This Digiday/Wiland survey is mostly about using external data to enhance customer files. It turns out that 57% of companies do it, two-thirds use four or more sources, and 17% use ten or more sources. But the news I found most interesting is that 30% of brands have built their own ID resolution system and another 22% plan to build one. Apparently it’s okay to try this at home.
While U.S. anti-trust regulators keep losing ground, European regulators are growing more feisty. The latest blow came from Spain, where the competition watchdog CNMC has fined Apple and Amazon a combined $218 million for limiting Apple resellers on Amazon Spain. While the stated purpose was to reduce sale of counterfeit goods, the CNMC found the result was to restrict competition among authorized sellers and from competing non-Apple products.
PLG fans rejoice: while product-led growth has received less attention recently than it had been, this Openview report offers lots of interesting data on the topic. Most eye-opening was that PLG is actually a minor source of new customers: the report puts it at 5%, compared with 32% from organic search, another 32% from sales, and 17% from paid marketing.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.