Lest we neglect Salesforce and Microsoft: those two have expanded their relationship by moving the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. The switch will improve performance, enhance scalability, and reduce deployment times. Not that those were problems. The companies also plan to connect Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams.
How confused is everyone (except you, Dear Reader) about CDPs? This Forrester survey of marketing and sales leaders found that 89% of say they have a CDP but just 11% are actually creating a unified customer profile, which is the core CDP function. Better news: those 11% are 3.4x more likely to report double-digit revenue growth than everyone else. Lots of great info here.
Self-updating CRM files and hands-free integration pipelines may seem magical, but the real miracle would be connecting marketing programs to business results. Mobivity is addressing that challenge with a new feature that assigns a unique, customer-specific ID to marketing promotions and then captures the ID when a promotional offer is redeemed. The offers can be delivered by Mobivity’s own text messages or receipt-printed promotions or shared through external channels.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).