CDP Institute

Intent data is also on the menu at ZoomInfo, which has acquired B2B data and solutions vendor EverString. They gain 100 million company records and 70 million professional profiles, including intent signals.

Meanwhile, Gartner has analyzed the tech stacks of 500+ brands and found the most successful marketers prefer best-of-breed product collections over suites and pay careful attention to analytics. They report the average martech stack has 55 products and that leaders are likely to combine CDP with mobile marketing and multi-channel marketing platforms.

How many companies have a CDP? The answer depends on who you ask and how they define it. In this survey for BlueVenn, 63% of respondents said they had one, up from 51% at the start of 2019. You can question the number but it does seem likely that penetration is growing. Another tidbit: 21% said they have integrated, omnichannel customer experience spanning all channels and the entire customer lifecycle. Plenty more here of interest.

We now put most of our privacy news in our separate privacy newsletter. But that won’t come out again until next week and I thought it worth reporting sooner that California Proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), passed in this week’s election. The law adds gives consumers greater control over personal data use, although some think it goes too far.

We’re light on real news today, so I’ll sneak in an invitation to try the CDP Institute’s new Use Case Generator (beta version). It leads you through a structured set of questions and returns a detailed use case suitable for vendor selection, implementation planning, or framing. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Intouch Insight reports that consumers have shifted to online purchasing during that pandemic but now are starting to return to old patterns. Convenience and price are now their highest priorities, while cleanliness has fallen from first place in May 2020 to third place in October.

We have no marketing news worth discussing today, so let’s look at some surveys. We’ll start with this Zeta Global report that found marketing budgets have shifted towards digital channels during the pandemic, and that the loss of third-party cookies makes it harder to target ads. Zeta’s conclusion is that cross-publisher customer IDs based on first-party data are essential, and that CDPs will play a critical role.

Meanwhile, Salesforce reports that most customers (74%) use multiple channels to complete transactions and 76% expect consistent interactions across all channels. But fewer than half say they feel different company departments share information needed to serve them consistently. Obvious but still scary: 61% feel they’ve lost control over their personal information, up from 46% in 2019.

It would be fitting to round out this issue with Quad’s announcement of a new direct mail platform, but the core feature – merging mail streams from several companies to reduce postage – is quite modest and I doubt you care, Dear Reader.

Marketing automation platform Selligent has been purchased by CM Group, which owns other email companies including Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Delivra. The deal adds AI capabilities to the CM Group portfolio and will enable Selligent to expand mobile messaging, analytics, and real-time personalization. Selligent was owned by private equity firm HGGC, which bought it in 2015.

Email is apparently a hot investment right now. Email creation platform Stensul just raised a $16 million Series B, bringing total funding to $23 million. It seems odd that there’s a market for a stand-alone email builder, but, apparently, there are enough enterprise marketers wanting a best-of-breed solution to keep Stensul growing.

Two major trends in the CDP industry have been emergence of industry specialists and of CDPs built into operational platforms. Right on cue, ticketing platform TicketIQ has launched FanIQ, which creates unified customer profiles and markets against them. Whether it’s a CDP depends on whether other systems can also access its data. FanIQ also taps into TicketIQ’s 40 million user profiles, matching yet another trend: integration of third party prospect lists.