CDP Institute

Amazon has purchased Selz, a small business ecommerce and marketing system that competes with Shopify.  It’s a logical step on Amazon’s path to world domination.  The deal happened last month but no one noticed until recently.

Here’s more old news: last December, LinkedIn announced Sales Insights, a data enrichment service that pushes information on LinkedIn’s 722 million members to Salesforce and other systems.  It’s still worth reporting given the unique scope of LinkedIn’s data.  As a bonus, the blog post announcing general availability doubles as a primer on how to assemble clean customer data.

A frightening 59% of U.S. sales leaders in this SugarCRM survey say their CRM system is costing them revenue and 61% can’t see all their marketing, sales, and service data.  Figures for UK, Germany, and Australia are a little better.  Also intriguing: despite incomplete data, 89% are already using artificial intelligence and 93% expect to use it more.

B2B CDP Leadspace and data compiler ZoomInfo have announced a strategic partnership that will give Leadspace “platform-level integration” with ZoomInfo data.  Tight integration of third-party data, especially about non-customers, is much more common among B2B CDPs than B2C CDPs.  But you knew that.

PureB2B also compiles business contact and company data for marketers.  They just launched PurePredict, which combines contact-level intent-based content consumption of known individuals; company-level intent based social media behaviors; and domain-level intent based on content consumption by anonymous individuals.  If that’s not enough, the company says it will add other types of intent data in the future.

Obnoxious behavior from Facebook is no surprise but we still should mention that they just blocked their users from all legitimate Australian news sources. Lies are still welcome. It’s part of Facebook’s fight against a proposal that they pay news companies for using the information. Google also dislikes the idea but chose to cut a global deal with News Corp.

Most of the marketing industry has gotten past the denial and anger stages of reacting to Apple’s tighter privacy policies and is moving on to bargaining.  AppsFlyer’s contribution is SK360, which restores some control by collecting campaign information that Apple’s SKAdNetwork sends to ad networks.  AppsFlyer e just announced a further extension, PredictSK, that predicts campaign performance.  Look for other measurement vendors to offer similar support in these trying times.

Email optimization vendor Validity has sorrows of its own: best practices including list hygiene, deliverability optimization, and A/B testing were used less last year than the year before.  High-performing companies were more likely to use most tools although AI was an intriguing exception: it was actually more common among marketers with lower inbox placement rates.

Engagement analytics firm Verint also has some sad news: half the companies it surveyed still feel ill-prepared to handle COVID-related disruptions and 82% expect managing engagement will get harder in 2021.  AI takes some lumps in this survey too: while 78% of companies have made moderate-to-high investment in AI, just 18% report it has been highly useful in managing change.

With COVID infections down in many places and mass vaccinations under way, it might soon be time to start worrying again about AI taking your job.  For example, let’s say your job is to monitor campaign performance in the ClickDimensions marketing platform, which attaches to Microsoft Dynamics 365.  Maybe you should polish up that resume, since ClickDimensions just bought Eletype, which does that automatically and reports its findings through Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Perhaps you analyze prospect information in the Copper CRM system.  They just bought engagement analytics platform Sherlock to do that for you.  The stated goal is to save users work, not to replace them, but that’s just what they would say, isn’t it?

Think you’re safe because you work in healthcare? Think again: Insightin Health combines “medical, clinical, cognitive, and social determinants of health to recommend the next best action for each health plan member” in personalized messages. They just raised a $12 million Series A, bringing total funding to $15.5 million.