used.

• You can now insert product recommendations in emails.

 

The future of CRM: SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C)

The demand for CRM solutions is large. The worldwide market for 2015 estimate the Gartner analysts to 26.3 billion dollars – by far the largest segment of the software market. Many companies have some catching up and increasingly asking service providers and manufacturers. With the trend away from on-premise licenses to cloud services should especially Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics benefit – one might think: SAP has however used the grace of late birth and sail the competition with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C).

In autumn 2015, SAP announced a revolutionary solution with C4C which goes far beyond the classic CRM addition, thanks to digital networking through social media analysis, customer service and support. Industry experts and IT managers were skeptical that promises were dismissed as pure marketing measures. But SAP is keeping its word and continuously published four times a year a version with extended functionality, the standardized supports new processes.

Meanwhile SAP C4C mastered the high customer demands and has grown into one of the most advanced cloud-based CRM systems on the market. As the cloud dominates about half of the CRM market and software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in 2015 recorded an increase of 27 percent, the solution captures the spirit of the time. Since it is hardly surprising that SAP ERP can be SAP 6.0 with sophisticated on-premise processes run for CRM and the successor S / 4hana it has hardly innovative and efficient functionality.

Instead, SAP focused on the cloud and should convince even the last skeptics so. For the CRM in the cloud is to SAP C4C safely. SAP operates the application as a public or private cloud in their own data center and transmits the data encrypted. Concerns about IT security and the loss of business-critical data thus belong to the past.

The competitors in the CRM market have long jumped on the train: Salesforce CRM is built exclusively on the cloud and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are the first two releases of new versions only in the cloud. Since it does not matter that the on-premise deployment of the software is optional. In short: On the cloud passes no way in CRM.