What is the best solution to setup an enterprise system to manage customer profiles and integrate with multi-channel marketing providers?

The crux of the challenge is really about having a consolidated data warehouse where you can tie customer profile to an integrated view of the customer activity with as close to real time feeds coming into it from the various customer touch points.  If you have it, then linking up with various marketing provider solutions, be it Unica, Aprimo, etc. becomes a relatively straight forward matter where you leverage that 360 customer view as the foundation of the marketing software to do its magic. Most companies do not have this consolidated data view.  Even for many small and medium sized companies, many of the data warehouses likely grew up organically over time to support various operational functions, and what you end up with is a fragmented view of the customer.  So the question is really about your data environment vs. the marketing solution that you put on top of it. Do you make the traditional investment in a big data warehouse type solution offered by Oracle, Teradata and such or do you make an effort to offload all of that data into the SaaS type provider such as http://Salesforce.com. And there may also be hybrid solutions. There are pros/cons to all these choices of course.  To answer marketing questions such as 'cost per acquisition' or 'multi-touch attribution', the first set of questions should really be about whether you even have good definitions for what a customer is, what a lead is, and whether your data environment actually supports those business definitions.  Because if the underlying data environment isn't robust enough to support the attempts to answer such questions, then you should first invest in building that foundation.  Then invest in the marketing software to run the campaigns.

I found a relevant answer from a related question.  Thanks

The "standard" approach is to integrate a CRM solution (e.g. http://Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Siebel, NetSuite) with a digital marketing solution (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, Pardot). Use the CRM system as the master system for customer and prospect relationship information (track sales, service, and marketing activities). Use the digital marketing solution for managing your suspect and prospect database, email campaigns, web form submits, and eventually most web visits. Implement scoring in the digital marketing system to automatically rank suspects and elevate them to prospects based on the level of engagement with your company. Implement drip campaigns in your marketing automation system to push suspects through your funnel. Augment traditional email marketing and web traffic information with social media engagement. Tightly integrate the 2 systems to alert reps of customer and prospect activities, and keep your digital marketing system in sync for customer statuses etc. A customer needs to be marketed to, targeted for upsell campaigns etc. Finally, create your own financial reports to calculate your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and other financial metrics. You can concentrate financial info in your CRM system by accurately tracking all campaign costs in your CRM system.

I have worked on both consulting and the usage side of the pyramid and have been a part of implementations of Siebel CRM, Infor Epiphany and SAP CRM with clients, however I have not come across any solution that was as easy to use as Unica. If you are a non-techy and want to use the simplest GUI for creating campaigns, defining segments, executing campaigns across multi channels and also closing the loop with response tracking and then reusing the responses as segments for future communications, then Unica is the best solution available in the market. No wonder, Unica has been a market leader for last 8 years in the Enterprise Marketing Management space.

You can take a look at our app called http://www.Tropical.io It's pretty simple, you connect all the apps you use daily for your marketing, sales, and helpdesk and we will generate a unified customer profile. The profile includes contact information, important insights about the customer, and a timeline of interaction between the lead and your company. We integrate multiple third-party apps such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Shopify, and 50+ more... Here are all the details about our customer profile: http://www.tropical.io/features/customer-profile

You can manage all your campaigns, your budget and calendar in one integrated online package called Orbis MRM from http://www.orbisglobal.com/ This is true Marketing Resource Management - this is really what you are looking for when you say "core infrastructure".

Pardot Marketing Automation is a certified partner and offers out of the box integration with multiple CRM systems including http://Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and NetSuite. By doing this, you can tag every prospect to their lead source and follow them all the way through the closed won opportunity. In turn, showing you the cost per acquisition or ROI. http://www.pardot.com/partners/technology-partners.html

we chose to go with Custom Scripting Solutions: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdyKoFZVeJEVR0jcw3RtTx1XFakoYnvFe We did because it doesn't require API interaction and Twitter, Facebook, Youtube ... Pinterest .. can't tell youre using it.

I worked for someone who didn't trust anything but index cards. That was a long time ago, but it was still a very unusually way even back then.