CDP Institute

Looking for email benchmarks instead? Twilio SendGrid has a ton, including open rate (14.5%), click rate (1.6%), and emails per month (8.3). Frequency is a big deal: 54% would unsubscribe from emails if a company mailed them daily – even about products they find interesting. Lots more on the impact of personalization, ideal number of images, optimal copy length, and more.

Want to explore customer experience in general? Take Qualtrics’ self-assessment and compare your results with others in your industry. Plus learn how companies organize their CX efforts, what separates leaders from laggards, and satisfaction by channel. Just the thing to kick off that long winter’s nap.

Nothing too important for you today, Dear Reader, but we do have a few items that reinforce earlier themes. Here, for example, is yet another private equity investment in martech: a €200 million ($222 million) deal by Providence Equity Partners for a majority share in social advertising platform Smartly.io. Okay, it’s adtech not martech but we’ve pretty much stopped making that distinction, right?

We also recently shared a spate of surveys on the B2B buying process. Good times, eh? You can relive the fun with this TrustRadius study, which again finds that buyers want product reviews and demonstrations, not vendor propaganda. Bonus stereotype: those skeptical Millennials rely more on reviews than Boomers, who still place some trust in air-quote experts.

There’s always something to say about privacy. This Integris study should make you even more nervous than usual with news that a single financial services transaction can be replicated across 100 systems, 64% of companies store sensitive personal data in 50 or more systems, and 45% share private data with at least 50 partners. Have a great day!

Private equity investors continue to pour money into customer experience systems. The latest is a $4.3 billion deal to take private LogMeIn, whose products include remote access (LogMeIn), collaboration (join.me) and Webinars (GoToWebinar). The price is less than 4x revenue, astonishingly low for the tech industry.

On a smaller scale but closer to home, Account-Based Marketing vendor Terminus has purchased Sigstr, which puts ad messages into email signatures. Price wasn’t announced but you can bet they paid more than 4x revenue.

Sticking with financial news: integrated business application vendor Odoo just raised $90 million. The deal is a trend trifecta: open source, all-in-one software platforms, and private equity investors. Odoo claims 4.5 million users, most on its free version but some paying for Odoo Enterprise.

The paralyzing complexity of today’s martech landscape has led investors to bet that marketers seek simplicity by buying all-in-one suites. At least, that’s how we read news that private equity-owned Episerver has bought B2B ecommerce firm Insite Software just one month after purchasing the idio recommendation engine. The deal comes just one week after Episerver competitor Acquia expanded its own footprint by buying the AgilOne CDP.

Single-vendor suites weren’t supposed to be needed in a brave new world where integration of separate systems was so simple that “citizen developers” let their grandkids do it for fun on weekends. Apparently it’s harder than that. Hence we see announcements like this one that Lytics has integrated its CDP with the Google Marketing Cloud, making it easy to access Lytics data for segmentation, audience selection, Web analytics, and more.

The data management veterans at Informatica know a thing or two about integration. They’ve just launched a bunch of enhancements to their products, including new controls over privacy-governed data access, AI-based data mapping, and improvements to identity matching, segmentation, and dashboards within their CDP.

Let’s focus on B2B marketing today. We have a very interesting report on Request for Proposal (RFP) management from Loopio. Are you surprised that RFPs account for 27% of software sales revenue vs 41% across all industries? More here on RFP challenges, timelines, and the age-old question: How many SMEs does it take to answer an RFP?