CDP Institute

Ascend2 took a look at the state of marketing automation and found that just 20% of respondents feel they are using their system to its full potential.  Lack of training (39%), resources (32%) and budget (31%) were the most cited obstacles, ranking well ahead of poor integration (16%), missing features (14%) and decentralized data (14%).  This doesn’t mean integration is a solved problem: just 7% of respondents said their marketing automation is fully integrated with other systems and 29% said it’s mostly integrated.

This Third Door Media / MarTech survey found 67% of organizations replaced at least one marketing tool in the past year, with marketing automation (24%), email distribution (23%) and CRM (23%) at the top of the list.  Interesting, but there’s no baseline of how many had each type of system in the first place.  Just over half said getting better features was the main reason for replacement – far outpacing cost.  About 30% of the replacement systems were home grown.  Download for more on decision time, upgrade champions, Covid impact,... Read More >

This just in from Lake Wobegon: two-thirds (68%) of respondents to this Lucidpress survey said they’re confident that most of their company’s content is relevant, even though only 32% find other companies are sending relevant content to them. Possibly related: 27% consistently measure the ROI of the content they create. Just 32% say more than half their content is personalized.

Headless commerce makes it easier to deploy custom ecommerce front-ends by providing the underlying processing technology. It’s an important trend but there’s too much happening to cover in depth.  So here are some headlines to give you a flavor: Shopistry has integrated with the Square payments platform and joined its App Marketplace.  Fast Simon has expanded its Shopify integration with  a new shopping optimization tools.  OneView Commerce has made its transaction engine available on Microsoft Azure.   You get the idea.

Conversational analytics is another growing space. The latest news there is that contact center AI vendor Observe.AI bought ScopeAI, which automatically extracts insights from chat, email, and social conversations.  Related items we’ve already reported include: ZenDesk’s purchase of Cleverly, Level AI’s launch with $15 million funding, Involve.AI’s $16 million Series A, and Verint’s purchase of Conversocial.

Messaging platforms are also hot, although I have just one item today: Netherlands-based Trengo has raised a $36 million Series A. Trengo combines customer and employee communications across multiple messaging channels, so it also plays in the equally-hot collaboration platform space.

Let’s do surveys today, Dear Reader.  Adobe offers a plethora of fun facts.  Sixty percent of personalization use cases rely on third-party cookies but just 37% of marketers feel ready for the cookieless future.  More consumers would share data in exchange for seeing no ads (55%) than for personalized experiences (53%) or free online services (39%).  Just 37% of marketers have real-time access to a central customer record.   Even more fun: only 28% with a central customer record said their CDP could read it, suggesting central customer data often sits... Read More >

This Forrester study for IBM found that 71% of senior adtech managers are exploring privacy-friendly data sets as a way of coping with cookie deprecation.  This compares with just 49% trying to build trust to improve voluntary sharing, even though the group said loss of consumer trust is the biggest problem with new privacy rules.  Nearly all agreed that personalization expectations are rising (91%), that privacy makes personalized advertising harder (87%), and that privacy regulations put traditional targeting and tracking methods at risk (87%).  Privacy-safe targeting was the most-cited use... Read More >

PwC found that marketing leaders say martech is their highest priority for the next twelve months (43%), ranking just ahead of customer experience, personalization, and loyalty (39%).  Data privacy straggled in sixth at 29%.   When asked about planned operational changes, the group put better content management first (54%), followed closely by increased use of technology (51%), improved data management for personalization (49%), and first-party data strategies (46%).

Sitecore has continued its acquisition spree with the purchase of ecommerce site search platform Reflektion.  The company already calls itself the “global leader in digital experience management software”, so perhaps this makes it the galactic leader.  It’s Sitecore’s fourth acquisition this year, following the Boxever CDP, Four51 ecommerce engine, and Moosend email platform.

Account-based marketing platform 6sense makes no claim to galactic dominance, but its home page headline “Know everything so you can do anything” carries its own whiff of excess.  Returning to reality, they just bought Fortella, which offers pipeline planning, forecasting and measurement tools.  Readers with a long memory or Crunchbase account will recall that 6sense bought B2B CDP ZenIQ back in 2018.

This survey by Aberdeen for Reltio is three-kitten irresistible since it measures the value of unified customer data.  TLDR: companies with unified customer data are more successful than the rest in oh so many ways.  Download for deets.