Those nice people at Optimizely are terribly excited about Real-Time Segmentation, their “new, first-of-its-kind offering that allows marketers to segment customers in the moment of engagement to deliver highly relevant, personalized digital experiences.” Exactly what’s different from other real-time personalization products isn’t clear, and you’ll have to wait to judge for yourself: it’s available only in beta to select customers.
Who knew IT folk were so cheerful? Splunk found data innovation leaders are more likely to say they can’t keep up with data growth (67%) than intermediates (41%) or beginners (15%), but are somehow less worried about it: leaders said they use more of their data and do a better job at real-time segmentation and recommendations than the others. Leaders also saw more opportunities to use sales, customer, and transaction data in the future.
Personalization and experimentation vendor AB Tasty is also claiming a first: it just acquired site search and recommendation vendor Epoq, which it says makes it the “first in our class to offer the market a consolidated approach to delivering relevant and consistent digital customer experiences.” The main story here is bundling of experiment-based optimization, recommendations, and search.
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.