Adventure! Drama! Comedy! You won’t find any of those in the news that Walmart has expanded its third-party Web marketplace to include Shopify merchants. But it’s still a reminder of Walmart’s continued development as an Amazon alternative.
Ah, some straight up news for a change: Account Based Marketing vendor Demandbase has bought Account Based Marketing vendor Engagio. There’s some overlap but enough difference for the deal to make sense.
Other industries haven’t been as severely disrupted as retail, so it makes sense that under two-thirds of senior business and IT executives from a broad range of industries told Telstra that COVID-19 had changed their organizations forever. Interesting regional disparities: 63% of European companies said they expect to close branches or reduce headquarters offices compared with just 40% of U.S. and North Asian respondents. And U.S. companies were more likely to than others to prioritize cost over revenue as their main digital transformation goal.
Netherlands-based retention management platform Retail Rocket just raised a $24 Million Series A, and immediately spent some of it to buy Sailplay, a New York-based marketing automation vendor that will grow its U.S. presence. Retail Rocket builds unified customer profiles in a module it charmingly calls Data Warehouse, and has other modules for AI-driven personalization, segmentation, and campaign management. The company has more than 1,000 global clients across Europe and South America.