CDP Institute

The email industry continues to consolidate. Mailgun, which sold a majority stake to private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, is buying Mailjet. Each firm brings more than 100,000 customers to the deal, but Mailgun is more of an API-driven engine for developers while Mailjet offers a complete user interface.

Open source data analytics platform Databricks has raised a $400 million Series F, bringing its total funding to just under $900 million. The deal values Databricks at $6.2 billion, an astonishing 30x its $200 million revenue run rate. By comparison, Salesforce paid less than 20x for Mulesoft. Yes, there’s a big world of data management software outside of CDPs.

Mastercard is buying SessionM, which combines a CDP with a loyalty system. It extends Mastercard’s growing suite of data-driven marketing services for retailers and other brands. The deal joins Treasure Data/Arm, Lattice Engines/Dun & Bradstreet, Mintigo/Anaplan, Radius Intelligence/Kabbage, and Allsight/Informatica as examples of a CDP purchased by a company outside the usual set of martech suppliers.

Established martech vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle have mostly chosen to build their own CDPs. Teradata, which also has a long history in martech, is doing the same with new CDP called Vantage Customer Experience. The cloud-based system adds identity management, activation, predictions and decisioning to Teradata’s Vantage analytical data management platform. General availability is set for early next year.

Like other martech outsiders, the big ad holding companies have bought customer data expertise: see Merkle/Dentsu, Acxiom/IPG, and Epsilon/Publicis. WPP’s Wunderman Thompson has plenty of customer data experience – the late Lester Wunderman coined the term “direct marketing” in 1967 – but they still aren’t building their own systems. Instead, they’ve just announced a deal to use Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP within their Customer Cloud platform.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern in the Department of the Obvious. The boss has no news today so it’s my turn. Let’s start with a study that finds shipping is important to online shoppers. ShipStation found that 96% of consumers consider shipping when buying and 88% say a bad shipping experience makes them less likely to buy again. I wonder what a bad experience does to the other 12%.

Next we have research from Asana showing that much office time is non-productive. They found 60% of time is spent on coordination, such as communications, searching for information, and managing priorities, compared with just 26% on skilled tasks. Taking the obvious up a notch, people say that most meetings are unnecessary and they spent a lot of time reading email.

Winning this week’s Ne Plus Obvious Award (which I just invented), a Princeton University study that found internet-connected TVs track customer data. They found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire channels – and that lots of the data could be linked to specific individuals. Maybe that’s not literally obvious, since the notifications are well hidden, but if you’re surprised then you haven’t been paying attention.

One of my favorite themes these days is that marketers focus on personalization while consumers want value.  Let’s add some wood to that fire with this Oracle Retail study, which found that consumers rate convenience as the most important part of a great in-store experience (56%), ranking experience far behind at 37%. Yet retailers prioritize them equally: experience 35% vs. convenience 34%.

This Merkle study on loyalty programs plays a variation of the same tune: 64% of consumers said they want prizes that make their lives easier while just 36% want something that makes them feel special. They’re also getting more impatient: 46% said in 2018 that they’re prefer a $50 prize now to a $75 prize in four to six weeks, compared with just 35% in 2018.

And you know those sophisticated marketing technologies you’ve been struggling to deploy, including cross-device campaigns, chatbot access to shopping behavior and customer service interactions, and social media ads based on visits to other sites? Accenture Interactive found consumers consider them four of the five creepiest things you can do. The only thing that’s creepier is receiving an ad for something you only talked about near a voice assistant.

Bluecore may qualify as a CDP but they’re a plain-spoken folk who just call themselves a “retail marketing technology company”.  Keeping in character, their just-launched Website personalization module is Bluecore Site. The new module works with Bluecore’s existing email product to coordinate customer treatments across both channels. The email product is unexpectedly called Bluecore Communicate.