A little over two weeks ago, our team published the Multichannel Campaign Management Magic Quadrant, turning our eyes once again to the providers of technology designed to coordinate and orchestrate marketing communications and engagement with individuals and customer segments across both offline and online channels.
This was my third published MCCM MQ. And just when I would have thought perhaps MCCM had found a place of quiet progression, there are years like this year, where we’re reminded that new entrants and investment bring interesting dimension to the market, existing providers are changing the game (sometimes, by choosing to no longer play), and the pace of innovation remains blisteringly fast. All of this, combined with projected growth rates of 24% YoY on a market generating $6B in spend, there remains much to examine and discuss.
Among the things that stood out to me this year:
Shuffling of dance partners: 2015 marked our first evaluation of the combination of eBay Enterprise’s CRM division, now combined with Zeta Interactive, expanding Zeta’s customer base and giving them access to eBay’s database marketing and email capabilities. We also saw StrongView added to the Selligent storyline, the two vendors part of a private equity rollup, enhancing their respective global footprint and functional capabilities. On the flip side, SDL announced their plans to exit the market, and following Teradata’s November 2015 announcement along similar lines, just 10 days post-publishing we learned that the Teradata marketing applications business was being purchased by Marlin Equity Partners.
Certainly other channel acquisitions were also part of each vendor’s evolution this year, but these bigger deals were a reminder of the competitive nature of the market. Vendors must focus on either hyper- serving a market niche, or developing deep and broad capabilities (organically or through acquisition), as it remains hard to compete without prioritizing the needs of the marketer, and quickly advancing your solution to serve their dynamic needs. Simply “keeping up” in this market won’t cut it, largely because of the…
Market innovation driven by digital natives: Market leadership has for the last several years been driven out of the vendors who were digital led. Speed of innovation, especially as pertaining to execution within and across channels, in real time, has been the hallmark of change. Now, the leading edge storylines surround how campaign management solutions help manage the audience and interaction data that is collected, created, and consumed throughout the customer journey, and then leveraged for insight. Vendors are investing in event processing engines that can process and act upon this data quickly, which enables them to monitor and respond to signals, actions, or changes in status or data, launching communications or interactions triggered by (for example) the Internet of Things. With this the campaign management solution acts as the power center for interactions, with more and more marketing blood flowing through it, meaning that…
Campaign Management is the backbone of customer experience: If customer experience is the outside-in view of your company, then campaign management is the inside-out enablement of it. And consequently, journey-management-builder-designer tools are now prominent within campaign management tools. The question I pose to providers in the space, however, is what they’re doing to preserve the uniqueness of CX (the outside-in part) to keep it distinct from the campaign management part. I would hate for marketers who are doing campaign management to think they’ve embraced a new approach to customer experience simply because they’re using the term “journey” instead of “campaign” to describe a path of interactions.
Clients can learn more about the vendors mentioned above, and the 15 others we examined in our report here. The category is dynamic, the vendors are aggressive, and the returns are significant. It’s been fun having a front row seat to it all.
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