Salesforce is warming up for next week’s Dreamforce conference with a bundle of product announcements. Today it focused on Customer 360, which makes unified customer profiles available for applications across the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Clouds. That may sound like a CDP, but don’t be confused: the Salesforce CDP still exists as part of the Marketing Cloud. On second thought, it’s okay to be confused.
The real work in building a CDP is assembling the customer profiles, whether they reside in a data warehouse or a separate CDP database. This hasn’t prevented reverse ETL vendor HIghtouch from championing “composable CDP” to help sell its data extraction tool. They’ve just added some features to make their extracts more useful to marketers, including abilities to split an audience into test segments and to profile audience members.
Amazon has several new tools for companies that sell on its platform. These include a Buy with Prime page within brand storefronts on Amazon, customizable Sponsored Brand ads, co-branded ads on Facebook and Instagram, and free email promotions to repeat, recent, and high-spend customers. But it’s not all wine and roses in Seattle: California just filed an anti-trust suit over Amazon pricing policies.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.