Small businesses love all-in-one sales, service, and marketing applications because they avoid the integration challenges of sharing data across separate systems. Salesforce has jumped into that ring with Starter, an all-in-one package that includes all sorts of templates and AI-powered optimization tools to make life easier still for resource-poor SMBs. Pricing starts at $25 per user per month.
It’s not just marketers who are worried about the impact of tech. This Utimaco survey of global consumer attitudes found that 41% believe a connected world would make life easier but a substantial 34% disagreed. U.S. consumers were even more pessimistic, with more thinking a connected world would be bad (39%) than good (37%). Just 19% of respondents said they don’t worry about data security.
A best-of-breed data quality monitoring tool is about as far as you can get from an all-in-one sales, service, and marketing platform, but there’s room in the market for both. Lightup offers a no-code data monitoring system which may democratize the process to some degree, but still will call for technically knowledgeable users. They just raised a $9 million Series A, which brings total funding to $20.7 million.
Traffic to ecommerce websites fell 1% year-on-year while ecommerce app sessions rose 13%, according to Similarweb. Shopper experience still needs improvement: 41% of shoppers feel like strangers to their favorite retailers and only 20% see frequent personalization. Convenience is king: 55% say they’d pay more to find the right item without scrolling through several pages of results.