Small companies are heavily focused on personalization while bigger ones worry more about identity resolution, according to this Neilsen report. Fewer than 20% of all sizes are very confident they have the right martech, between a quarter and a half plan to increase martech spend in the next year, and bigger companies are much more interested in second party data. Good stuff.
Third party data isn’t dead or even dying: in fact, 78% of companies plan to increase their data acquisition budget in 2021, according to this Explorium study. Demographics, company, financial, and anonymized individual data are the most common purchases, while business intelligence, advanced analytics, and predictive models are almost tied as the most common applications.
Mobile marketing platform Airship has added Live Chat, an option that watches online customers and offers to chat when it spots an opportunity or problem. Triggers can be based on a combination of behavior, location, lifecycle events, and journey status. Customers will be grateful or creeped out, or maybe a bit of both.
Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.