CDP Institute

CDP Amperity is working to help companies cope with the “cookie-less future”.  They’ve added integrations with the Unified ID 2.0 identity standard and the Throtle identity and data onboarding service.  Unified ID 2.0 converts customer email addresses into a hashed email (or HEM, as the cool kids call it).  This enables individual-level ad targeting and tracking with partners who have captured the same email address.

You weren’t too interested in yesterday’s acquisition stories, Dear Reader, so you probably don’t care that email provider Pathwire, which owns Mailgun and Mailjet, just bought email preview and testing company Email on Acid.  But any company that is cool enough to name itself Email on Acid deserves a mention.

Cloud database Snowflake gets a lot of attention as a CDP platform. They just announced planned features to make it easier to sell data in their Data Marketplace,  to detect and tag personally identifiable information, and to create anonymized analytical data views. All helpful for CDP users. Release dates are not set.

B2B data and solutions vendor ZoomInfo is buying Insent, a chat system that also identifies visitors, routes them in real time to the right account owner, and can schedule future conversations.  It’s the company’s fourth acquisition since DiscoverOrg bought ZoomInfo in February 2019 and adopted the ZoomInfo name the following September.

Email services company iContact is expanding into search engine marketing with the purchase of Moz.  iContact is owned by J2 Global, which owns dozens of companies including email providers Campaigner, Communicator, SMTP, and Kickbox.

Big Tech is under attack from many directions these days.  The latest blow was landed in France, which reached an $268 million anti-trust settlement with Google that also requires changes to give competing ad platforms equal access to Google’s ad server and Ad-X ad exchange.  Critics felt the fine was too small to matter.

Switching to cheerier news, this Rackspace study finds that a mix of business and IT managers ranked improved customer experience as their top strategic priority, ahead of security, digital transformation, and cost savings.   Personalization was close to the bottom on the list of CX application benefits; top benefits included 24×7 availability, demonstrating security, and greater engagement.

This Forrester study for Teradata and Celebrus also addresses CX technology.  Most interesting findings are that more companies have personalization tools (49%) than customer data management systems (39%), and more have next-best experience and real time decision engines (31%) than basic customer analytics (23%).  Apparently that crawl-walk-run thing isn’t as popular as you thought.

It’s a bit of a potpourri today, Dear Reader.  Here’s a report from 360iResearch that estimates the global CDP market at $1.7 billion in 2021, growing to $5.3 billion by 2026.   They offer breakouts by CDP type, enterprise size, vertical, region, and more, although it’s hard to imagine how they’d find that out.  Price is $4,207.

Amplitude calls itself a “digital optimization system”, which could mean almost anything.  In fact, they collect customer-level behaviors and product data, and use it to identify opportunities, build personalized messages, and  track near- and long-term results.  They just added an A/B testing module that draws on the same data, which lets it do much more than standard A/B tests.

Here’s an effort to save by the planet by discarding old emails, which are wasting resources by taking up storage space.   The idea is to put an expiration date on commercial emails, since few people will ever look at them more than a few days after they’re sent.  I’m pretty sure they’re serious, although it might be a subtle joke.

We have a tasty mix of investment news today, Dear Reader.  First is pricing of marketing tech, data, and services vendor (and CDP) Zeta Global’s previously-announced IPO, which proposes to raise $250 million for a market cap of $2 billion or so.  It’s a fairly modest 5x revenue, which will be around $400 million.