In cheerier news, high-touch retailer Nordstrom has purchased two customer technology companies: mobile clienteling app BevyUp and messaging-based e-commerce system MessageYes. The deal is apparently as about adding expert staff as much as using the specific products.
Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.
More bad news: GlobalWebIndex found personalized Web site recommendations ranked a dismal 17th on the list of product discovery sources. Ray of hope: they were ahead of ads in movie theaters. Most cited sources were search engines, TV, and word of mouth.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)