Earlier this week, Oracle Netsuite announced that the Bronto marketing platform was assigned End of Life status. It’s official: Bronto is going the way of the dinosaurs.I worked at Bronto Software from 2014 to 2017, and it changed the course of my life and my career. Professionally, I consider it the setting where I “grew up.” It was my second sales job and my first brush with marketing technology. On a personal level, Bronto is where I met my now-husband. It’s where I met some of my closest friends. The culture that Joe Colopy and Chaz Felix built was unique - the epitome of the lightning-in-a-bottle that only comes from combining smart, dedicated people, a cool product, and rapidly-growing industry. But — as it goes in life and in the Martech space — all good things must come to an end. During my time at Bronto, the company was acquired twice. The first time, it was acquired by Netsuite in 2015. Shortly after, in 2016, Oracle acquired Netsuite. The problem with the latter move was that Oracle already had another ESP in its portfolio, Responsys. Suddenly, Bronto went from being a standalone platform to a small part of a robust product suite. The Oracle NetSuite corporate image blotted out the beloved little green dinosaur logo. Product updates and enhancements eventually came to a halt. Meanwhile, the Martech world kept evolving. And while Bronto was once the cutting edge, the lack of investment in the platform post-acquisition led to its becoming obsolete. Anyone paying attention saw this meteor coming for a while.

But there’s a bigger story to tell.

The end of Bronto signals a more exensive extinction — that of the traditional ESP. Back in the cretaceous period (read: early 2000s), email was once the primary communication channel between brands and customers. As more data and new channels became available, and customer experience became just as important as the products you’re offering, email now shares an increasingly crowded stage of communication platforms.Consumers have also changed. Today’s customers expect brands to know all about their needs, preferences, past interactions, and purchases. In fact, research shows that customers are willing to make a long-term trade of personal privacy in exchange for a short-term benefit or convenience, like more relevant promotions, product recommendations, and online shopping experiences.The implications of these trends are twofold: First, though email remains the workhorse of the marketing strategy, omnichannel has become more critical. Marketing messages must now be integrated with other end channels like SMS, mobile push, and paid advertising. Second, marketers need to be able to move at a faster pace, which means they need tools that enable them to access and use all customer data to deliver these highly personalized, cross-channel experiences and drive the results businesses need to grow.The proof of this is in the results. Companies that over-rely on email have already fallen behind those using omnichannel and more data-driven tools. For example, our clients that send automated, personalized abandonment journeys across multiple channels report a 3x higher conversion rate and a 24% increase in open rates than compared to those that send one-off messages.Similarly, Simon clients have reported a 20x overall increase in conversions, in part due to their ability to quickly build custom micro-targeted segments and launch multi-channel campaigns from a single platform.This is why systems that enable real omnichannel experiences have been rapidly winning market share. While the email category has continued to grow, the best tools used to send email nowadays don't only send email.Recommended Read: What's possible when you bring data and end-channels into a single place? Read how Equinox’s CRM Director seamlessly scaled up communications and personalization during COVID.

How to move on from Bronto

Are you a Bronto client that’s now shopping for a new partner? As a Simon employee, I am admittedly biased. However, I do feel passionate about helping frazzled marketers and eCommerce professionals find the right partner and platform that’s going to be able to meet their needs, whether that's Simon or any other platform.I’d encourage you to look at Bronto’s end of life as an opportunity to take stock of your marketing program wishlist. This is a chance to rework your marketing stack to set your business up for success as the CX evolution continues. With the rise of the end-to-end experience cloud, heightened customer expectations can now be met with marketers’ ability to access their customer data and use it to build and launch automated, multi-channel, and hyper-personalized campaigns--quickly and at scale. That said, there are some qualities that you should look out for when shopping for your Bronto replacement.

Ease of migration

The timing of Bronto’s ride into the sunset could be problematic, according to digital marketing agency, Tinuiti. “Q4 2021 presents a huge hole and challenge in the middle of the timeline. Brands need to be aware that safely onboarding subscribers to a new ESP could take 4-6 weeks (dependent on list size) and that most development teams have a code-freeze heading into the holidays.” Because of this, Tinuiti suggests that you plan your migration to take place between now and September 2021, or January to April 2022. But regardless of when the migration happens, you can’t afford any downtime when switching from Bronto to your new tool. When evaluating marketing technology providers, it’s crucial to understand how they can quickly and efficiently help you move off Bronto and into their platform. Here are seven questions to ask vendors regarding the migration process:

1. How long does it typically take new clients to launch initial campaigns? What’s the average time to value?
2. What services are included during initial setup and implementation?
3. Is there a dedicated integrations resource or consultant?
4. Is there any platform training?
5. What resources or technical support are clients/brands expected to provide during onboarding and migration?
6. Will there be any lapse in performance?
7. What is the vendor's ability to support and run IP warm-up?

Capabilities

It’s no longer enough just to have an email service platform with an intuitive UI and good deliverability. Those are table stakes. Take care to evaluate whether the new platform can support your strategy across channels, now and in the future.Questions to ask:

1. Can the vendor provide an example of a multi-step, multi-channel journey targeting a particular audience segment?
2. Describe how the rules for a segment are managed in the product. Ask for details about what data can be used to create these rules (transaction data, onsite data, CRM data, customer service information, and campaign/content attributes) and if there are any restrictions.
3. Are the customer segments dynamic?
4. Does the platform enable triggered campaigns? (welcome, cart abandonment, back in stock, etc)
5. Describe the platform's content personalization capabilities.
6. Can users build HTML templates?
7. What are the platform's experimentation capabilities?
8. Are users able to easily set up and run A/B and multivariate tests across all channels and journeys?

Ease of use

In its heyday, Bronto empowered non-technical marketers to create segments, campaigns, and messaging. Your next solution should allow for the same.Questions to ask:

1. Ask the vendor to describe its typical business users.
2. Do you need to have any technical background to use the platform effectively?
3. Does the vendor have a WYSIWG email editor?
4. Can users directly query customer data to define segments through a non-technical UI?
5. Does the platform provide a non-technical UI to conduct multi-channel journey-based orchestration?

Support

Change is hard. Consider the problems with Bronto's [lack of] support, and the type of relationship you want from your new technology vendor.Questions to ask:

1. What does the team surrounding the platform look like?
2. Is the same level of support provided for all clients?
3. Does the vendor provide any strategic advisory or best practice instruction?
4. How frequently do clients meet with their customer success manager?
5. Are there any additional costs associated with support and strategic advisory?
6. Describe the additional support provided during migration, onboarding, and implementation.
7. Ask the vendor to detail how they provide ongoing support once implementation is complete. Be sure to ask about details about key contacts, advice about best practice, issue reporting and escalation and notice of product enhancements.
8. Ask the vendor to describe communication channels that you have access to for support. This can include slack, email, calls, zoom and more.

Integrations

The Martech world will continue to change and grow. As that next new channel or new Martech darling comes on the scene, does the new provider have the capabilities to integrate this into your marketing ecosystem easily?Questions to ask:

1. Does the vendor have the ability to activate data, trigger campaigns, and personalize content in all major end channels (SMS, push, on-site, customer service and advertising channels)
2. Does the vendor integrate with your data sources, such as customer data warehouses, eCommerce platforms and data management platforms?
3. Does the vendor integrate with your in-house built solutions such as custom e-commerce platforms or data warehouses?
4. Can the vendor ingest custom data science models and algorithms?
5. Does the vendor have two-way integrations with BI tools like Tableau or Looker?

Innovations

Finally, when looking for your Bronto replacement, I'd advise you to find a partner that's in it for the long haul and actively investing in its platform.Questions to ask:

1. Ask the vendor to share their product roadmap.
2. What features and innovations differentiate the vendor's product from competitors?
3. Ask the vendor to describe the key areas of investment within its product, and how this will enhance its capabilities, and how it will benefit you,
4. Describe the major developments that the vendor expects to see in the coming years relating to the CDP or ESP space How will its solution be positioned to support these?

I’ve spent nearly a decade listening to marketers try to address the challenge of leveraging all of their customer data to drive personalized, cross-channel experiences in a way that is scalable and drives revenue. And ESP point solutions just aren’t the solution. So while I’m genuinely sad to see a once-great product go extinct, I’m excited for former Bronto clients to have the opportunity to explore marketing solutions that can help them elevate their customer marketing across not just email but SMS, push, web personalization, and direct mail as well. If you'd like to explore how Simon can help, request a demo today.

Jenna Klebanoff is the Director of CRM & Member Marketing at Equinox, a luxury fitness club headquartered in New York City with locations throughout the US, UK, & Canada. Equinox signed on as a Simon Data client in 2019, seeking a solution that would enable Equinox to deliver a genuinely omnichannel member experience program.

In December 2019, very few businesses were prepared for what was coming in the following year. 2020 taught us at Equinox the importance of always being there for our members — whether that meant ready to react to major macro events such as COVID or prepared to respond to anything we learn about the member. We’ve shifted our mindset from “Always On” to “Always Ready,” which has funneled through our whole marketing approach. “Always Ready” is a simple but ambitious objective — it means giving our members more of what they want, when, and where they want it across their journey with Equinox.

Equinox is more than a fitness club — we provide physical and digital spaces for high-performance living wherever and whenever our members want to connect. But when the pandemic hit and states began closing businesses, we had to be sure we were part of the solution by closing our fitness clubs and delivering digital offerings to our members.

The power and ease of the Simon platform saved us from a vast communications delay and massive manual workload. When we first onboarded Simon Data as our CDP of choice, we had decades’ worth of rich first-party data around how our members interact with us in-club, but we weren’t able to leverage those insights to their full extent.

The challenge: Delivering personalized communications to complex customer segments

Every region where we operate has implemented a stay-at-home order at least once in the past year, with many of our clubs opening only to close again. We had to develop a highly targeted communications strategy based on location, member type, and member engagement. The level of personalization we were able to serve to our total member file would not have been possible without Simon Data’s technology.

Starting in May 2020, we knew that locations would start reopening, but we didn’t know which regions, when, or what the local safety protocols would be. In the spirit of being always ready, we took the time to reimagine the member journey and the three overarching audiences we would need to hit. These segments needed to exist regionally, and they needed to be dynamic because members were moving from one to another of these categories throughout the year.

1. Active members
2. Members who chose to keep their account frozen
3. Members who churned in 2020

You can’t maintain the kind of relationship we have with our members without this level of thoughtfulness and deep segmentation. Beyond the COVID-relevant lifecycle stage and region, we had to consider why they came to Equinox before the pandemic (i.e., Personal Training, Group Fitness classes), how often they came in, their LTV, and other vectors. Leveraging Simon Data allowed us to create these deeply-segmented, dynamic audiences to push out campaigns in real-time to our members when and where they wanted to engage with us.

Results: What we’ve learned

As it worked out, we’ve not only been able to keep these complex journeys organized and easy to understand, but we’ve also been able to learn so much more about our members.

For example, when thinking about where to focus our personal training efforts, we learned which clubs and regions have above-average penetration. We identified our top decile LTV customers, and knowing that they have to book a visit ahead of time, we plan to track them for a surprise-and-delight campaign when they visit the club.

We created these highly segmented programs because it was the best experience for the member, but these efforts garnered real business results. Despite the increased initial workload and the massive and sudden shift of strategy, we saw the following wins:

• We now better understand our audience, with a nearly 3X increase in customer segments over the year before.
• We delivered better content when & where our members wanted while decreasing send volume by 22%.
• We saw a 79% increase in open rate and a 29% increase in CTR.

We strive to keep the member at the center of everything we do. Simon’s technology allowed us to be nimble, quick, and adaptable in the face of the changes we’ve experienced since the COVID-19 outbreak and communicate with our members in the right channels, with the right content, at the right time.

With Simon Data as our key member dashboard, we are so much more strategic and nuanced than batch and blast. That capability could not have been more critical than during this past year, and the importance of maintaining this level of intimacy and personalization is here to stay.

Almost without exception, CRM marketers should look to make triggered messaging the core of what they do. These messages convert at a higher rate, create better customer experiences, and require less manual management than traditional campaigns. What is a triggered message? Any message sent in response to a user’s action — typical examples include abandoned cart messages, newsletter registrations, and post-purchase upsell campaigns.Despite this increased performance, though, not all triggered messaging is created equal. So how do you know if you’re leaving money on the table? Here are the eight biggest triggered messaging mistakes folks are making in the market today:

1. Your triggers aren’t coordinated/collide with the rest of your marketing & CRM activity.

Problem Summary If a customer is eligible for multiple campaigns, managing the underlying prioritization logic — and throttling the total number of campaigns sent — is challenging, if not impossible. This results in “trigger collisions.” Customers receive too many messages, many of which are conflicting, overlapping, or contradictory.Symptoms

1. Customers receive “abandoned cart” messages after purchasing an item.
2. Customers receive a discount on an item they’ve already purchased at full price.
3. Customers receive multiple messages within a few hours, all of which have different/disconnected calls-to-action.
4. You have no control over where/when/to whom your triggered messages are sent.
5. Auditing triggered message eligibility is difficult or even impossible.

ImpactWithout triggered prioritization and integration, companies risk list disengagement. They will also suffer from lower revenue per send, and can take a significant hit to brand equity.

2. Your triggered content is one-size-fits-all.

Problem You cannot effectively personalize the content of your triggered messaging based on what you know about the customer. Despite being very different from one another, customers receive messages that look identical.Symptoms

1. You cannot customize the products within an email to match the customer’s past browsing history, purchases, and recommended products.
2. You cannot prioritize what’s shown in a message based on current inventory dynamics (e.g., price, availability).
3. You cannot discount dynamically in a message based on a customer’s sensitivity to price (e.g., have they bought on discount? were they acquired on discount?).
4. There’s a massive disparity between the personalization levels of your conventional versus triggered messaging.

ImpactTriggered content that isn’t meaningfully personalized creates a host of issues:

1. It gives discounts to customers that don’t need them.
2. It fails to leverage timely opportunities tied to inventory.
3. And the messages themselves are less relevant, damaging your customer connection.
4. The data bears this out: campaigns with > 2 in-message personalization elements drive 2x more clicks and 6x higher conversions.

3. Your triggers work independently across your channels, or you’re missing key channels.

Problem You aren’t able to send coordinated triggered campaigns across all relevant customer engagement channels. In some cases, you’re unable to send triggered messages in a specific channel (e.g., push or SMS), or the triggers that you do send there are unsophisticated. Symptoms

1. You can’t send or manage triggered messaging in a specific channel (e.g., push).
2. You can’t dynamically prioritize triggers based on expressed channel preference.
3. You can’t coordinate one channel (e.g., email) with another (e.g., SMS).
4. You don’t have visibility into customer journeys that stretch across channels.
5. Your customers are receiving disconnected or duplicative messages across channels.
6. Your customer engagement is lower in a specific domain (e.g., mobile).

ImpactCampaigns coordinated across channels simply work better. Significantly better.

1. Conversion rates for campaigns that leverage a push AND an email action are 2.6x higher.
2. Campaigns that effectively recruit 3+ channels can see returns well above this number.

4. Your triggered attribution models are way too vendor-friendly.

Problem Some vendors have pushed revenue guarantees aggressively over the last few years, which can be very appealing from a contractual perspective. The problem is that — in most cases — the models they use to evaluate their own performance are deficient and ruthlessly self-interested. These vendors “show incrementality” by refusing to agree to a real holdout and by drastically ramping send volumes. In effect, they’re simply cannibalizing other channels and taking credit.Symptoms

1. Your vendor guarantees a contract based on a flat percentage of topline revenue but refuses to agree to a proper control group to assess efficacy.
2. Your provider charges a percentage of total digital revenue generated, and the number feels very high, but they’ve justified it by claiming incrementality.
3. Your vendor has total control over the volume and content of sends, aggressively using discounts and increased send-volume to hit goals.
4. Losses in other channels largely offset incremental gains in your vendor’s primary channel.
5. Your vendor is justifying an investment in their platform via a reallocation of acquisition spend.

ImpactYou’re wasting money and showing fake incrementality. These vendors have built businesses on the back of creative storytelling, strong sales processes, and basic triggering capabilities, but they should not be part of any modern marketing stack. Beyond the cost, their aggressive, discount-led sending approach tends to damage lists and erode margin. Not a great combination.

5. You can’t test your triggers in the same way that you test other aspects of your marketing.

Problem Because they’re harder to build and harder to manage than standard campaigns, behavioral triggers can get short shrift when it comes to iteration. Merely getting the trigger out the door can be daunting enough. The associated workflow challenges mean that incremental experimentation simply doesn’t seem ROI positive. Additionally, understanding triggered campaigns’ performance is inherently more challenging due to conversions happening over an extended period instead of within a specific window.Symptoms

1. You don’t have multiple variants of your triggered campaigns running.
2. You haven’t tested critical aspects of your triggered campaigns (e.g., send time, sub-segmentation, offer level, ordering) due to workflow/resource constraints.
3. You lack the functionality to run meaningful experiments on your triggered messaging program.
4. You don’t have a strong understanding of the deeper dynamics of your triggered messaging campaign performance beyond topline metrics (e.g., clicks, opens, sends).
5. You believe there are incremental performance gains to be found in your triggered messaging program.

ImpactThe data could not be more transparent: experimentation drives significant incrementality. Companies that don’t experiment are hemorrhaging opportunities. Across our customer base, experimentation drives upward of a 63% lift for behavioral triggers, and that value increases dramatically (to 3.5x) when looking at experiments with four or more variants tested. Workflow and resources are almost always the limiting factors, but companies don’t feel as if there are achievable solutions.

6. Your triggers are too slow and fail to get the attention of your customer.

Problem Sending “real-time”/low-latency triggered campaigns remains a challenge for many brands. While campaigns entirely reliant on streaming data (e.g., abandonment) are typically easier to speed up, other types of lifecycle triggers are often still running on 12–48 hour windows. This latency has a meaningful impact on conversion metrics and represents a significant challenge, particularly for enterprise brands undergoing digital transformation. Symptoms

1. You have one or more lifecycle campaigns currently running on a latent (e.g., > 12 hours) trigger.
2. You have collisions between conversion events and pre-purchase triggered campaigns (e.g., customers getting abandoned cart messages after buying).
3. You don’t know the latency of specific lifecycle triggers or have gotten ad hoc feedback that people aren’t getting particular messages they’re eligible for.
4. When building your triggered messaging strategy, you’re often forced to choose between message speed and depth of personalization.
5. You currently use an older marketing cloud - e.g., SFMC, Responsys, or Adobe Campaign.
6. You don’t have a centralized data warehouse or lack a centralized data science/data engineering function.

Impact “Going real-time” is an important goal for marketers. Intuitively, they understand that being more responsive to the customer is likely to impact performance positively. And they’re right: low-latency behavioral triggers (i.e., < 1 hr) perform 100% better with no increase in unsubscribes. Bottom line: if you don’t have a strategy to get faster, start building one.

7. You aren’t able to adjust triggered logic using everything you know about the customer.

Problem Determining who gets what is just as much a data problem as a strategic one. Companies collect a tremendous amount of data on their customers but often struggle to use it in a marketing context. Triggered campaigns are no exception: data integration and storage issues with modern martech solutions frequently prevent the full customer record from being leveraged. As a result, key data points often go unused, reducing the scope of personalization and capping possible performance gains.Symptoms

1. You can’t use certain data types (e.g., browsing data, customer support interactions) to sub-segment or adjust triggered messaging.
2. You can’t suppress customers from triggers based on key profile attributes (e.g., high-value customers, new customers).
3. One or more customer data sources remain unconnected to your marketing cloud/triggered marketing provider.
4. Your triggered messaging campaigns feel “basic” or “uninspired.”
5. You get customer feedback about triggered messaging being inappropriate/incorrectly targeted.
6. Your CRM team has ideas for campaigns that they’re unable to implement due to data-availability issues.
7. You struggle to use historical data points alongside real-time streaming data when you design a triggered campaign.

ImpactRecruiting more data sources leads to better campaigns: lift from campaigns that use data from 2+ sources is 1.1x higher than those only using a single data source.

8. Your triggers are single-step.

Problem You run triggered campaigns, but they’re not “journeys” — they’re one-and-done. Triggered campaigns work because they respond to moments of high customer intent; a single message often represents only a fraction of the possible engagement a marketer might drive.Symptoms

1. You don’t have multi-step campaigns for your primary triggered touchpoints (e.g., abandonment).
2. You’ve tapped out specific messaging moments’ performance but haven’t explored extending those moments with incremental messages.
3. Your CRM team tends to think in terms of specific message performance, not sequence/journey performance.
4. You suspect you could find incrementality in extending messaging sequences or building more complex journeys, but you’re resource/workflow constrained.

ImpactThis is often the single biggest leverage point for CRM teams looking to improve their triggered messaging programs. Customers have been known to respond to the third, fourth, fifth, or even sixth message in a journey, particularly where considered purchases are concerned. For example, conversion rates for triggered abandonment journeys are up to 3x higher, with a 24% higher open rate than single messages.

Conclusion

You can’t afford to settle for mediocrity when it comes to your triggered messaging. Companies addressing all 8 of these challenges are winning market share, driving LTV, realizing outsized performance gains, and setting themselves up for the future. Companies that fail to embrace them are leaving money on the table. It’s that simple. And while “simple” doesn’t necessarily mean “easy,” all of this is possible for any business with the right strategy, data infrastructure, and technology partners in place.If the promise of flexible, scalable first-party data paired with cross-channel execution and automated personalization sounds exciting, then check out How Self-Serve Segmentation Led to a 300x Boost in Engagement to see how one of Simon Data's clients has been able to dominate the market with marketing-owned data strategies.

Have customer behaviors and preferences remained static over the past year? They've likely changed in the last week.Confession: The last time I bought real, work-appropriate, non-stretchy pants was in February of 2020. That’s over a year without a work-wear purchase, and I bet I’m not alone.2020 (and now at least this first part of 2021) was the year of Zoom calls, home office setups, and staycations. Blazers, hanging out with friends in bars, and international trips were out, and athleisure, home exercise equipment, and cleaning supplies were very, very in.The shifts resulting from Covid were wide-felt and instantaneous when the world ground to a halt in March 2020, but we expect the gradual climb back to signal a lot more minute shifts in customer behavior. And companies are expected to keep up.Some areas are still under strict lock-downs, while in others, we see workplaces and restaurants slowly re-open. Customers’ circumstances may dictate whether they’re hopping on a plane tomorrow or still looking for ways to upgrade their homes as they continue to quarantine. It’s never been ‘one size fits all,’ but now consumer behavior can shift wildly from one customer cohort to the next. So I have to ask: are you able to measure and act on your customers’ implicit and explicit buying signals?

What Makes an Agile Marketer?

Marketers have to keep a close pulse on customer behavior — what they are browsing or adding to their cart, what emails they’re opening or ads they're clicking, and what content inspires them to purchase. You need to understand them and show them that you understand.In many cases, creative marketers have no shortage of ideas for exciting campaigns to run but don’t have easy access to up-to-date customer data to make these ideas a reality. For example, we had a client recently run a timely Super Bowl campaign where they triggered emails to any users who had viewed or purchased Kansas- or Florida-specific products or who have an order with a shipping or billing address in one of those areas. They personalized the copy with the specific team and added in product recommendations that were team-specific. Personalized content like this is shown to have a significantly higher click and conversion rate than traditional batch and blast messaging. Behaviorally triggered messages convert at a rate of 22x over batch and blast messaging.

So what’s necessary to pull off a hyper-personalized campaign?

You have to have access to your customer data. And not just their historic purchase history, but also the real-time activity of what they have recently viewed or abandoned. This data is often stored somewhere within the business. It may be tracked in a data warehouse or via your ecommerce platform, but is it accessible to your marketing team? We believe in democratizing data to ensure that marketers have access to what they need to bring creative, timely, and personalized campaigns to life.

How Can Marketers Keep Up with Customer Shifts?

Customers that may have been based in New York before 2020 might now be purchasing from sunny Florida or snowy Colorado. Static, unchanging customer cohorts and segments are likely outdated, and it’s vital that your marketing tech can keep up as buyers move and their requirements change.

Centralize!

If customer behavior is constantly shifting, then your data should be complete to catch all the signals. First, you need to centralize all real-time and historical customer data for building dynamic segments. From there, it should be easy to test and iterate against your unique and ever-changing audience.In our own research looking at client data, we found that segments that contain conditions that leverage multiple integrations have 110% greater lift compared to segments that leverage only one integration.

Dynamicize!

Next, we highly suggest that any segment you create is dynamic. As your company gathers new signals from your consumers that they can automatically and dynamically fall into and out of segments based on this behavior.Comparing Simon Data clients who have run abandonment campaigns using both event-triggered flows and high-latency segment-triggered flows, we found that low-latency behavioral triggers perform 100% greater with no increase in unsubscribes.

Test & learn!

Next, you need to consider the messaging that you’re sending to these audiences. Are you able to experiment and test what subject lines, content, and creative resonate in each channel? Experimentation is often the key to finding the right fit for your customers and unlocking incremental revenue. Examining our own client data, we discovered that experimentation can drive up to a 63% lift for behavioral triggers, and that value increases dramatically (up to 3.5x) when looking at experiments with 4 or more variants tested.

Take a bow!

Finally, I salute you, dear marketer, for the work you’ve put in over a challenging period to make your brands successful. Keeping up with consumers’ quickly shifting habits in our new reality is no easy feat.Whether you are working from your couch or back to the office, I encourage you to take a look at your marketing program and the marketing technology that underpins it. Ensure that you’ve put these three steps into place to understand your customer at this moment and ensure that you’ll be relevant to them in the next. To learn more about how marketers can successfully evolve alongside customers, read how one Simon client saw a 300x boost in engagement using Simon Data's fine-grained, self-serve segmentation tools.

2021: Among other things, The Year of Data Privacy

According to Business Insider, 2021 is the year to expect sweeping federal data privacy laws to go into effect. This may not be true — just scan a few 2020 predictions to disabuse your expectations from anyone’s powers of prescience — but no matter your political stance, it would be a fairly uncontroversial statement to believe that the current administration will be much tougher with data privacy regulations than the previous administration.So even if "USAGDPR" doesn't come to be this year, it's really just a matter of time. Luckily, with CCPA having been in place for over a year now, most large companies should have a handle on their data and consent management practices.If you sell a product and you're not a cash-only greasy spoon, then you're also in the business of data privacy and security, which itself ladders up to customer confidence. That last bit, the thing about customer confidence — that's the hard part.In a report called "How consumers see cybersecurity and privacy risks and what to do about it," PwC learned this about customer trust:

• 69% of consumers believe companies are vulnerable to hacks and cyberattacks.
• 25% of consumers believe most companies handle their sensitive personal data responsibly.
• 10% of consumers feel they have complete control over their personal information.
• 72% of consumers believe businesses — not governments — are best equipped to protect them.

In other words, the topic of data privacy does not inspire confidence.To make the internet a safer place, businesses, governments, and citizens will need to educate themselves on best practices, easily avoidable hazards, and the fact that vulnerable PII poses a very real danger.Speaking to Martech Series in February 2020 about the then-recent CCPA regulations, Looker’s Chief Privacy and Data Ethics Officer, Barbara Lawler said:

“Transparency is central, but so is a public commitment to ethical data practices, tools, and data governance. As a starting point, businesses, more specifically, the people — data analysts to chief data officers — need tools as a means to analyze the data in their own databases, minimize sprawl, and reduce the risk of breach or misuse. We should be expecting data governance at machine speed.”

Following Ms. Lawler, I must agree that technology got us into this mess, and it's only with technology's help that we can ever hope to get out. The problem is just too complex, the amount of data too vast, and the stakes too high.

What happens when you fail to comply with data privacy legislation?

We are not in any way giving legal advice, but there are many hazards that lay ahead of the company that ignores privacy regulations. Take for example the Subject Rights Requests (SRRs) outlined in CCPA.SSRs requires companies to respond in a timely, accurate manner to all requests for enabling consumers to opt out and invoke their right to be forgotten by companies that hold their data. CCPA empowers consumers to take legal action against non-compliant organizations. Consumers can easily go after non-compliant organizations via social media to receive a payout for PII mismanagement.This could create mountains of SSRs. Where does consumer trust go if you can’t honor them?Further complicating matters is that many organizations still use a manual systems-based approach to manage compliance, which is complex, time-consuming, and offers little insight into their known and unknown data.If a company doesn’t know what data they have or where it resides or moves, it’s impossible to comply with CCPA, creating a vicious cycle of opportunistic SRRs that can prevent an enterprise from attending to its core activities and bringing business to a halt.So let's see how the technology proposes we solve this issue.

How technology can automate data privacy compliance

The threat of drowning in SSRs is just one reason to adopt technology that will automate an accurate and scalable CCPA compliance solution. Brands need to put in place technology that can locate all caches of personal data — structured, unstructured, or not yet inventoried — on a continuous basis.If a customer leverages their right to be forgotten, and you don't have the ability to corral all of their data, then it's safe to say you're in trouble.As data privacy worries grow, it is becoming existentially important to any company that they are able to automatically find every single location housing a consumer's personal data, which will allow your brand to efficiently remove the relevant data across the org.This is only simple if you don't pause long enough to stare at the firmament in awe of how much data a large brand actually collects on every human that interacts with it. (Not to say that every brand uses their data well, but that's a story for the CDP Buyer's Guide.)To demonstrate compliance — with CCPA or any legislation that may be on the horizon — you must implement a data mapping process to describe data flow throughout the org. Building the data map without visibility over the network traffic of your org would be a massive challenge. Manually creating a data map difficult; manually maintaining it is impossible. Having this in place will make it infinitely easier to honor SSRs and requests invoking the right to be forgotten.

Stay privy to privacy laws

The growing number and reach of privacy legislation in the US and abroad might seem overwhelming. Rest assured that the current trajectory is moving toward a simpler regulatory environment in which individuals gain more control over their data and the necessary trust between brands and consumers can grow stronger. With the right flexible data framework in place, you can easily respond to markets, legislation, or other external pressures (like, say, COVID), reducing legal liability and keeping your customer data safe.One issue that arises when Marketing doesn't own its own data strategy is that data changes hands too often, sometimes in the form of emailed CSV files with thousands of customers' data. One way to patch this hole is by giving Marketing control of no-code segmentation tools. To see how one of our clients was able to gain a 300% boost in engagement by just passing segmentation from IT to Marketing, click here to read the report.Disclaimer: The information provided in this post does not constitute legal advice, is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice, and should not be relied upon as such. You should seek legal advice or other professional advice in relation to various governing laws and data compliance regulation matters you or your organization may have.

More than any acquisition of 2020, Facebook’s Kustomer purchase left martech experts scratching their heads. Sure, Facebook has made ostensibly odd acquisitions before (e.g., Oculus), but all could be satisfyingly rationalized. In comparison, Kustomer felt like a real outlier. How does a fledgling customer service CRM platform support Facebook’s strategic business goals?

Kustomer Acquisition Opportunities

In reality, the acquisition is incredibly savvy — provided Facebook plays its cards right. Here’s how to think about it:

• Facebook is in the shopping business — and business is good: Facebook and Instagram shops have been a tremendous boon for their stock price, and providing the appropriate backend is a critical part of getting that story right. Facebook almost certainly aims to deliver a true end-to-end buying experience superior to what Shopify and others can offer. They lack the same depth of tooling, however — particularly where customer management is concerned.

• In case you hadn’t heard, Facebook is in the ad business, too: Almost everything that Facebook does, ultimately, is in the service of ad revenue. Platform investments, acquisitions, data plays — all of it translates into ad dollars. Facebook is incredibly similar to Google in this regard.

• Facebook’s ad dominance comes from superior data: Facebook is an advertising behemoth because it commands disproportionate impressions and pairs those impressions with a nearly unrivaled identity graph; the integrated value of Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Facebook Connect, and the Facebook Pixel is simply tremendous. Facebook’s ability to identify customers anywhere and serve premium ad units in high-engagement spaces is what ungirds its strategic position. Their identity graph allows them to target consumers more precisely in both retargeting and acquisition use cases, and this has allowed them to show higher ROI relative to competitive options.
• Facebook’s data landscape is both evolving and creating risk: Much has been made of the decline and fall of the cookie, and its impact on Facebook's business is poised to be material. Today, Facebook’s pixel is a foundational piece of their identity graph: it is the primary connection between Facebook’s owned spaces and consumer activity on advertiser properties. Through it, Facebook gets browsing and conversion data that are critical to both fueling and justifying advertiser spend. With the Facebook Pixel now at risk, Facebook needs other pathways to get 1p advertiser data, and they need to fully own them. In many ways, Facebook is already preparing for this with their “Offline Conversions” product.
• Data regulations represent incremental risk: GDPR and CCPA are imperfect, but they collectively represent an idea that isn’t going away; customer data will be regulated, and companies will have to justify their aggregation and usage. Facebook is thinking very seriously about PII (personally identifiable information) — Where will using PII expose them to legal risk in the short and long term? What do these risks imply regarding their strategic position? And what can be done about it?

So, Facebook’s business turns on having superior data, and cookie annihilation + new regulations represent a risk to that position. In response, Facebook is looking for a way to get first-party data reliably, in real time, and in a way that doesn’t expose them to legal challenges.

Kustomer for Customers

Facebook also wants to be in the business of providing end-to-end shopping experiences and needs the tech to back that up. Kustomer, properly deployed, is a great potential pathway for all of these goals:

• Kustomer collects customer service data, which is very defensible: Regulations like GDPR force businesses to justify their rationale for keeping and using customer data. In practice, this means that as more legitimate customer value is created through the use of a customer’s data, the less restricted the use of that data will be. For example, the EU’s regulators don’t view showing more relevant ads to customers as a particularly valuable use of customer data. Accordingly, there’s long-term risk in justifying customer data collection based on improving ad relevance. In comparison, making sure an order is delivered correctly is seen by regulators as mission-critical; this means that if Facebook’s 1p data landscape is built on Kustomer (vs. some other pathway), they’ve essentially de-risked losing access to a critical element of their identity graph. Smart.

• Kustomer’s data collection isn’t predicated on pixels; it’s more holistic: Kustomer has differentiated by having a friendlier approach to data integration, one that is both real-time and flexible. With the ability to integrate elements of purchase data, browsing data, and support interactions, Facebook can use Kustomer as a way to retain 1p data visibility in a cookieless world. Additionally, with Kustomer deployed at a company, the wolf is truly in the henhouse: Facebook finally gets fully inside of their clients’ walled garden, no longer simply relying on cookies for understanding the dynamics of an advertiser’s business. They see it all.
• Kustomer has shown real success with exactly like the type of customers FB is courting for Shops: With tremendous penetration among born-digital D2C companies, Facebook likely believes Kustomer will fit in elegantly into their existing commerce stack. Kustomer brings a set of customers that have scaled up through all of the stages of D2C growth and can potentially offer these solutions to Facebook’s massive mid-market. Currently, the support model for Facebook shops is notably lacking (and that may be an understatement). This could be a major part of the answer that also paves the way for an enterprise push.

Kustomer Service

But if Facebook simply wanted to get into the world of 1p data management, why buy a CX-focused CRM solution instead of a more traditional one?

• Facebook and Instagram Shops have a service problem: As mentioned, both Facebook and Instagram Shops decidedly lack when it comes to the service experience. What’s true for the enterprise is true for the mid-market/SMB segments: service wins. If indeed, Facebook is looking to solve this problem with this acquisition, only a CX-focused platform would do.
• Enterprises want to turn their service interactions into revenue streams: There’s a proven and strong correlation between service excellence, LTV, and winning market share. Accordingly, businesses are investing heavily in solutions that will help them realize this opportunity. Kustomer — along with Zendesk and others — have been growing on the back of this trend. Additionally, many businesses, both traditional and born-digital, are also realizing that they can't effectively differentiate on product or price and thus have to embrace experience holistically as a differentiator.

• Facebook’s properties are increasingly the locus for service interactions: The shape of customer support is changing quickly. Social networks have become a dominant space for brand-customer interaction. Both older and rising generations of customers have become comfortable using Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and even Instagram/Facebook for support and conversion activity. Facebook owns the conversation space but provides an API for vendors to connect to these platforms. Why not build (or, in this case, buy) down the value chain, particularly where those next steps provide a critical, defensible pathway into oodles of 1p data?

• CX is becoming the heart of CRM for enterprise B2C companies: Because of this new revenue mandate, we have seen the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, reflecting the growing importance of “owning the customer relationship, end to end.” CX CRM solutions like Kustomer are designed to function as the operating nexus for managing the customer relationship in this new world. Salesforce has long hoped that their core SFDC product would serve this function, but it never quite fit; recent investments in Service Cloud and C360 Audiences are an acknowledgment of this reality. They’ve also now truly integrated a proper CX tool into their CRM to address this. Zendesk’s product is strong but has limitations, particularly where data is concerned. Kustomer can and has disrupted both incumbents, and with Facebook’s backing, could be dominant.
• Marketing and service interactions bundled together = new ad products and new ad dollars: Once Facebook moves down the value chain into your 1p data, all sorts of interesting possibilities emerge. Facebook can develop unique ad products to help mitigate negative customer service interactions in real time. True 1:1 offers that are natively integrated with your CX experiences in Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger can drive entirely unique programs that improve LTV. Products built around bidding on your competitors’ customers abound, all natively delivered. Imagine what would be possible in a world where there’s a Facebook phone. No one else can offer anything like this; Facebook just needs to execute.

Ultimately, the TL;DR on this one is pretty straightforward: Facebook wants your 1p data, even in a cookieless world, and they don’t want to get sued for using it. More people are using Facebook’s platforms for support interactions, companies are investing more in support/CX than ever, and the tech market hasn’t been won. Facebook sees an opportunity to build better ad products through deeper integration, generate more ad revenue, fix customer pain, and solve their 1p data problems in parallel. They might even win an evolving SaaS market for their trouble. Oh, and they’re investing in a better future for Facebook and Instagram Shops, which could make the acquisition on its own. What’s not to love?

Will it work for Facebook? And how?

So if the case is straightforward, what has to happen for it to work? A few big things:

• Facebook needs to have clear, differentiated use cases: Facebook has massive enterprise penetration. To drive Kustomer adoption, they will need to pick specific use cases that create significant, differentiated enterprise value. Marketers and technologists are more than happy to invest time and money in new initiatives, but the ROI has to be super clear. Facebook will get the benefit of the doubt in ways that others can’t, but the case still has to be there. As discussed above, there’s certainly no shortage of interesting ideas for Facebook to pursue here (e.g., native ad products); whatever they choose, strong investments in product marketing and sales enablement will be critical to driving success.
• They need to ensure data integration into Kustomer is super easy: While Kustomer offers a lot in terms of data flexibility, integration isn’t always easy. Given that so much of the potential value for Facebook lies in using Kustomer to access advertisers’ 1p data, they need to make sure that they have a strong, simple pathway. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook pursues a supporting acquisition to make this easier, potentially in the CDP space.
• Kustomer needs to become truly enterprise-ready: Kustomer’s enterprise penetration is very low. It appears as though the vast majority of their customer base is born-digital DTC. These DTC brands’ digital strategies have served as the new template for entrenched enterprise companies. They’re looking to hire CMOs and heads of performance marketing/CX out of them to drive digital transformation. In that sense, Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer makes sense; just as Facebook ushered in a “new way” of buying ads online, their bet here is that they can use Messenger + Whatsapp + Kustomer + their ad products to usher in a new era of real-time, omnichannel CX management. But Kustomer almost certainly needs to make enterprise-readiness investments for that to happen, meaning things like permissioning, instancing, security, and more.
• They might need to make Kustomer free for the enterprise (or close to it): Remember, to the enterprise, Facebook is an advertising business; where Salesforce makes money off SaaS licenses, Facebook should choose to simply commoditize their competitors’ profit centers and get paid via ads. Google Analytics is the gold standard for this sort of thing: Google built an analytics product that they basically gave away for free (and essentially continue to, even at the enterprise level). Why? Because it helped them show the value of AdWords and generate more ad revenue. By doing so, they were able to functionally set the standard approach for measuring ad performance: last-click attribution. Any idea what attribution model favors search above all others? Facebook can do something similar here.
• For enterprise advertisers, it ultimately just needs to show incrementality: If Facebook’s work here results in even a single percentage point improvement in ad conversion rates, the long-term impact will be extraordinary. Reductions in CAC will drive increases in ad spend, and the price tag for Kustomer will seem inconsequential.
• They must tell a great story about providing a full end-to-end buying experience: For their commerce customers, this is about delivering a better customer experience that should keep you far, far away from Shopify or other competitive platforms. Facebook has an opportunity to help the next generation of D2C — and potentially enterprise — companies build entirely on their commerce stack from the ground up. This has the potential to meaningfully diversify their revenue in the long term.

If Facebook can make the barriers to entry low (i.e., minimal cost, good enterprise readiness, fast integration) and deliver a compelling product vision, the ad dollars will most certainly follow. The chances are that Facebook will work with those born-digital DTC companies early to show initial success before rolling out offerings to their more ambitious enterprise partners. Assuming strong performance, enterprise companies already on competitive solutions will find ways to rationalize overlap in the short term, with an eye towards ripping and replacing in the long term. Facebook simply needs to get a foot in the door.

What does this mean for other players in the space?

Given the enterprise dynamics discussed above, folks at companies like Salesforce and Zendesk should be paying attention. From their perspective, Facebook can use ad products built on the promise of “true omnichannel engagement” as a Trojan horse to win a quickly growing SaaS market. Both Salesforce and Zendesk have very clearly built their strategy around CX management, and both need to be thinking through the implications of this deal.First, Salesforce is still ascending in the enterprise when it comes to marketing/CX CRM, and customer support continues to be a major investment area for them. They’ve been clear publicly that their CDP (C360) is targeted at connecting service and marketing interactions, though the maturity of that product continues to be somewhat unknowable. Nevertheless, the loftiness of their vision, their existing infrastructure and entrenchment relative to the operational elements of CX management, and the sheer variety of technologies under their umbrella (e.g., Krux, Evergage, etc.) make it unlikely that Salesforce can be meaningfully displaced in the short term. Instead, expect an uneasy alliance of sorts until we find out whether or not Facebook can offer a holistic alternative. In Zendesk’s case, its entrenchment in the upper midmarket and certain verticals of the enterprise has been relatively unchallenged, but both Kustomer and Service Cloud have pathways to threaten this. In short: they could be in for a tough time. It’s easy to imagine Zendesk looking at Kustomer prior to its 2019 acquisition of Smooch and deciding it was too rich given their relative safety in the market. Kustomer was gaining traction, but ultimately wasn’t enough of a threat to justify a major expenditure; better to snap up Smooch to accelerate the development of similar functionality (e.g., Whatsapp and Messenger integration) than overreact, after all. Now, however, Facebook — who owns both Messenger and Whatsapp — owns their direct competitor, making the future integration landscape much less certain. To maintain its edge, Zendesk needs to drive superior product innovation and remain active in M&A while hoping Facebook and Salesforce get distracted by other priorities.Finally, Shopify deserves some discussion here. Facebook’s story in online shopping is a nascent one but potentially massively disruptive to Shopify. The native, end-to-end integration that could be realized by Facebook (from the first impression, through click, into purchase and post-purchase) is unprecedented. But it needs to get traction. If it does, Shopify’s response will be fascinating.

Conclusion

Given the primacy of first-party access data in Facebook’s presumed designs, it will be particularly interesting to see how Kustomer’s product evolves under their ownership, and of course, how Salesforce and Zendesk respond. Data management and access in CRM remains a massive challenge — seen often from our purview — and which can look very different vertical by vertical and even company by company. With Salesforce’s heavy bets here on C360, one imagines a natural collision point at integration. Other, smaller, or much older players in the space will have their hands full. It looks like a three-horse race at this point, with a lot of open questions for each company. Ultimately, Facebook’s intentions will go a long way to determine how this shakes out; if they have larger designs on martech/CRM, it will change the outcome materially. Beyond this, the confusion around the acquisition exposes the artificial divide between “martech” and “adtech.” This conceptual divide, predicated as it is more on technological limitations than anything strategic or utilitarian, will continue to fade into the background as major players push innovative and disruptive approaches. At the end of the day, CMOs and CCOs don’t care what you call it: they want to manage the customer experience in a way that’s differentiated, and they want to maximize revenue through traditional service interactions. B2C businesses realizing this are making more money and winning share of wallet; B2B businesses facilitating this are winning markets. If a company (in this case, Facebook) can offer something fundamentally new and powerful that stretches across both adtech and martech, it will be adopted. The question then will not be When or If but How.

Effective corporate marketing can no longer be built on branding and content alone. Accurate messaging and reliable delivery to the right targets at the right time demand the skilled deployment of data, science, and technology. The endeavor to evolve marketing to incorporate these new functional skills, commonly referred to as digital transformation, shouldn’t be owned solely by the CMO, but the CMO must lead it.Many corporate marketing programs have witnessed dramatic shifts in the CMO’s traditional jurisdiction to new functional teams under new C-suite titles such as CDO (Chief Digital Officer) or CXO (Chief Experience Officer). “Digital IT” teams — which leverage data, data science, and technology for marketing purposes — have now become such key business influencers that without strong alignment and collaboration, large enterprises put their growth strategy and transformational ambitions at risk.Technically advanced teams now introduce tooling and programs using free-flowing, aggregated data and metadata to build digital customer experiences that are easily tracked and measured. These new digital teams have scaled quickly because the business case for more investment is relatively easy to demonstrate. By now, these teams and practices are so commonplace that CMOs of large enterprises will often use the term “data-driven” to describe their overall marketing strategy. But here is why the CMO today is in a colossal predicament: marketing is accountable for setting a vision for digital transformation, but it lacks the skills and resources to achieve this outcome on its own. The wise CMO bridges the knowledge gap by driving cross-functional alignment around practical growth strategies, not by reorganizational conquest.A strategy that balances long-term ambitions with short-term wins aligns the business around the marketing capabilities that drive competitive advantage. A principled approach to crafting this strategy invites cross-functional participation in a series of analytical exercises. The CMO should consider deploying the following frameworks to empower and align marketing and Digital IT teams:

1. Think of the end-to-end marketing operation at your business as a supply chain; let’s call this a marketing value chain.
2. Commit your team to collaborate with Digital IT to produce a unified perspective on which technical competencies will drive the most value and which will carry the most risk.
3. When evaluating technology vendors to meet specific needs or gaps in your marketing value chain, ensure all teams align on evaluation criteria.

Establishing the Marketing Value Chain

Marketers don’t have to be at a disadvantage when it comes to data and technology decisions. By establishing the marketing value chain for their business, they rally diverse teams around substantive priorities. The marketing value chain isn’t very different than an ordinary supply chain. Instead of determining needs for design, production, manufacturing, and distribution to bring products to market, the modern CMO partners with Digital IT teams to drive data availability, audience creation, content development, campaign orchestration, and analytics & insights to bring digital experiences to market continuously.

To assemble and facilitate the marketing value chain, the CMO and Digital IT teams must come together to advance the technical competencies that underpin each of the five steps. To start, the CMO should lay their marketing value chain out and collaborate with Digital IT to identify the key technical competencies that will make each part possible. The goal is to lay out each technical competency required to activate the desired marketing value chain.

How to Determine the Priority of Your Technical Competencies

To start, the modern CMO should present the digital experiences that are the most strategic for the business. For example, let’s say a hypothetical enterprise aspires to produce a multi-channel coordinated campaign that makes it easy for marketers to target customers in the appropriate channel based on their cohort. The technical competencies critical to delivering this experience include orchestration, personalization, and optimization. As a result, the organization has determined these areas of the highest strategic value compared to other competencies such as segmentation, modeling, and content delivery.Objectives and measurable results (e.g., increased lifetime value, increased cost-effectiveness, or quicker time to value) may guide these use cases. Marketing and Digital IT should use these measures to ensure that data and technology decisions support high-priority digital experiences.Connecting scoring-criteria to each competency to assess strategic value is the most crucial initiative the CMO will undertake in optimizing the marketing value chain. The CMO should clearly define the use cases and outline the success criteria, while Digital IT should use their teams’ scoring to influence which technical competencies get priority.

Determining Risk Associated with Developing Your Technical Competencies

Once the strategic value is associated with technical competencies, it’s time to evaluate whether to build or buy the new technology. To do this, the CMO and Digital IT should assess the risk of each option. All teams involved in the marketing value chain should participate in determining risk areas and their relative importance. Risk-to-own criteria might include the total cost of ownership, technical debt, and time consumption. Risk-to-buy criteria might include the total cost of ownership, compatibility with other tools, and availability of tested solutions. Organizations may elect to have as many or as few criteria as they think are necessary and vote on the appropriate weights of each.Once stakeholders from Marketing and Digital IT have completed value and risk assessments of technical competencies in the context of their priority digital experiences, a completed scorecard might look like this:

Streamlining the Build vs. Buy Decision

Cross-functional scorecards are useful to the CMO because they streamline decision-making around one of the most critical and complex decisions an organization can make. The choice to build technology should not be made lightly. One should only decide to build if the strategic value is compelling, and the risk to buy is daunting.

Using the Proper Evaluation Criteria to Grow

Let’s say a CMO has bought into this approach and has agreed with Digital IT to configure its core competencies with external solutions. How does one go about determining which in-market technology will meet a complex enterprise’s nebulous and evolving needs? Before getting into the weeds, the CMO and Digital IT must align around a handful of governing theses to guide their pursuit.

The critical criteria for technology that cross-functional teams should prioritize:

Efficiency & Accessibility

Pursue vendor solutions that seamlessly combine multiple aspects of the marketing value chain. Use the marketing value chain to foster collaboration across Digital IT teams.

Control of Data

Elevating flexibility as the primary criterion for data processes will encourage team members to work cross-functionally not because it’s encouraged from on high but because it flows naturally from initiatives inspired by data.

Collaborativeness of User Workflow

New technology can’t just be an attractive user interface for a marketer alone. It needs to be a value add for Digital IT teams by connecting into their workflows.

Enablement of Homegrown Investments

New technology should not only introduce new capabilities for immediate use but promote in-house capabilities already in development. This should be an off-the-shelf requirement from a vendor solution because Digital IT teams want extensible platforms that can be built upon and can integrate with other pre-existing systems.

Mitigation of Vendor Lock-in Risk

New technology shouldn’t create dependence or commitment to a marketing cloud stack as a prerequisite for success. Seek out tools that integrate with everything and boast a compelling business case. The former will provide ongoing flexibility to mix and match capabilities; the latter adds long-term value without creating dependency on outside solutions.

Quality of Vendor Customer Success Team

New technology providers should offer talented resources that are affordable and available to train users of any functional or technical orientation.In conclusion, digital transformation elevates both Marketing and Digital IT teams by using their competitive advantages to increase marketing efficacy. Only a strong partnership can enable the cross-functional teams required for digital marketing to make key technology decisions to lead the transformation effort. Many large enterprises stall in their digital transformation journey simply because they devote Digital IT resources to the wrong competencies and activities. The modern CMO can drive leadership in this process by communicating a clear vision, assembling the marketing value chain, and partnering with Digital IT to co-determine which marketing technology truly supports the enterprise’s primary digital experiences.

Marketing is no longer traditional print and TV ad placements with spray-and-pray brand initiatives. Nowadays, brands turn to complex marketing stacks to navigate the digital dance of listening for data, thinking against a strategy, and speaking with customers. An exponential amount of data is created every day that — with the proper marketing stack tools and strategy — can be tapped, mined, and leveraged by brands to make better decisions about their marketing and provide unique and valuable customer experiences. To do so, marketing teams are dedicating a significant amount of their annual budgets to building and maintaining their martech stacks.

• 10x the amount of data exists today than it did a year ago.
• 26.2% of the average marketing budget goes to marketing technology.

Access to data has completely changed the game for how marketing operates, but it has also become overwhelming and costly.

Marketing in a Data-Driven World

Martech selection and management are more difficult than ever as martech has become a booming industry, with marketing leaders everywhere looking to amp up their marketing stacks to keep up with competitors and rising customer expectations.

• Market Pressure: Competitive positioning is a driver of stack development as each brand tries to not only close the gap with their peers in the market but exceed it.

• Internal Pressure: Brand leaders often feel pressure from the C-suite to deliver. Caught between a rock of limited resources and a hard place of needing to demonstrate ROI, Marketing leaders struggle to establish a solid martech stack strategy.

• Customer Pressure: As customers go more digital, brands face increasing expectations to meet customers where they are, pushing brand leaders to acquire new technologies aimed at enabling new-in-kind initiatives.

From 947 to 8,000+ in just six years, the martech landscape has expanded exponentially, creating an opportunity and pressure for marketing stacks to grow and for marketers to become overwhelmed.

Over-stacked, Under-leveraged

While marketing technology is critical to today’s marketing function, it has become acutely overwhelming. Enterprise stacks have accumulated layers over the years, leaving teams often not even knowing what lives in it.

Shiny Object Syndrome

Marketing stacks grow when new tools are selected because it’s what ‘everyone else has,’ or because they promise to solve a particular surface-level pain point. However, the addition of new tools can often create new problems. Large martech stacks are not just expensive to acquire, but they also have several recurring costs such as:

• Lost revenue due to bad data
• Technical debt associated with maintenance, upgrades, and missed opportunity from versioning
• Staff up-skilling and external support

Bad Data and Marketing Technology are Ubiquitous

• 30% of a company's revenue is lost due to bad data (Gartner, 2019).
• 91 different marketing clouds services are in the average enterprise martech stack (Scott Brinker, 2019).
• 2x more applications are used in a company than they think (Blissfully, 2019).

Many capabilities remain under-leveraged

The average marketing stack capability utilization, by percentage (Gartner, 2020)

• Unused, 43%
• Used, 57%

Nearly one-half of the average company's marketing stack capabilities go underused — meaning Marketing either fails to get critical value out of their tools or are paying for more than they need.

Listening, Thinking, and Speaking Out of Turn

Marketers have built their stacks to be customer-centric, but most marketing technology only focuses on one or two of the essential elements of strong customer experience:

• Listening: Tools to collect data from customers.
• Thinking: Tools that process data, generate insights, and support decision-making.
• Speaking: Tools that allow brands to connect and engage with customers across their lifecycle.

Given that best-in-class customer experiences depend on marketers being able to operate at the intersection of these three elements, stacks that fail to seamlessly integrate these elements are doomed to underdeliver.

In most architectures, the capabilities required to Listen, Think, & Speak are disconnected, creating gaps in the customer experience and marketing's impact. Disconnected systems cause teams to under-leverage large portions of their marketing stacks’ capabilities. Fragmented data workflows are high-maintenance for teams at best and generators of a poor customer experience at worst. Disintegrated technology can cause missed opportunities through a slow turnaround, misaligned data points, and low-leverage insights. And too often marketing stacks have overlapping capabilities that not only exacerbate the fragmentation but deepen redundancies.

• 70% of organizations need to integrate more than 6 disparate data sources. (Ventana Research, 2020)
• End-channels are both critical sources of and consumers of customer data and thus rely on a solid data infrastructure to have an impact.

Finally, the data flow is hindered by not having the right tools with the right connections keeping them from having the right impact on marketing’s key initiativesWorkflow is hindered by slow manual processes that take up both marketer resources and speed to market. The customer experience is directly impacted by how a brand listens to customers’ behaviors and preferences, thinks about the right content for them, and speaks to them in the right place and at the right time.

Marketing's Biggest Data Pain Points Stem from Gaps in Marketing Stacks

Data Flow

Siloed Data

• No central location for all data to live
• Unable to unify data effectively
• Seamless identity and personalization is difficult

Slow Data

• Difficulty matching real-time data to profile data
• Refresh rates too slow.

Data Volume

• Imbalanced data storage causing data loss
• Too much data to process in a timely manner

Workflow

Inaccessible Data

• Cross-functional silos and red tape
• Roles and responsibilities

Manual Processes

• Pulling data by hand per project
• Poor integrations across tools
• Coordinating across teams

Orchestration

• Managing the rollout across end-channels
• Balancing experimentation

Customer Experience

Experience Gaps

• Content doesn’t resonate
• Disconnects between online and offline experience
• Misalignment between business unit engagements

Missed Opportunities

• Marketing engagement arrives too late
• Missed identity resolution across channels

To learn more about how to build a stack that can serve as a seamless customer architecture and marketing command center, download our comprehensive guide, Optimizing Your Marketing Technology Stack.

The only way to future-proof yourself — in life and in business — is by cultivating flexibility and optionality as a core competency. In the modern marketing technology stack, this capability translates to modularity: the ability to seamlessly swap out technology without being tied down to anything that falls short of new demands.In working toward developing this ability in your martech stack, you will probably start to analyze, assess, and rethink certain components and capabilities that you find. Regular critical assessments are necessary for adjusting to current and future needs, which is why approaching these assessments within the correct framework is so critical.Finding the best-fit solution is the process of determining and aligning objectives, team skill-level, use cases, tactics, and necessary capabilities over a profile of the ideal technology. Lack of alignment that drives you to under-tool will inevitably create frustration and hamper momentum, while over-tooling creates excess costs paying for under-used technology.

Phase One: Establish Marketing Objectives

Before you do anything, the most critical activity you should undertake is laddering out marketing objectives directly from the brand-wide commercial objectives.By ensuring the executive team of your shared vision, you'll be more likely to gain buy-in when the time comes to assess funding for new technologies and initiatives. Positioning marketing objectives as levers that can be pulled to drive the brand-wide objectives will clear the path (at least somewhat) for getting your team the tools, talent, and time it needs to transform the digital experience.To start, find the intersection points between brand-wide objectives and marketing objectives.Commercial objectives are the keystone of any organization, offering focus, alignment, and a north star for functional activities across the board. But not all brands have centralized objectives. Even for those that do, not all marketers have easy access to them. Encouraging strategic thinking in the organization can sometimes be the first step to kicking off a productive conversation between marketing and its executive peers.

Example Commercial Brand Objectives

• Company/Brand Reputation
• Cost-Reduction/Margin
• Net Profit/Revenue Growth
• Innovation
• Efficiency
• Risk Mitigation

Each brand objective can have several possible ways that Marketing can drive them, and strategically mapping those out can be a critical part of rationalizing Marketing’s activities and spend in the future.

Example Marketing Objectives

• Marketing Efficiency
• Acquisition
• Conversion
• Retention
• Growth
• Advocacy
• Customer Experience

Phase Two: Align on the Tactics Necessary to Achieve Those Objectives

In any conversation about planning, things would move from the highest-level goals down to the strategy level and lower down to the tactical level. But today, we're not telling you how to plan for the future — we're simply describing how to use moments that are already baked into your planning phases as an opportunity to think not only about team KPIs and OKRs but also to set expectations around your current and future technical abilities.Once you know your business-level objectives and the departmental objectives that feed the machine, you'll start to ideate tactics — the many programs and campaigns you could run to move the needle, likely a mix of the tried-and-true with some amount of new initiatives or approaches.Some marketing tactics are better placed to enable certain objectives than others. Choose the ones that will have the most impact for you. For example, below we've laid out a schema that maps tactics onto objectives as framed by lifecycle stage.

This is a fairly intuitive step that is often overlooked, especially by less technical marketing leaders. To put it simply, if you were a military genius, you wouldn't plan for battle without an exact munitions inventory and headcount. You're the marketing genius, and your best-laid plans will fall short if you don't inventory your capabilities upfront.This is the perfect time to be innovative and to consider new-to-you or even new-in-kind tactics to reach goals. These tactics make for good indicators of the technical capabilities that should be factored into stack considerations, which in turn can give you insight into the viability of a certain tactic.For instance, you might say that you want to launch x-tactic in Q1, but on closer inspection, x-tactic requires several net new capabilities, and, digging deeper, you learn that said capabilities require dedicated technical personnel that you don't have. On the other hand, you might discover some capability buried in your stack is exactly what you need to execute a planned tactic, and without a regular capabilities audit, you may have paid for an unnecessary new tool. At this point, break down each tactic into tasks and milestones toward final execution and measurement. Determine the capabilities you need to make these things happen. Make a note of which capabilities are essential, which are incredibly helpful, and which are just nice-to-haves. At the rate that technology is moving, the nice-to-haves are becoming must-haves with greater frequency than ever, so it’s nice to keep a record of most-likely candidates of near-future must-haveness.

Phase Three: What Technology Will Make It Happen?

Be honest about what you need and don’t need. Consider your objectives:

• What available tools do you need to achieve your objectives?
• What exactly do the tools enable?
• And what do the tools require to have an impact on customers?

Your selection of marketing tools should represent your team’s capabilities and objectives.All tools have different requirements for what they need to work, which in turn defines the types of organizations and objectives for which they work best.Every tool type will exist on a spectrum of maturity and complexity, with different capabilities that may or may not work for your team. Not every brand will require the same tool capabilities. Here are the most common customer connector tools most marketing teams deploy.

Not all brands need advanced technologies for every end-channel, and others might need a little extra. All marketing leaders should think critically about the capabilities they really need to achieve core objectives, increase utilization, and reduce waste.In the end, you should have the tools for the job — no less, and as close to no more as possible. You should also be in a position to anticipate near-future needs, and — with a modular tech stack built around a smart hub — you’ll be able to easily swap out pieces to seamlessly transition from current to cutting-edge whenever the need arises. Click the link below to download the Pre-Work Checklist for Setting Criteria for Customer Connector Marketing Tools and How-To Checklist for Setting Criteria for Customer Connector Marketing Tools for tools-for-thought designed to offer guidance and suggestions to help narrow the search and establish an early-stage capability-requirements list.

Think as we might, we cannot think of a single facet of business that has gone untouched by shifts in technology.The big question businesses should always be asking themselves is the level of involvement required to evolve on pace with the technological vanguard.

Commodity Versus Differentiator

From our perspective as a technology company, we do whatever we can to ensure that our engineers aren't reinventing the wheel or the ESP or anything else that would fail to differentiate us as a company.The build-vs.-buy argument comes down to what "build" represents as opposed to "buy."If you lack an established and commoditized capability, it is likely a better bet to buy than build. It's easier and more efficient to lean on a partner and reap immediate ROI than to tie up engineering hours trying to repeat the success of someone for whom the capability is a core differentiator.One example from Simon Data would be our need for scalable compute resources. Rather than build server warehouses, we rely on Amazon's AWS, which also lets us flexibly increase compute power during use surges, like around the holidays.If a capability is a core driver of value and a strategic differentiator, it is likely something you want to build.No matter how stodgy and traditional, businesses must accept that content and technology are inextricable from core business in every industry and vertical.The technology that you pour resources into must create a unique value for your customers. If there's no laser-focused use case behind the necessity of building an ESP or CRM in-house, then you likely don't need to build it at all.On the other hand, if you're in the fortunate position to have a clear aim toward delivering value through a technology that's unique to you, then shedding the dead weight of inessential workloads building erstwhile-commoditized capabilities will help you get there faster.An apparel company may be hard at work building a portal that would bring the digital experience closer to an IRL experience — which, these days, some might consider to be God's Work. This retailer has its engineering team pushing the bounds of creativity and current technology. They don't need to disrupt realizing their vision by establishing a team to build run-of-the-mill (or even slightly better) heat-mapping software to inform UX and Marketing of conversion-rate optimization opportunities. While the capability is a necessary component of growing the business, the question of who built it is less important (if it's important at all).In other words, "build-vs.-buy" is only settled through evaluating all of your planned or "someday/maybe" builds against a possible purchase or partnership opportunity.It may be encouraging to know that this step isn’t easy even for us, an engineering-first technology company.

Technical Debt Versus Flexibility

The other critical factors in the decision to build or buy are maintenance, ongoing improvements, and added complexity, all of which can roll into the idea of technical debt.The truth is that naming the decision we're discussing "build vs. buy" makes this decision sound comparable to "Cook vs. Order In," which betrays the level of commitment required from the former half of the equation. In reality, it's more like "Start a Farm vs. Go Grocery Shopping."Unless you only need a new capability for a limited time, there's no such thing as a one-time build. For every new capability, you will need to dedicate future resources to maintenance and upgrades in perpetuity. Even letting a technology go to seed before migrating can often cause more headaches than it solves.One must also consider the sophistication required of a given solution. If you need a solution that helps you compete but won’t become a core differentiator, shopping for a best-in-class solution will be more efficient than shopping for a whole engineering team to assemble that solution.We've seen among our clients that the build-mindset runs the risk of walling out non-technical marketers and experience leaders. Unlike out-of-the-box solutions, not much sweat is spent on in-house solutions' accessible UI or UX. This creates friction in execution and end channels, cumbersome workflows, and interdepartmental bottlenecks — all of which only serve to slow down operations.As came up in a recent Executive Roundtable, your technology is only as future-proof as it is easily jettisoned. In other words, bias toward speed over robustness. As one Executive Roundtable guest put it:

“The best strategy is to accept that things are going to change. Rather than future-proof, prepare for the future by minimizing the risk of pain and keeping your organization open to opportunities that the future holds."

This might be one of the best arguments for outsourcing: flexibility is the only true path to adaptability, and the companies that adapt most quickly are the companies that succeed. The companies that don't adapt...ahem...Blockbuster Video comes to mind as an example that won’t offend anyone. To recap, the question of build vs. buy points to two variables:

• Is this capability a unique core differentiator, or is it a commodity?
• Will the adoption or creation of this capability accumulate a technical debt or empower technological agility?

For more on this and other considerations around using the right technology for your company and unique use cases, check out “Turn Your Tech Stack into an Ecosystem: A Technologist’s Guide” by Simon CEO Jason Davis.

Or get your dating advice from a customer data platform

This is Part 2 of our dissection of an effective welcome series. For Part 1, click here > First Impressions: The ‘Friend A’ Welcome Experience Strategy.Customers begin their relationship with a brand well before signing up for email. Still, an expansive, well-designed, and well-timed welcome series is critical to deepening that relationship and building brand affinity.Before doing anything, brands need a clearly defined objective for their welcome experience and the actions it’s intended to drive. This will allow them to streamline their initiatives and increase the likelihood of having an impact on consumer behaviors.If you look at the steps below and imagine that it’s not customer relationships but dating advice, your marching orders will become clear. Things become more complicated when you’re dealing with data and the massive scale of serving thousands or millions of customers, but that’s what Simon’s smart hub CDP is here for.

Phase 1. Establish the relationship

1. Create the moment: Set the scene and draw consumers in.Lead with your best self, but above all, be a great listener.2. Build a profile: Enable engagement with essential data.Ask questions, get to know them, and find commonalities so you can move from small talk to genuine conversation. 3. Expand engagement: Get permission to expand to a new channel.Float some ideas for a second date but don’t seem desperate or pressing.

Phase 2. Develop the relationship

4. Get tactical: Define essential steps for a successful relationship.Propose an activity you know you’ll both enjoy.5. Make it work: Call consumers to action with meaningful content.Send them a Spotify playlist you know they’ll love and a magazine article relevant to something they said. Follow up to see when they’re free for [INSERT AWESOME ACTIVITY].For the sake of brevity and to avoid writing an article about dating, we’ll stop the analogizing here. The point is to help marketers and business leaders see the connection between their high-tech initiatives and the ancient art of simply building a relationship. While digital-first DTC brands have generally earned the spotlight for customer engagement over the lumbering legacy brands they’ve come to disrupt, we’d like to focus on how one of the legaciest of legacy brands successfully gets to know its customers. But first, some trivia to get across that old dogs can keep up in this economy:

• This company’s earliest predecessor was chartered in 1799 by the New York State legislature to supply "pure and wholesome" drinking water to the city's growing population.
• Two of its co-founders included Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
• In 1817, the company expanded its offerings into banking.
• In 1853, Abraham Lincoln became a customer of this now well-established financial institution

Who knew Chase Bank had such a storied past? As you’ll see, Chase can thank their focus on customers for their long history. After all, without customers, no company sticks around. Let’s see how Chase does it today (because we don’t have examples of a 19th-century welcome series). If you’re in financial services, check out our white paper on how marketing black holes threaten client relationships and what you can do about it: Download “Closing Context Gaps”

Establish the relationship

Creating a moment

Set the scene. Give customers a simple and straightforward path to begin a meaningful engagement with you. Know why customers are visiting your site and offer them a choice to self-select a journey that helps get them there.Solve a problem. Entice engagement from customers by helping them overcome a barrier or frustration when shopping for a product in your category and helping make their decision easier. The key is to make it easy, reduce the friction and frustration of analysis paralysis, and remove decision anxiety. An example of setting the scene is simplifying your homepage to allow customers to choose a path from a selection of options while also allowing you to quickly segment on intent.

1. Chase offers visitors a curated collection of product options to explore what fits their needs
2. They highlight a diagnostic tool to help customers identify the best credit card for their preferences.
3. Chase encourages participation by simplifying the decision-making process.

Building a profile

Have a purpose. Collect only the information that you need to offer customers a unique, valuable, and tailored experience, and make it transparent why that information is being collected. Some key questions to ask during this design phase include:

• What data will enable us to create high-value experiences for customers?
• Is personally-identifiable information necessary now?

Make it engaging. Don’t just offer customers a long form to complete. Create an interactive experience that shares value back as they complete it. Sample content types include:

• Diagnostics: How well am I budgeting my monthly income?
• Calculators: How long will it take to reach my savings goal at x savings rate?
• Benchmarks: Am I more or less well-traveled than others my age?
• Recommenders: Which skincare product is right for me?

1. Chase walks customers through a series of questions to uncover preferences and objectives.
2. They allow customers to track their progress and responses as they complete the quiz.
3. The tools uses collected customer preference data to align customers to best-fit products and encourage their application.

Expanding engagement

Offer a next step. Create an opportunity for the customer to take the first step in the relationship by making their first micro-conversion from unknown to known, this can be a purchase or offering an email address.Welcome the customer. Use this first micro-conversion to kick off a welcome series and define how you will nurture customers to take further action.Additional metrics to consider:

• Email sign-up vs. product purchase
• Product pages visited
• Personal goals and objectives

Ideas to encourage sign up:

• Personalized results
• Curated collections
• Special access
• Differentiated advice

1. Card applications can be daunting, so Chase simplifies the process as much as possible by including confidence boosters.
2. Chase ensures clients are aware of the biggest benefits relevant to the objectives uncovered in the quiz.
3. For Chase, a completed card application marks the first critical micro-conversion, moving customers from unknown to customer and triggers an email onboarding series.

Developing the relationship

Get tactical

Define your triggers. Consider what actions should kick off your welcome series, as well as any other triggers that you want to shape into the overarching customer experience over the course of the series, and how they might impact what messages are sent.

1. For Chase, the trigger we’re focusing on is a credit card application.
2. Each card appeals to a different persona — the cash-back rewards persona, the traveler persona, the dining rewards persona, etc. The follow-up content a customer receives depends on the card they applied for, which signals them as falling into a given persona.

The email screenshots below are for a travel-rewards card, which you probably could’ve guessed (the mark of a good email!).

Identify channels. Determine the best channels to engage your new customers as they make their way across the series — consider email, SMS, display ads, and mobile push as options.

1. When customers visit their statement online, Chase encourages a detailed account setup, using the opportunity to enable preferences and create new channels for engagement.
2. Chase encourages users to set key preferences, which define the customer experience.
3. This call to action is found in the online customer portal and is featured in their statement review.

Space it out. Consider how long you would like to make your welcome series, the number of communications you would like to send, and how long of a delay you would like between each communication as you map out the full journey.

1. Chase starts off slow, then speeds up engagement in the early stages of the new customer relationship. After the account is up to date and in use, Chase decreases communication so customers will perceive each email as containing only important information.

Branch with purpose. Allow for if/then responses across the journey to react to customer behaviors and stay relevant. As customers continue their welcome experience, consider the actions they might take between communications, and if that can/should impact their next message.

1. A week into ownership, Chase updates customers on their progress against a large welcome bonus to build urgency and provide a path forward through coaching.
2. Chase gamifies their welcome bonus to create urgency and build utilization habits.
3. In a separate follow-up email, Chase offers customers low-effort ways to maximize dollar spend and point return.

Make it work

Establish calls to action. Consider your end goal and the calls to action at each point in the series that will effectively drive customers toward that goal.

1. Chase sends a final email to coach customers on ways to use accrued points, encouraging users to set goals for points they can achieve with higher spending.
2. Once customers have begun to accumulate points (about six weeks), Chase offers a glimpse at some ways to cash in points.
3. Chase updates messaging to be more aspirational tone to further gamify point-earning against an end goal, which for this persona is travel rewards.

Additional best practices to make it work

Respond immediately. Send an instant response to acknowledge the customers’ first action and to quickly continue the relationship while top-of-mind.Keep listening. Use the data you have and continue to gather new information to inform the content of any follow-on communications, ensuring continued relevance.Experiment for results. Plan variants of each communication to test for what is most effective to drive the desired behaviors in the target audience and optimize for results.The key thing to recognize is that there’s a vast difference between collecting data on customers and knowing customers. The only way to truly understand your customers is with a marketer-friendly data layer that allows marketers to easily observe, test, and analyze campaigns and behaviors. And the best way to make that dream a reality is to bake campaign orchestration seamlessly into your customer data and segmentation UI. In the long run, you can’t influence customer behavior if you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it without a robust customer data platform that can demonstrate value in market. For Part 1 of our look at effective welcome series, click here >First Impressions: The ‘Friend A’ Welcome Experience Strategy.

Or, how to make sense of all the Salesforce CDP offerings

2020 has obviously been a strange year. And it’s been made no less odd by the release of the Salesforce CDP offering, 360 Audiences. After all, Salesforce Chief Analytics Officer and Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz told AdExchanger in this 2018 interview that "I think [CDPs are] a passing fad." Then, in 2019 — not a full year later but only 280 days (i.e., three business quarters) later — Marty Kihn, SVP of Product Management for SFMC, told AdExchanger:

"What the market needs is for somebody to make a claim and build an enterprise-grade, reliable CDP.”

This interview was, of course, to announce Salesforce's plan to build a CDP. So what happened in those three quarters that caused the 180 resulting in 360 Audiences? Obviously, in 2018, Salesforce had no plans to build a CDP, so Stutz had an incentive to disparage the category. But it wasn't long before they saw that the demand was unmistakable — not to mention the CDP-related rumblings of their biggest competitors, Adobe and Oracle. The choice became clear: hemorrhage customers or jump on the CDP train.The above is speculation, but it's supported by what we see as the two significant constraints on Salesforce with regard to building and sustaining a fully-fledged CDP.

Two Reasons the Salesforce CDP is Hamstrung

Salesforce is quite strategically constrained. They have a user base and a massive product base that is significant in the enterprise. And they have a twin mandate:

1. To deepen those relationships (i.e., sell more stuff)
2. And to put up moats and be defensive, primarily against large competitors, but also against disruptive intrusion from below.

Even if Salesforce threw their hat into the CDP ring with the charitable intent to drive value for their customers, they still have to deal with the constraints placed upon them by the tech they already have in the marketplace, which pigeonholes what they're allowed to offer. Given that they have so much in use in the market, and given that they just want to fend competition off, they only have a narrow area in which to build a play. They're not looking to have an innovative product. Salesforce is looking for something that will principally, to some extent, retrofit their current products, some kind of lightweight layer that will improve data functionality or availability to things that people already have. They also need to pull people farther into their closed-garden ecosystem.

But is Audiences 360 a Good CDP?

No, not yet. Its release is incredibly premature, and if the product roadmap is to be believed, A360 is an infant who’ll be under heat lamps for a while. But might it become a powerhouse? Maybe. But given the mandates mentioned above, the things that they must do severely limit what they can do. Audiences 360 looks like a pretty basic data layer that privileges pulling batch data out of Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud. The overall Salesforce implementation and data philosophy is essentially "We're going to dump a bunch of Lincoln Logs on your head, and you have to build it yourself." For that reason, they also have a giant ecosystem of platinum partner implementation specialists, i.e., businesses built to be Salesforce ecosystem helpers. While Salesforce is under no obligation to throw those businesses a bone, they don't want to be disruptive, and those businesses are good for revenue.They're making a product that satisfies their ecosystem partners; it also heavily privileges their products so that they can lock customers more securely inside their walled garden.

But if Salesforce is Awesome, What’s the Problem?

Audiences 360 is geared toward and gated by the limitations of Salesforce’s old, cobbled-together technology. Salesforce's current tech constrains their CDP in a couple of crucial ways. Integrations. Salesforce wants everyone to be end-to-end Salesforce, which is more of a strategic limitation than a technical one, but a very salient facet. They are strategically disincentivized from integrating well or playing nicely with any outside vendors. Redundant capabilities. Let's start with Marketing Cloud as an example. Marketing Cloud ExactTarget (ET) has a relatively constrained notion of how it orients the data, what kind of workflows you have within and around the tool, what it should own versus what should be owned by other systems, and so on.To that end, an ET deployment is going to handle your email journeys. They've got some ability to do push; they're not optimal for it, but they can do it. They have some wobbly Facebook Audience integrations. For additional end-channels, they make available short-code integrations. But because of that, if you're on Marketing Cloud, then orchestration for email, push, and Facebook audiences must live in ET. They want all of your single-channel and omnichannel orchestration to live within ExactTarget as a product. With that as an existing constraint, they must then build a CDP that is nondisruptive to where they already require orchestration to live. In other words, you can't orchestrate from the same tool that is building audiences or sending data around. Friction between products. It makes sense to unify these capabilities in one UI. But they can't do it because those things already live elsewhere. Salesforce will not deploy a CDP that requires a massive refactor of products they already have in market. They’re not going to create something that would require an enormous change to existing corporate workflows.So the abridged version is that Salesforce has an infant CDP, which they built not because they wanted to or because they had an affirmative vision. They built it as a line of defense. They want to use it to satisfy their partners and to suck customers further into the Salesforce ecosystem.

What Does This Mean in Practical Terms?

Let’s say you're a big business, and you're mostly on the Salesforce stack. But you've got Omniture, and you use Braze for push. You have different business units using or testing things, making siloed purchasing decisions. But now you're trying to unify all of this into one totalizing holistic engagement strategy. Here are your options:

1. Rip and replace all that other stuff and go deep into total Salesforce reliance
2. Deploy Simon, and we'll make it all sing nicely together.

Rather than offering a massive line of half-baked products to up-sell and lock in customers, Simon's approach prioritizes freeing marketers to choose the solutions that fit their businesses and use cases. As a smart hub CDP, we specialize in seamless integrations with anything you throw at us. There are things that Simon does that Salesforce can never do because then they're not allowed to contemplate it:

• We have broad-based integration capabilities into any number of systems that you might use (including Salesforce), so we handle your baseline integrations.
• We have a flexible data layer that makes getting data into and out of your Salesforce products very easy (or Adobe, Oracle, SAP...you name it).
• We built the product in a way that privileges data ingestion, so it’s less of a burden on your team.
• Being a newer technology, we have been able to avoid the mistakes others made before us.

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, we’re not a part of any cloud ecosystem. We are free to treat all vendors equally to leverage the full functionality of your stack.

To learn more about how Simon can create your seamless customer architecture, book a demo