CDP Institute

CDP vendor BlueVenn surveyed marketers and consumers. They found that 86% of marketers feel they need to collect as much information as possible for maximum success but 81% actually collect only data that is “strictly necessary”. Consumers are even more confused: 70% find personalized advertising “creepy” while 63% find personalized recommendations useful and 83% hate irrelevant advertising. Plus other interesting tidbits.

Zeta Global (formerly Zeta Interactive, formerly XL Marketing) has raised $115 million in equity and $25 million in debt financing, bringing its total past $250 million since 2007. The company provides a a SaaS-based marketing cloud supported by strategy, creative, execution, and analytics services. Acquisitions have included Acxiom Impact (email) and ClickSquared (multi-channel campaigns).

Cloud-based data visualization vendor Domo has closed a $100 million funding round, making its total almost $700 million. Domo has prebuilt connectors for more than 400 applications and provides basic functions to clean, transform, and combine the data it ingests. Options are available for private clouds, on-premise storage, or federated access (i.e., reading data without importing it). Users can attach visualization apps to the data Domo assembles, but Domo does not provide direct access in the way of a Customer Data Platform. In case you were wondering.

TapClicks offers reporting, visualization, and workflow for marketers and agencies. It has more than 100 prebuilt connectors to advertising, messaging, social, and other systems. The company just bought Raven Tools, another marketing reporting vendor with a tighter focus on digital marketing, site auditing tools for search engine optimization, and a base among smaller clients. TapClicks will keep the Raven Tools brand.

It’s no longer news when a vendor adds artificial intelligence to its products. But you’ll probably still be interested to learn that Oracle has added a slew of AI-based apps to its customer experience solutions. The sales and marketing parts use AI to select the most relevant personalized content for individuals.

Ecommerce personalization vendor Dynamic Yield has launched a new product that supports mobile Web sites. The system builds unified customer profiles, generates product recommendations, and dynamically adjusts mobile page layouts. Dynamic Yield also supports personalization, testing, and segmentation for mobile apps, email, and display advertising. As Dynamic Yield points out, mobile accounts for 60% of online traffic but just 16% of online purchases, mostly due to poor mobile ecommerce experience.

Moveable Ink has added a service to display live prices and inventory information within emails, using data read from client systems when the email is opened. This requires direct integration with back-end systems holding the information. It’s especially relevant for industries with constantly changing prices and availability such as airlines, hotels, and entertainment events. Oh, and retail.

Vendors keep seeking the key to serving the vast majority of small businesses not yet using a marketing automation system.

Lead Liaison’s approach is to add a free CRM to its system, which already offers Web visitor tracking, marketing automation, and Web site personalization. Pricing for all three functions starts at $750 per month for 5,000 contacts. The CRM module is set for general release by mid-summer.

Salesfusion is following the theory that small businesses need support services for key marketing automation tasks. It has just launched a package that combines its software with ten hours per month of template building and campaign execution services. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month for up to 5,000 contacts.

Salesforce.com's worst nightmare just came true: Microsoft is making LinkedIn profiles available directly within Dynamics 365 for Sales.

LinkedIn may be the mother lode but it’s not the only source of profile data. ReachForce has updated its data cleaning and enhancement features to include contact intelligence and easier integration with online form pages. ReachForce integrates with marketing automation (Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, IBM Silverpop and HubSpot), not with sales systems.