Integration Across Silos Joined with AI and Hyper-Personalization Help Top Vendors Extend Lead

This year’s Technology Value Matrix for Marketing Automation highlights increased efforts to minimize marketing campaign opt-outs by using AI-driven targeting, data integration and automation that further personalizes content based on more granular audience preferences. Increased pressure from European general data protection regulation (GDPR) has also further accelerated investment in the development of tools that better encourage subscribers not to drop out of marketing campaigns.

The leaders in this year’s Value Matrix include: Adobe Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce.

“Every marketing automation vendor talks about personalization, but few have achieved hyper-personalization. Going beyond even micro-segmentation, true personalization means no prospect or customer ever receives communications they don’t want – from a channel or at a time they don’t prefer. In this pursuit, GDPR’s further restrictions on maintaining banks of customer data makes things even more difficult when attempting to get customers that have opted-out back. Getting effective personalization right the first time is crucial,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Research at Nucleus Research.

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One of the biggest hurdles to effective omnichannel marketing is real-time visibility into information spread out between departments, databases and applications. Vendors are driving improvements towards a “single view” into customer data with e-commerce and marketing integration strategies at the forefront of this push. And as a means to grow their own market share, vendors are increasing engagement for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer models, increasingly overlapping capabilities between these categories of offerings.

Vendors are evaluated within the Technology Value Matrix on both usability and functionality – key drivers of value – and placed into four categories: Leaders, Experts, Facilitators, and Core Providers. Customers can use the Matrices to evaluate vendor short lists as well as to make the case for maintaining existing applications.

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