Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs
Published: 24 April 2018 ID: G00331171
Analyst(s): Adam Sarner, Andrew Frank, Jennifer Polk, Noah Elkin, Benjamin Bloom
Marketing leaders will find evolutionary shifts in demand and supply for their multichannel marketing initiatives. Our inaugural MMH Magic Quadrant examines a market unifying customer data across channels, enhancing personalization and decisioning with AI, and integrating customer journey analytics.
Market Definition/Description Gartner defines the multichannel marketing hub (MMH) as a technology that orchestrates a company's communications with and offers to customer segments across multiple channels. These include websites, mobile, social, direct mail call centers, paid media and email. MMH capabilities also may extend to integrating marketing offers/leads with sales for execution in both B2B and B2C environments.
Further defined:
■ Basic multichannel marketing includes functionality for segmentation, campaign and message creation, campaign workflow, and campaign and message execution.
■ Advanced analytic functionality enables customer-level data and analysis and modeling such as predictive analytics, journey analytics and customer profile management.
■ Advanced execution functionality includes personalization, content management, event triggering and real-time offer management in both inbound and outbound environments.
■ Digital marketing capability, as part of an integrated multichannel marketing solution, includes functionality for programmatic advertising, mobile and social marketing, and web and email marketing. Digital marketing extends the marketing process through channels such as the web, email, video, mobile and social applications, point-of-sale terminals, digital signage, kiosks, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Adobe Adobe, a Leader, offers a broad suite of marketing applications in its cloud-based multichannel marketing hub solution. It attracts global enterprises and midmarket organizations across a range of
Page 2 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 industries. B2C marketers seeking a marketing hub that includes native integration with analytics, advertising and creative applications should consider Adobe.
Strengths
■ Product: Adobe Campaign, Adobe's multichannel marketing hub, unites content creation and data analytics with cross-channel execution capabilities. It leverages access to a common set of audience data that users can share and enrich across other Adobe applications within Adobe's Experience Cloud. Adobe Campaign supports the migration of legacy Windows-based Campaign Classic users to its newer cloud-only Standard version.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Adobe reorganized its marketing cloud applications under the Experience Cloud umbrella to better align products with organizational dynamics. With Experience Manager and intelligent content capabilities, it took steps to streamline integrations and workflows between creatives, marketers and analysts. These workflows help marketers find relevant images, personalize layouts and assets, automate tasks in bulk, and deliver tailored experiences faster. Adobe also leveraged its partnership with Microsoft to integrate Adobe Campaign with Dynamics 365. Adobe Launch, a redesign of its tag management functionality, improved client-side web capabilities deployment.
■ Roadmap: In the coming year, expect Adobe to leverage its Microsoft relationship to adapt its marketing cloud application to Azure, leveraging Azure's capabilities in data rights management. By providing open access to capabilities powered by Sensei, Adobe's artificial intelligence (AI) platform, the company plans to transition from an applications focus to a platform provider, and source marketing capabilities from its developer community.
■ References: Adobe receives high marks from references for its email marketing; multistep, multiwave campaign creation; and web analytics.
Cautions
■ Adobe customers often struggle with Adobe's pricing policies, which require commitment to usage levels that may be difficult for marketers to forecast. References demonstrate lower-than- average satisfaction scores with Adobe's contract negotiation process.
■ Compared to other vendors evaluated in this research, Adobe's social marketing capabilities net below-average reviews from references.
■ Reference clients cite technical support and professional services as areas in need of improvement, calling for greater responsiveness and deeper knowledge of their business.
AgilOne AgilOne is a Niche Player. The company positions its multichannel marketing hub as a customer data platform (CDP), suggesting a focus on single-customer view, analytics, and data collection and orchestration. B2C marketers with robust first-party data seeking to coordinate analytics and activities among a diverse set of customer interaction systems should consider AgilOne.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 3 of 35 Strengths
■ Product: Users praise AgilOne's ability to ingest data from disparate systems and orchestrate activation across channel-specific interaction tools. Its focus on first-party data and analytics enables marketers to gain insights from their customer base and apply these to develop more targeted multichannel campaigns.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, AgilOne added a number of integrations with ad tech solutions, including Criteo, Oracle BlueKai and LiveRamp. It also refined integrations with Google Customer Match and Facebook Custom Audiences. AgilOne developed its configurable customer intelligence layer with machine learning to support one-to-one marketing applications. Its new AgilOne Customer Privacy API supports "right to be forgotten" requests mandated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scheduled for enforcement in the European Union this May.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, AgilOne plans more content models, more machine learning enhancements and platform enhancement to support additional enterprise use cases.
■ References: AgilOne references praise the company's distributed marketing and segmentation capabilities, citing the ease of deriving data insights from the platform. The company also garners positive scores for its event-triggered marketing and predictive analytics capabilities.
Cautions
■ AgilOne requires more integration with outside vendors than do marketing hubs with substantial native execution capabilities. Marketers with a complex variety of channel-specific execution tools should proceed with caution.
■ AgilOne focuses on B2C marketers with the data to support analytics-driven personalized relationships with consumers. Marketers that lack extensive customer data collection, consent and processing capabilities may have difficulty with this approach.
■ References give AgilOne below-average scores for email marketing and describe the UI as slow.
Cheetah Digital Cheetah Digital (formerly Experian Cross-Channel Marketing) is a Niche Player. With a focus on serving enterprise retail, media and financial services customers, its solution features sophisticated segmentation capabilities. B2C marketers seeking to unify customer data for email-driven multichannel execution should consider Cheetah's Marketing Suite.
Strengths
■ Product: A customer data layer combining demographic, transactional and event data powers the Cheetah Digital Marketing Suite. Segmentation capabilities incorporate descriptive, predictive and prescriptive insights for real-time execution. The platform enables "in the moment" adaptations to predesigned customer journeys based on external data inputs.
Page 4 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Cheetah augments its Marketing Suite with services including marketing strategy, implementation, creative, deliverability and analytics.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Cheetah Digital focused on usability improvements to the Marketing Suite's campaign management functionality. It introduced an archiving service that preserves personalized messages at the individual level and enhancements to the content editor and mobile reporting. Advances to segmentation capabilities brought faster data processing times. Cheetah Digital also bolstered its mobile marketing functionality to meet rising compliance requirements for the GDPR and other regulatory frameworks.
■ Roadmap: Cheetah Digital plans to invest in its data-handling capabilities in 2018. It intends to incorporate AI and machine learning to enhance messaging automation and better anticipate marketer needs. Cheetah also plans to focus on creating a distributed, more scalable, open platform that increases connectivity with other martech solutions and data sources.
■ References: References note the platform's flexibility, chiefly its ability to integrate multiple data inputs, and the ease of developing customer segments and delivering personalized marketing at scale. Clients praise Cheetah's good value for the price and consider the account team a trusted, proactive partner.
Cautions
■ In 2017, Vector Capital acquired a majority stake in Experian Cross-Channel Marketing, relaunching the company as Cheetah Digital. A subsequent workforce reduction, and the entrance and exit of executives may call into question Cheetah's ability to execute on its MMH roadmap.
■ References scored Cheetah below other vendors in this research for ease of deployment. They note user interface speed issues and inconsistent technical support responsiveness. Customers continue to express a desire for a more robust dashboard.
■ References gave Cheetah's customer journey, web and predictive analytics capabilities below- average scores relative to other vendors evaluated in this research, as they did for Cheetah's overall product capability rating. They note a desire for greater insight into the product roadmap.
Emarsys Note: Emarsys did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Therefore, Gartner analysis is based on other credible sources, including public information and discussions with Gartner clients that use Emarsys products/solutions.
Emarsys is a Niche Player. The company targets enterprise and midmarket organizations across retail, hospitality and travel verticals. Marketing leaders seeking strong, vertical-specific expertise and personalization capabilities for mobile, web and email marketing initiatives should consider Emarsys.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 5 of 35 Strengths
■ Product: A common data, analytics and omnichannel platform developed in-house at Emarsys provides the foundation for the company's Marketing Platform. The suite offers email, web, mobile, SMS, social, direct mail and advertising personalization capabilities. The Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AIM) solution further optimizes marketing timing, content and communications across channels. More advanced campaign analytics capabilities include predictive analytics, product recommendations and incentive recommendations (for retention).
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Emarsys enhanced its out-of-the-box offering with dynamic content capabilities, user permissions and strategic reports linking channel performance to business impacts. New vertical-specific configurations for subscription e-commerce, airline, hotel and retail correspond to key use cases, enabling new clients to gain the benefit of Emarsys' industry experience. Emarsys also launched an AI-optimized Web content personalization solution.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Emarsys will further develop its AIM to include improved algorithmic prediction of optimal channel, offer, content and timing. Users will be able to develop their own AI models, automation blueprints, next-best-action guidance and standardized content blocks to enable content personalization at scale. Planned enhancements to AIM's data onboarding, and extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) capabilities intend to help marketers optimize and manage outbound marketing. The company intends to use AI to help users report and visualize performance.
■ References: Customers give Emarsys high marks for its email marketing, attribution and social marketing features. References consistently note an engaged and responsive Emarsys implementation and support team. They cite price, value, product functionality and pricing flexibility as key drivers in their selection of Emarsys.
Cautions
■ References cite the Emarsys roadmap as an area of concern. Instability of past feature releases drives some to defer adoption of new features until they are confirmed to be stable and working as promised.
■ References cite Emarsys' mobile marketing product immaturity, and note that end-user training and deliverability assistance fell short of expectations.
■ Given the industries it targets with its multichannel marketing hub, Emarsys has low marketplace visibility. Most of its brand awareness is confined to the retail sector.
Episerver Episerver is a Niche Player. With its Digital Experience Cloud platform, Episerver combines content management, digital commerce, digital marketing and rule-based as well as AI-based personalization for midmarket organizations, and divisions and subsidiaries of global enterprises primarily in North America and EMEA. Marketers seeking campaign management, personalized experiences for performance marketing and rapid time to value should consider Episerver.
Page 6 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Strengths
■ Product: Episerver's Intelligent Campaigns solution simplifies the process of collecting website event data and activating it in direct marketing campaigns triggered by on-site behaviors. It can orchestrate personalized messaging among email, SMS and mobile push channels. Its Profile Store data platform features connectors to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics solutions for CRM integration.
■ New capabilities: Episerver continued to integrate and build upon its 2016 acquisitions of Optivo, a campaign management and customer intelligence solution, and Peerius, a personalization engine, into its single digital experience platform (DXP). DXP also has web content management (WCM) and digital commerce capabilities. Optivo and Peerius will be integrated with each other, but will remain separate but complementary with Episerver's campaign management platform. Episerver's commitment to the Microsoft Azure PaaS for cloud deployment gives it the ability to deliver new capabilities as Microsoft continues to invest in the platform's features and marketplace.
■ Roadmap: In addition to planning incremental product improvements in the areas of testing and analytics in 2018, Episerver intends to add new features such as social and advertising-based acquisition channels, and advanced AI models for campaign optimization across all touchpoints.
■ References: Episerver elicits its highest marks for multistep, multiwave campaign creation. Customers also cite solid event-triggered marketing capabilities and customer support. They give the platform high marks for ease of use.
Cautions
■ Episerver's approach to intelligent campaigns supports a relatively narrow range of marketing tactics. Its solution focuses on welcome and onboarding messages for new customers, reactivation for lapsed customers, and retargeting for recent website visitors who failed to complete a transaction. It lacks the flexibility of more advanced systems, especially in areas of media and customer acquisition.
■ Episerver Campaign receives low marks from reference customers for search marketing, social marketing, content management and predictive analytics, features it plans to address through integrations with other Episerver products. Its scores for real-time offers and web analytics also were below average.
■ References describe Episerver as lagging in innovation and automation, citing stagnation with Episerver Campaign features inherited from the Optivo acquisition as a particular concern, which Episerver will need to address in its roadmap.
IBM IBM, a Leader, offers a wide global reach. Its solution attracts a broad range of sectors and has a growing feature set of IBM Watson's AI capabilities. B2C and B2B marketers seeking strong
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 7 of 35 customer segmentation, extensive marketing functions and multiple deployment options should consider IBM's solution.
Strengths
■ Product: IBM Watson Marketing comprises several multichannel marketing solutions, including Watson Campaign Automation (SaaS), IBM Marketing Software (on-premises), Watson Real-Time Personalization (SaaS), Watson Marketing Insights (SaaS), Watson Customer Experience Analytics (SaaS) and Watson Content Hub (SaaS). This combined portfolio adds broad functionality to IBM's MMH offerings.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, IBM launched Watson Marketing Assistant. This AI-enabled tool helps users perform tasks, pull performance reports, and understand the sentiment and tone of campaign messaging. Through a partnership with MediaMath, IBM Media Optimizer began providing management capabilities for owned and paid marketing channels. Watson Marketing launched a managed-hosted version of IBM Campaign, enabling user access to the capabilities of Campaign with the flexibility of cloud or on-premises deployment.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, IBM plans to have Watson Marketing Insights put predictive capabilities directly in the hands of marketers, helping them understand everything from audience engagement levels to lifetime value and churn risk. The company seeks continued expansion of its Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) partner ecosystem, expanded capabilities for paid media, and centralized audience management and segmentation capabilities. It plans to increase investment in IBM Watson Marketing Insight's predictive capabilities to drive real-time personalization. IBM is working to ensure its offerings help organizations meet operational requirements of the GDPR before regulations go into effect.
■ References: References give IBM high marks for its automation features, together with its ability to complement other products, notably IBM UBX. They also praise the platform's speed and reliability.
Cautions
■ To fully leverage all MMH capabilities, clients must use both IBM Marketing Software (on- premises) and Watson Campaign Automation (SaaS) — since some capabilities aren't available in both offerings.
■ References gave IBM lower-than-average scores in predictive analytics and mobile analytics.
■ References note that IBM's user interface needs work, citing navigation challenges. They also note lack of ease around solution updates, particularly with larger implementations.
Listrak Listrak is a Niche Player. Its solution offers multichannel marketing capabilities centered on campaign orchestration and mobile marketing. Listrak primarily services retailers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms, and travel and hospitality service providers. B2C marketers seeking a
Page 8 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 multichannel marketing hub that focuses on customer engagement and conversion should consider Listrak.
Strengths
■ Product: Listrak's SaaS-based platform focuses on helping its clients achieve and market to a single, complete view of the customer. Its platform offers a range of capabilities to unify customer and audience data; generate and apply AI-driven insight; orchestrate, automate and personalize campaigns; and support multichannel engagement.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Listrak added unified profiles, and probabilistic and deterministic cross-device identification aimed at improving targeting. It expanded its personalization focus, including advanced segmentation, AI-driven campaigns and programmatic advertising. The vendor enhanced Listrak Composer with dynamic and predictive content and product recommendations. Listrak improved its mobile offering with the addition of native SMS and a mobile SDK that includes triggered messages to IoT endpoints. It added a new travel and hospitality suite. In early 2018, Listrak launched a beta version of Listrak CRM, a solution focused on customer analytics, data modeling, and customer and audience segmentation. It also launched a set of dashboards, and data visualization and exploration tools aimed at increasing customer insights.
■ Roadmap: The company plans to continue adding capabilities to Listrak CRM throughout the year with a focus on predictive analytics and advanced insights. Listrak also plans to extend mobile into SMS filtering, and app and wallet push notifications. It plans to further enhance personalization functionality with predictive web content and add householding capabilities to its customer profiles.
■ References: Customers give Listrak high marks for email, mobile, social and event-triggered marketing. They also indicate web analytics is an area of strength. Users praise the company's ability to understand their business needs, support them as a strategic partner and deliver value.
Cautions
■ Listrak lacks native capabilities for third-party data matching, onboarding or DSP integration, requiring custom integration to access third-party data and limiting a 360-degree customer view of first-party data.
■ Client references rate Listrak's advanced analytics, specifically predictive analytics and customer journey analytics, below average compared with other vendors evaluated in this research.
■ Despite the growing importance of personalization and recent updates to Listrak's personalization engine, clients also score it below average in this area.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 9 of 35 Marketo Marketo is a Leader. Its solution focuses on delivering multichannel lead management and event- triggering capabilities for B2B marketing organizations in the software, business and financial services industries. The company continues to build visibility with B2C companies. Marketers prioritizing customer life cycle management, together with email and social marketing capabilities, should consider Marketo's multichannel marketing hub.
Strengths
■ Product: The Marketo Engagement Platform underpins its MMH offering. Native modules provide multiple channel-specific capabilities, augmented by a large catalog of partner solutions. The company incorporates predictive analytics for marketing program and channel insights, and customer journey analysis. AI-powered predictive content delivers real-time personalization. These functionalities link to Engagement Platform's dashboards, offering insights into campaign performance. Sales engagement functionality helps keep B2B organizations aligned across the customer buying journey.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Marketo enhanced its native account-based marketing solution, leveraging the company's acquisition of the ToutApp sales enablement tool. Marketo announced a partnership with Google that includes hosting Engagement Platform on the Google Cloud Platform. To augment its Ad Bridge component, Marketo added integration with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Google Customer Match, allowing for ad targeting across search, Gmail and YouTube.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Marketo plans to upgrade the Engagement Platform user interface to increase marketer productivity and collaboration. A new marketing performance insights dashboard is also in the works. The account-based marketing app will add account hierarchies, with improved targeting, personalization and reporting capabilities. Marketo plans to integrate Engagement Platform with Google's G Suite as part of its evolving strategic partnership.
■ References: Customer references appreciate the ROI they get from Engagement Platform, noting that it enables marketing teams to consistently deliver on business objectives. Reference clients cite Marketo's lead management, email and account-based marketing functions as key strengths.
Cautions
■ Engagement Platform's capabilities and feature set are complex, requiring dedicated skilled resources or third-party professional service providers to maximize platform use.
■ References report challenges around implementation. Marketo scores below the average of other vendors evaluated in this research for ease of deployment and ease of integrating Engagement Platform with other components of the martech stack.
■ Marketo gets below-average marks from reference customers for service and support. References cite a desire for more proactive support to identity roadblocks and help optimize their use of Engagement Platform. They note a need for more responsive technical support for high-level projects.
Page 10 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Maropost Maropost is a Niche Player. With a solution that features revenue optimization, the company primarily serves midmarket organizations in retail, healthcare, financial services, and travel and hospitality. B2C marketers at midmarket companies seeking a multichannel marketing hub solution designed for lean marketing teams should consider Maropost.
Strengths
■ Product: Maropost offers a multichannel marketing hub focused on marketing automation, data analytics, personalization and AI-powered marketing. Its Revenue Optimization Suite enables orchestration across web, email, mobile and social, with data integration support for social advertising. Maropost focuses on measuring and optimizing lead quality and sales conversions, as well as reporting return on campaign spend.
■ New capabilities: In early 2018, Maropost launched Sales Cloud to improve data sharing between sales and marketing teams and measure marketing ROI and contribution to revenue. It enriched email marketing with open-time optimization and a live content countdown on expiring offers. Underscoring its focus on conversion, Maropost added send time recommendations based on conversion optimization, leveraging its DaVinci AI when clients have limited historical data. It also supplements its existing data capture with the ability to track session behavior.
■ Roadmap: Maropost's 2018 roadmap involves deepening its multichannel personalization capabilities overall and within individual marketing channels. Planned improvements include simplifying A/B testing, adding a content and product recommendation engine to email, and adding an A/B testing module to mobile. It also plans to expand mobile marketing functionality with triggered messaging and behavioral segmentation and a text messaging API. It plans to build out social marketing with social listening and the ability to create a Pinterest campaign.
■ References: Client references laud Maropost's ability to understand their business needs and serve as a strategic partner. Clients rate Maropost above average for lead management and event-triggered marketing compared with other vendors in this research.
Cautions
■ Whereas Maropost's visibility has improved over the last year, it shows up in only 5% of client references' consideration sets, slightly below average across all vendors profiled.
■ Maropost lacks advertising capabilities. Although it supports data integration with Facebook Custom Audiences, the lack of native capabilities requires clients to invest in additional tools to manage digital advertising in-house or to rely on agency partners.
■ Channel selection and optimization remain highly manual and still don't utilize Maropost's AI capabilities.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 11 of 35 Optimove Optimove is a Niche Player. Optimove's focus is cross-channel e-commerce, with a multichannel marketing hub solution that features customer profile management and self-optimizing campaigns. B2C retail, e-commerce and financial services brands seeking an analytics approach to segment discovery and message targeting across channels should consider Optimove.
Strengths
■ Product: Optimove focuses its multichannel Relationship Marketing Hub on the collection and unification of consumer data to enable analysis, life cycle modeling and campaign planning. Optimove segregates customers by life cycle stage, using increasingly granular behavioral signals to recommend ideal customer marketing campaigns. The company also offers data science and strategic service resources to clients seeking a more-full-service approach.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Optimove added the ability to run self-optimizing campaigns. This feature lets users define test segments, treatments and holdout groups, following which the software continuously optimizes the match between each marketing offer, microsegment and channels. These include email, Facebook, SMS and mobile push messaging using Optimove's native channels or third-party systems via API.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Optimove will continue its rollout of Optibot, which proactively surfaces recommended actions to marketers based on campaign insights. Optibot triggers notifications to users with campaign insights by segment and life cycle stage. Opitmove's AI is planned to autonomously improve current campaigns, stop poor-performing activities and easily pivot to new campaigns.
■ References: References praise Optimove's modeling capabilities as well as its strong service and account management teams. Product functionality, a consumer focus and strong consulting capabilities drive client adoption of Optimove.
Cautions
■ Realizing the value of Optimove's predictive capabilities requires the availability of historical, first-party behavioral and transactional customer data to be loaded into its advanced analytics module for tuning and training.
■ Optimove's solution may not fit all B2B brands. Recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) attributes are key to training Optimove's intelligent campaign management.
■ References note limited options for lead management use cases where consideration cycles are long and a desire for native integration with Salesforce CRM for B2B sales.
Oracle Oracle is a Leader. Its multichannel marketing hub includes a range of capabilities and marketing applications, and has a comprehensive underlying data infrastructure. B2B and B2C marketers seeking deep customer centricity, a foundation for AI and the ability to orchestrate a unified customer experience should consider Oracle's solution.
Page 12 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Strengths
■ Product: Oracle segments its multichannel hub functions to specialize in B2B (Oracle Eloqua) and B2C (Oracle Responsys) for upper-midmarket and large enterprises. The connected assets of the Oracle Marketing Cloud enable horizontal integration into other offerings such as Oracle Bluekai, Oracle Maxymiser and Oracle Infinity Analytics.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Oracle enabled the integration of Oracle Data Cloud attributes throughout the Oracle Marketing Cloud offering, using applications with a common ID graph to map first-party data to second- and third-party data for audience insight and acquisition. Marketers gain capabilities such as Responsys Program Orchestration to trigger display media retargeting campaigns. Oracle strengthened its Adaptive Intelligent Apps, its ability to use machine learning to gain customer insights and recommended actions.
■ Roadmap: Oracle's 2018 plans include CX Audience, a cross-channel and cross-platform segment creation tool that ingests event and consumer attribute data from across the enterprise. B2B marketers using the Eloqua suite gain a LinkedIn Sales Navigator app that delivers native insights from social selling activities. Oracle also plans to launch a Salesforce CRM app, as well as enhanced auditing capabilities for objects within the Oracle Marketing and CX offering.
■ References: References cite the performance and functionality of Oracle Responsys, and they note Oracle Eloqua's robust functionality for lead management. References also note Oracle's strengths in personalization, multistep/multiwave campaign creation and campaign optimization.
Cautions
■ Few references report relying on Oracle Marketing Cloud for real-time offer management, predictive analytics or distributed marketing, indicating limited use of these components. References note that some capabilities may require licenses to other Oracle CX suite modules beyond its messaging-focused tools.
■ References express concern that implementation can be complex, and that Oracle's sales team doesn't clearly outline the potential intricacies upfront. Users cite additional challenges working with offshore implementation partners.
■ Use cases for Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Marketing, such as send-time optimization or product recommendations, are more conservative than AI offerings from other Leaders. Oracle's horizontally integrated products represent untapped potential for transformative artificial intelligence in marketing.
Pegasystems Pegasystems (Pega) is a Visionary. It attracts marketers in the financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing, and energy and utilities industries as well as communications service
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 13 of 35 providers. B2C and B2B marketers seeking a multichannel marketing hub that can integrate customer interactions across the entire customer life cycle should consider Pega.
Strengths
■ Product: Pega's Customer Decision Hub focuses on AI-driven next-best-action calculations, which integrate across marketing, sales and customer service functions. Pega's focus on real- time interaction management enables marketers to develop personalized relationships with customers, extending beyond promotional messaging.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Pega introduced a new AI feature to address privacy and disclosure requirements of the GDPR. It also added new features and tools to make "always on" marketing easier for traditional marketers to learn and leverage. Pega extended its marketing capabilities to include advertising with its paid media module featuring direct API integrations with Google and Facebook. Pega differentiates its advertising offering by keeping personal data within an advertiser's firewall and applying next-best-action calculations to direct paid search, social and display campaigns.
■ Roadmap: Pega plans improvements to its platform by adding more KPIs to model goals and outcomes for optimizations and by making heavier use of AI to optimize outcomes. It plans to accelerate deployment and extend its back-office functions with consulting and technical partnerships in the marketing ecosystem.
■ References: Pega receives its highest marks in the areas of real-time offers, personalization and campaign optimization, reflecting the strength of its operational analytics.
Cautions
■ Pega is not a point solution; it requires a comprehensive approach to adoption that is not well- suited to deployments of limited scope.
■ Implementation generally requires extensive involvement of IT resources to realize the full benefit of its deep architectural approach. "Complexity" is a descriptor clients regularly use in relation to Pega implementation and deployment.
■ Pega gets mixed reviews from reference clients for its web analytics, segmentation, data mining and attribution metrics. Below-average scores reflect challenges some marketers — especially smaller ones — report in leveraging these tools.
RedPoint Global RedPoint Global is a Niche Player. With a focus on retail, financial services and insurance, and healthcare industry sectors, its multichannel marketing hub solution features a flexible customer data platform, in-line analytics, and robust orchestration. B2C marketers seeking customer data and profile management and a multichannel orchestration engine should consider RedPoint.
Page 14 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Strengths
■ Product: RedPoint's Customer Engagement Hub solution includes a customer data platform that creates and unifies consumer profiles built from diverse enterprise data, which gives marketers the ability to view and orchestrate customer journeys across multiple marketing solutions or vendors. Prebuilt integrations with other marketing solutions ensure RedPoint customers can leverage high-volume orchestration capabilities to manage the customer journey across any existing components in their stack.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, RedPoint's Customer Engagement Hub expanded its real-time capabilities, adding a product recommendation engine, web interface for single customer view lookup, enhanced dashboards and reports, and machine learning for optimization. RedPoint also added partnerships, enhancing its list of data, content and analytics integrations. These include connectors to messaging solutions from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and Cheetah Digital, which are crucial to multichannel execution. RedPoint also expanded its DMP integrations to include KBM Group's Zipline, a connector that enables marketers to deliver targeted ads leveraging first-party data.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, RedPoint plans for continued investments in a new web user experience for marketers and real-time dynamic customer journeys powered by machine learning. RedPoint will also continue support for additional NoSQL databases. New product bundling such as OEM email, SMS and mobile push solutions will simplify deployment for particular industry verticals. RedPoint is also coming to market with a GDPR offering with PossibleNOW.
■ References: References give high marks to the company's customer and professional services teams. Marketers seeking personalization and cross-channel orchestration report selecting RedPoint for its data-handling capabilities. They note functionality for the platform's cost, deployment speed and overall flexibility as key strengths.
Cautions
■ Outside of email marketing, RedPoint supports more than 100 data and marketing channel technology integrations. Marketers should be certain they can either leverage these out-of-the- box connectors with their tech stack or handle any overhead created by any additional integration management.
■ Despite UI updates, the solution may not be a good fit for teams lacking strong technical skills.
■ References note that getting started with RedPoint can be difficult for marketers without a strong understanding of their data.
Resulticks Resulticks is a Niche Player. With a solution that features robust data management capabilities, the company targets consumer electronics, financial services, healthcare, retail, travel and hospitality, and telecommunications organizations. Resulticks has a strong customer base in India and the Asia/Pacific region. It's building a presence in the U.S. market. Marketers seeking data
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 15 of 35 management, multitouch attribution and multichannel campaign orchestration capabilities should consider Resulticks.
Strengths
■ Product: Resulticks' mCloud platform is supported by an audience data management module. It includes connectors to external data sources, plus segmentation, propensity modeling and lead scoring functionality. mCloud's campaign creation and orchestration module includes dynamic offer management, real-time communication rule engine, machine-learning-driven analytics and reporting across the customer journey. The platform can function as a stand-alone MMH solution and integrate with other marketing automation platforms.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Resulticks reconfigured mCloud around a new master data management module and a revised campaign orchestration module designed to enable "dynamic" communication. It expanded to new channel capabilities such as a voice assistant, adding a budget simulator and incorporating AI capabilities into the orchestration tool. It also added distributed marketing capabilities for B2B2B and B2B2C use cases, enabling differentiated levels of campaign access for channel and agency partners. Resulticks added a mobile app that brings marketers essential campaign metrics and benchmarks, and added a number of mechanisms across the modules to facilitate GDPR compliance.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Resulticks plans ongoing developments to its data management module, including autogeneration of data attributes based on patterns the system detects. It also aims to launch a marketing plan generation tool that leverages historical customer data. Resulticks will look to integrate new channels and endpoints into its orchestration module, advancing the digital voice assistant marketing it launched in 2017. The data management module will eventually integrate into a marketing data blockchain that can be private or permissioned.
■ References: References cite strong ROI from using the Resulticks platform. They laud mCloud's intuitive interface, strong data integration, customer targeting and channel orchestration capabilities, and analytics. References praise the speed with which Resulticks delivers new features. mCloud received above-average scores across every major capability compared with other vendors evaluated in this research.
Cautions
■ Balancing ambitious platform expansion plans and customer growth objectives requires a measure of agility that would test even the most seasoned organization. It remains to be seen whether Resulticks can sustain this pace on multiple fronts.
■ Although not the driving force of its market entry strategy, Resulticks can be used to complement other MMH platforms. This "coexistence" approach may hinder the company's scale and expansion aspirations as an MMH.
■ Users can be overwhelmed by the platform's breadth of capabilities. References note a desire for quick-start templates to maximize the available functionality.
Page 16 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Sailthru Sailthru is a Niche Player. With a solution featuring sophisticated event-triggering and personalization capabilities, the company primarily supports organizations across the retail and e- commerce, entertainment, media and publishing, and travel and hospitality sectors. Marketers prioritizing personalized email and mobile marketing and web experiences should consider Sailthru.
Strengths
■ Product: Sailthru offers a full-suite MMH offering built on core strengths in email and mobile marketing and data-driven personalization capabilities, which extend across channels. Sailthru natively supports first-party data onboarding, with third-party data onboarding and matching enabled through partner APIs. Customer profiles amass demographic, behavioral and intent data from multiple sources. Predictive analytics span the customer journey, enabling personalized campaigns based on interest and intent factors.
■ New capabilities: Sailthru sharpened its mobile marketing capabilities in 2017. It now enables users to create dynamic segments based on mobile behaviors and trigger mobile messages based on website or email activity. Users also can personalize mobile app content based on customer engagement in other channels. Sailthru added an overlays product to its Site Personalization Manager. In addition, Sailthru invested heavily in customer success and technical support capacity to offer a higher level of client service.
■ Roadmap: Sailthru's 2018 plans call for simplified personalization processes, the ability to deliver push notifications based on expressed interests in other channels and predictive customer journeys. Expect interface improvements to better support multichannel journey planning, the addition of app-based retargeting in Lifecycle Optimizer and improved dashboarding capabilities. Sailthru also aims to automate weekly reporting covering email performance.
■ References: Reference clients give high marks to Sailthru's email marketing, personalization, segmentation and event-triggered capabilities. They praise the platform's flexibility, reliability and user friendliness. They also appreciate Sailthru's client service, citing the company as a strategic partner, and view Sailthru as providing solid value for their investment.
Cautions
■ Despite expanding its multichannel marketing capabilities, Sailthru's mobile and social marketing, and customer journey and predictive analytics functions don't receive the same high marks as its core email marketing solutions. References note some gaps in reporting functionality.
■ Customers express a desire for greater ease of use, noting that maximizing some Sailthru toolsets demands technical capabilities. This requirement may prove challenging for smaller teams that lack such capabilities in-house.
■ As Sailthru focuses on innovation and new solutions, references note lagging updates to basic capabilities, reflecting potential organizational growing pains.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 17 of 35 Salesforce Salesforce is a Leader. Its solution supports regional and global organizations across a broad range of industry sectors. B2C marketers seeking cloud-only multichannel marketing hub deployment — particularly when integration to Salesforce assets in customer service, sales and its Commerce Cloud platform is a priority — should consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Strengths
■ Product: Salesforce continues to round out its multichannel marketing capabilities. Marketing Cloud components include Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, Salesforce DMP, Data Studio and Journey Builder. Pardot, part of Sales Cloud, is Salesforce's B2B marketing solution supporting lead management and account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Salesforce added Data Studio, a data-sharing platform focused on second-party data. It offers marketers access to premium data for purchase and gives data sellers the ability to provision their data. An OEM partnership with Thunderhead, rebranded as Interaction Studio, will ingest customer interactions and build in-the-moment profiles for individuals. Partnerships with Sitecore and Google 360 analytics boosts Salesforce's access to web content management and web analytic capabilities.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Salesforce will continue to build its customer data profile with a data layer that integrates first-, second- and third-party data. This year, Salesforce's Einstein platform is slated to deliver journey recommendations, determining the next-best journey for individual consumers based on their propensity to engage.
■ References: References consistently note the value they get from Salesforce's Journey Builder, especially its ability to connect with other Salesforce clouds and product updates.
Cautions
■ Some of Salesforce's Einstein AI capabilities such as propensity scoring are further developed as part of Pardot and Sales Cloud. Users give web and mobile analytics below-average marks (leaving partners to fill in gaps) and cite reporting as a Marketing Cloud weakness.
■ Users consistently mention issues with setup and support, and the significant amount of IT resources needed. They also cite a desire for better integration among the client service teams across Salesforce offerings.
■ References cite a lack of pricing transparency, particularly when adding new licenses.
SAP SAP is a Leader. Its solution focuses on using first-party data to build and maintain profiles and automate multichannel marketing. SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud enables cross-channel campaign management, event-triggered marketing and targeted advertising for global marketing organizations. Large enterprises looking for a multichannel marketing solution that measures and
Page 18 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 optimizes marketing impact, especially those using other SAP solutions, should consider SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud.
Strengths
■ Product: SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud (an on-premises version is also available) supports multichannel marketing campaigns across online and offline channels. It also enables budgeting, reporting and analysis for iterative marketing improvements through integrations with SAP ERP and other third-party systems that track spending in financial systems, which can aid in measuring and proving marketing contribution to revenue.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, SAP updated the user interface of its campaign designer, enhanced reporting and dashboards, and improved campaign and program planning. It capitalized on last year's acquisition of Abakus by embedding SAP Hybris Customer Attribution into the marketing cloud to enhance attribution and measurement. A 2017 acquisition of customer identity management company Gigya enables SAP to improve its identity, preference, consent and profile management capabilities. It enhanced event-triggered marketing with inputs from IoT events. SAP expanded social marketing, adding support for LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp, and mobile, adding geolocation-based offers.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, SAP plans to add campaign portfolio optimization and marketing mix optimization, and to enhance its behavioral segmentation capabilities. It also plans to use SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to expand further into data-driven segmentation with the ability to focus on goal-based segmentation. It also intends to enhance its account-based marketing hierarchies to link related accounts within client organizations.
■ References: Client references view SAP as a strategic partner and chose the platform for this reason, as well as its vision and roadmap. They value SAP's ability to understand their business needs better than other competitors considered. References rate SAP above average on performance and scalability, service, and support. Clients specifically give SAP high marks for segmentation and event-triggered marketing.
Cautions
■ References give SAP below-average ratings compared with other vendors evaluated in key areas such as value, integration and deployment, out-of-the-box functionality, ease of use, and training.
■ Clients rate SAP below average in product capabilities such as lead management, web analytics, real-time offers and recommendations, email marketing, and mobile and social marketing. Client ratings for SAP's social marketing and web analytics declined noticeably from last year.
■ Abakus, acquired in 2016, is now fully embedded. However, client references rate SAP attribution metrics well below average, with some clients relying on other vendors for this functionality.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 19 of 35 SAS SAS is a Leader. Bolstered by its reputation in data management and advanced analytics, SAS attracts global clients across the financial services, telecommunications and retail sectors. Marketers seeking an analytics-focused marketing hub with an emphasis on personalization and performance optimization should consider SAS Customer Intelligence 360.
Strengths
■ Product: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 consists of a variety of modules for customer analytics, campaign management, real-time omnichannel customer interactions and marketing resource management. The solution is designed for power and flexibility, with a focus on revealing customer insights and automating repetitive tasks.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, SAS took steps to address perceptions that its tools are only suitable for advanced users. It simplified its user interface and added AI features designed to provide more accessible insights and explanations to business users. Its Viya front end includes a new mobile interface and a new visual tool for data preparation.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, SAS will focus on a 'hybrid' campaign management approach that unifies digital and nondigital interactions, and a modernization of its marketing resource management (MRM) offering, called 360 Plan. Additionally, SAS is extending its cloud offerings with containers and microservices, and incorporating AI and machine learning technologies into its products. Its roadmap includes more customer data platform features, including privacy controls, support for streaming analytics and IoT-based data collection and activation, and new open-source integrations. Its AI innovations include proposed features including customer journey oriented "Smart Tasks" that provide the best offer for a given interaction.
■ References: SAS gets outstanding ratings for attribution metrics and good ratings for mobile marketing analytics and segmentation and/or data mining, reflecting the strength of its analytics foundation. Users praise its flexibility and breadth of support for activities from planning through execution.
Cautions
■ Customers deploy SAS most often as an integrated solution consisting of modules from its extensive Viya suite. These integrations, although supported by a rich set of partnerships, can be costly and complex.
■ SAS focuses on cultivating trained professionals through affiliation with academic institutions and providing educators with free software and training materials, as well as broadening its reach by supporting Python, R and other popular scripting languages. Still, finding data scientist talent to support the underpinnings of SAS's MMH offering may be a challenge.
■ SAS lacks social marketing capabilities and gets below-average ratings for its content management/digital asset management (DAM)/product information management (PIM) solution compared with other vendors in this research. References note its web analytics capabilities function below expectations.
Page 20 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Selligent Marketing Cloud Selligent Marketing Cloud is a Niche Player. It primarily serves upper midmarket or large enterprise organizations across the U.S. and Europe, particularly in the retail, financial services, media and telecommunications sectors. Marketers seeking high-volume, data-driven engagements across digital channels should consider Selligent.
Strengths
■ Product: Selligent Marketing Cloud consists of multiple modules for native MMH capabilities such as email, website and mobile personalization capabilities. A universal customer profile within the entire solution ensures that engagement activities at one touchpoint appear in event marketing and real time for decisioning in other channels.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Selligent focused on improving predictive capabilities, drawing on web behavior and third-party data to recommend content. Newly launched Selligent Cortex is available in the site module and provides a machine-learning-driven recommendation engine. Mobile messages now contain rich content with enhanced (open-time) personalization and product recommendations. Location-based capabilities such as geofencing were added to enable contextual in-app and push messaging. Selligent also released a new feature to manage multilanguage and multichannel content and workflow. Content blocks allow users to reuse predefined content across messages and channels for easier content creation.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Selligent plans to expand its AI and machine learning capabilities across offers, content, audience and journey optimization. It also plans to invest in expanding into new channels through native capabilities and relevant third parties. The company will focus on channels such as Rich Communication Services RCS (Android), customer care, messaging apps and web push. It plans to introduce enhanced reporting and intelligence, and add transparency for marketers to understand machine decisions.
■ References: Selligent gets good reviews on scalability and solid marks on ease of use. References give the solution above-average scores for email marketing functionality overall.
Cautions
■ Selligent's investments in email marketing and upgrades to its marketing cloud still have yet to yield commensurate results for a multichannel marketing hub. Market potential remains, but isn't yet fully realized by prospects.
■ References indicate a need for quality control improvement in new version releases. Some references mentioned technical frustrations to the point of wanting to roll back updates until Selligent resolved them.
■ References cite a need for more U.S. support staff, noting that most of Selligent's critical support staff is located in Europe.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 21 of 35 Sitecore Sitecore is a Visionary, offering a cloud-based multichannel marketing hub solution focused on personalization. The company primarily serves organizations in the services, manufacturing, banking, and travel and hospitality industries, with a strong presence in North America. Marketers seeking a solution that extends multichannel marketing into customer experience design and optimization should consider Sitecore.
Strengths
■ Product: Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) 9 is part of the new Sitecore Experience Cloud and includes the functionality of Sitecore Experience Database (xDB), Sitecore Cortex machine learning and Sitecore Experience Manager. It also includes an xConnect API to gather and integrate customer data. XP supports customer analytics, marketing automation and campaigns across web, mobile, social and print.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Sitecore added xConnect to improve data integration with third-party platforms and enhanced Sitecore Cortex machine learning to improve personalization, testing and optimization. Sitecore added an integration with Stackla, a content marketing platform focused on social and user-generated content. It also strengthened its encryption for tighter security and compliance, and improved the path to migration for clients. An enhanced UI is designed to improve ease of use for marketing teams.
■ Roadmap: Planned for the third quarter of 2018, Sitecore will launch XP 9.1, enhancing segmentation and personalization through expanded data capture from external interactions, mobile and IoT, adding to first-party data in xDB profiles. It also looks to add machine learning capabilities and expand data modeling to reflect propensity to buy or interact by channel, day, location or device. Sitecore plans to improve its mobile analytics and mobile API to enable richer engagement.
■ References: Client references rate their overall experience above average and give Sitecore high marks for traits including value, integration and performance. Compared with other vendors evaluated in this research, Sitecore's platform scores above average for functionality in multistep campaign creation and optimization, customer journey analytics, content marketing, and distributed marketing.
Cautions
■ Sitecore remains focused on B2C client engagements. It recently added B2B capabilities, but has since focused more on CRM integrations than native capabilities. Only a small percentage of client references use Sitecore for lead management, with most relying on other vendors.
■ Client references rate Sitecore below average on segmentation, with some users relying on other vendors for segmentation and optimization.
■ Email marketing remains a soft spot in Sitecore's feature set. It released Email Experience Manager in 2016, but 100% of its client references still rely on other providers for email marketing, rating Sitecore below average in this area.
Page 22 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Zeta Zeta is a Niche Player. Its data-driven campaign management solution primarily attracts organizations in the retail, travel and hospitality, financial services, media, telecom, and healthcare industry sectors. Marketers seeking a multichannel marketing hub solution backed by managed and strategic services should consider Zeta.
Strengths
■ Product: ZetaHub uses a single view of the customer across its suite for insights, personalization and orchestration. The solution matches proprietary data assets to first-party customer and marketing data. The unified data model now enables machine learning to scale segmentation, channel selection and personalization.
■ New capabilities: In 2017, Zeta Data Cloud began support for real-time data from the web, mobile and other sources for a unified profile. It continued to grow through acquisitions and product integrations, adding advanced machine learning optimization from Boomtrain and more robust customer signals such as life events from Disqus. Its partnership with Kitewheel enables Zeta clients to measure and create customer journeys. New templates and upgraded content interface aim for simpler authoring of high-impact personalization.
■ Roadmap: In 2018, Zeta plans to enable real-time personalization through its data assets to improve prospect interaction. The company looks to offer scalable personalization and event triggers based on cross-channel behaviors such as social conversations, publisher website activity and predictive models. Zeta's investment in Visto opens new possibilities for better measurement, recommendations and programmatic advertising. Zeta will continue to refine lead management and distributed marketing capabilities to serve sales organizations such as insurers.
■ References: References give their highest scores to Zeta's overall experience and product value. They note the Zeta team's strategic partnership approach and its commitment to their business needs. Zeta's solution set — especially email, multistep campaigns and real-time offers — gets positive feedback from references for ease of implementation and use, performance, and scalability.
Cautions
■ With the acquisition of Disqus, Zeta has access to third-party user data and signals within the Data Cloud platform. Global marketers should review Zeta's additional license agreements and consent management tools to ensure consistency with the marketer's specific GDPR compliance efforts.
■ Outside of email and SMS, Zeta customers demonstrate more modest use of full-suite multichannel marketing capabilities. For example, low client adoption of programmatic advertising suggests that Zeta's retail customers are not yet executing an omnichannel strategy supported by the Zeta product roadmap.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 23 of 35 ■ References report concerns with Zeta's total cost of ownership and limited out-of-the-box functionality. They note a cumbersome product upgrade process as well as complexities in the user experience that make certain tasks more time consuming than anticipated.
Vendors Added and Dropped None
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria For inclusion in the 2018 Multichannel Marketing Hub Magic Quadrant, Gartner focused on vendors that offer the most relevant and compelling marketing solutions.
Functionality Vendors must support all of the following:
■ Ability to create, execute and manage multichannel marketing interactions.
■ Proven campaign planning, tracking and reporting with role and approval capability.
■ A UI suitable for marketing users who create, execute and report on interactions.
■ Basic multichannel marketing functionality, such as audience data collection and segmentation, campaign workflow, and campaign execution.
Vendors must support at least four of nine functionality components:
■ Advanced analytic functionality:
■ Predictive analytics: Capability to analyze customer behavior to predict attrition/churn, next most likely purchase and propensity to buy, enabling a company to more effectively target customers or stage the offers to make during interactions. Although this may be offered through partnerships, we will look for proven integration and references of actual utilization.
■ Campaign optimization: Ability to balance and coordinate multiple constraints to maximize expected value from single or multiple campaigns or engagement. Functionality enables trade-offs among different campaign execution options, such as which campaign to use, which channel to use, the number of interactions per individual and the expected value of each interaction.
■ Customer journey analytics: Ability to track and analyze the way customers and prospects use a combination of available channels to interact with an organization over time. It should cover the multichannel nature of customer engagement, including human interactions (e.g., a call center), digital marketing (i.e., website, app and email), customer service (i.e., live chat), physical locations (i.e., retail stores) and those with a limited two-way
Page 24 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 interaction (i.e., display advertising). Although this may be offered through partnerships, we looked for proven integration and references of actual utilization.
■ Customer profile management: Marketers seek to unify and synchronize their customer data across multiple channels, devices and life cycle stages for personalized engagement and campaign orchestration. Vendors should enable marketers to activate their own first- party data while bringing in and utilizing customer data from second- and third-party sources. This includes:
■ A "360-degree" or unified customer profile, which brings together data from internal systems and data warehouses, point of sale, website, and other engagement data and attributes to enable segmentation and customer analytics, and inform personalization.
■ Ability to onboard data and match first-party data with third-party audiences. This includes data collection capabilities through tags as well as preconfigured integrations with common marketing point solutions, data partners and analytics tools.
■ Cross-device identification (XDID) techniques to connect the activities of an individual customer or prospect across devices and channels. Device identifiers can be explicitly supplied by the device operating system (deterministic) or inferred statistically from observable characteristics (probabilistic). Marketers rely on XDID for ad targeting, analytics and personalization.
■ Advanced execution functionality:
■ Event triggering: Functionality involves the detection, prioritization and execution response for significant events affecting a customer relationship.
■ Real-time recommendations: Suited for areas such as offer management and deals with offer arbitration. It enables the combination of the most-up-to-date information from data collected prior to the interaction, as well as new data collected during a real-time interaction with a customer. Model-driven, real-time recommendation capabilities should be channel- agnostic and provide both inbound and outbound interactions.
■ Content management/DAM/PIM integration: The ability to provide or support digital asset management, product information management, and content management for tailoring and optimizing customer and prospect interactions.
■ Personalization: The ability to apply context, including knowledge about users and their circumstances, to tailor and deliver relevant messaging, content, offers and interactions via digital channels (e.g., web, email, mobile, social, advertising, search or chat) to maximize conversion and improve other marketing and business results. Offers largely rule-based personalization and, at a minimum, native execution on the web plus at least two other channels (e.g., email, mobile, social, advertising/retargeting, SEM, chat or call center).
■ Multichannel lead management capabilities: The ability to provide lead management functionality for both inbound and outbound marketing initiatives. This includes, at a minimum, lead collection, analytics, augmentation, scoring, process management and nurturing, across a minimum of three lead generation and lead management channels within
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 25 of 35 a single campaign. In addition, functionality must support bidirectional integration with CRM or sales force automation applications (such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce Sales Cloud).
Digital Marketing Capability We consider specific digital marketing functionality, such as web analytics, social analytics, social marketing, mobile marketing, programmatic advertising and digital commerce connections.
Market Presence and Momentum For inclusion in the 2018 MMH Magic Quadrant, we focused on vendors with:
■ At least 20 customers using multichannel marketing hub products.
■ At least 15 new customer wins for multichannel marketing hub during the past 12 months.
Vendor Viability Vendors needed to have at least $15 million in 2017 fiscal-year revenue and enough cash to fund a year of operations at the current rate of cash depletion.
In addition, we placed a strong emphasis on innovative, visionary offerings. Visionaries provide a strong vision for the multichannel marketing market or excel in advanced or emerging areas. These include customer data platforms and artificial intelligence, identity resolutions, multidimensional segmentation, mobile marketing, loyalty marketing and social marketing, and real-time interaction management. They can set strategic direction or demonstrate specific innovative capabilities in one or more functionality area (such as advanced campaign functionality or digital marketing integration) in multichannel marketing that the market will eventually adopt. Visionaries may have multichannel marketing implementations from different buying centers, such as customer service or digital commerce.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: This is a key differentiator in vendor selection. Therefore, product capabilities are given a high overall weighting. Subcriteria include basic campaign and advanced multichannel marketing functionality, basic and advanced analytics, interaction/journey workflow, and functionality for digital marketing. Weighting: High.
Overall Viability: This addresses the overall health of the vendor, including line-of-business offering multichannel marketing hub solutions. Viability includes the vendor's history of and commitment to the continued success and development of world-class multichannel marketing hub solutions. Weighting: High.
Page 26 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Sales Execution/Pricing: This provides an assessment of the overall effectiveness of the sales channel, and how it deals with presales responsiveness, contract negotiations and pricing for their multichannel marketing hubs. Weighting: Medium.
Market Responsiveness/Record: This gives an assessment of the multichannel marketing hub vendor's success in creating and meeting a consistent demand for its product, measured in continuing client wins and use in its installed base. Weighting: Medium.
Marketing Execution: This provides an assessment of the vendor's overall momentum and perceived multichannel marketing hub focus and presence in the market. Vendors must show established and continued broad or specific (such as industry focus) credibility for marketing interactions in a multichannel environment. Weighting: High.
Customer Experience: This is an evaluation of client relationships with multichannel marketing hub vendors. Product support and responsiveness, and access to best practices, such as user groups, are considered. An important component of the customer experience is ease of tool use. Gartner's multichannel marketing hub clients see this as an important aspect of the overall customer experience. Weighting: Medium.
Operations: This is the ability of a vendor to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include organizational structure (such as skills, experience, systems and other vehicles) that enable the vendor to operate efficiently and effectively on an ongoing basis. Weighting: Low.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product or Service High
Overall Viability High
Sales Execution/Pricing Medium
Market Responsiveness/Record Medium
Marketing Execution High
Customer Experience Medium
Operations Low
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: This is the vendor's ability to understand the multichannel marketing hub space, and its value proposition in the market, and how effective it is at reaching the marketing buying center for companies purchasing multichannel marketing hub solutions. Vendors must
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 27 of 35 demonstrate multichannel marketing solutions that fit the needs of the overall market. Weighting: High.
Marketing Strategy: This offers an assessment of how well a vendor can differentiate itself from its competition and of functionality, and how it articulates continued leadership in its overall multichannel marketing vision. Weighting: Medium.
Sales Strategy: This assesses a vendor's strategy in using direct and indirect sales channels to sell its multichannel marketing hub. Weighting: Medium.
Offering (Product) Strategy: This assesses the multichannel marketing hub feature set as it maps to functionality requirements, particularly functionality that enables advanced capability in inbound and outbound environments. Weighting: High.
Business Model: This assesses the vendor's alignment of its go-to-market and sales strategies for particular industries, geographies or delivery models. Weighting: Medium.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: A vendor is assessed on how well its solutions target its current market, as well as its ability to leverage best practices or capabilities for targeting new industries. Weighting: Medium.
Innovation: This assesses the vendor's expertise or capital for investment for pre-emptive purposes in developing new areas in multichannel marketing. Weighting: Medium.
Geographic Strategy: This assesses the vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography. This can be either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Weighting: Medium.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding High
Marketing Strategy Medium
Sales Strategy Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy High
Business Model Medium
Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium
Innovation Medium
Geographic Strategy Medium
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
Page 28 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders Leaders consistently do considerably better in overall multichannel marketing performance for basic and advanced campaigns, and for integration with digital marketing. They have high market visibility, high market penetration, strong market momentum and a strategic vision for growing the multichannel marketing hub business.
Challengers Challengers see continued investments in multichannel marketing hub solutions as complementary offerings to the business applications that are their core competencies. Challengers have a developing understanding of the multichannel marketing hub market and basic functions. They see multichannel marketing as an opportunity to increase revenue and retention in their installed bases, and they concentrate on established clients' needs for multichannel marketing functions and strategic direction, rather than on setting a visionary pace with potential requirements.
Visionaries Visionaries provide a strong vision for the multichannel marketing hub market, or they excel in advanced or emerging areas such as inbound marketing and digital marketing. They can set a strategic direction or demonstrate specific innovative capabilities in one or more functional areas (such as advanced campaign functionality or digital marketing integration) that the market will eventually adopt. Visionaries may have multichannel marketing implementations in multiple buying centers, such as the contact center, digital commerce or social marketing departments. Although Visionaries show promise in multichannel marketing, they may lack execution capabilities, such as growth potential, resources or scalability.
Niche Players Niche Players provide specific needs in the multichannel marketing hub space. They may be focused on a specific function, process (for example, lead management), geography or industry. Multichannel marketing hub vendors in this section tend to lack a broader set of multichannel marketing capabilities (such as advanced analytics) or execution potential (such as sufficient resources or a fully developed market strategy).
Context Most marketing leaders expect their budgets to rise in 2018 (see "Survey Analysis: Marketing Budgets Skew, Putting More Pressure on Marketers With Lean Martech Budgets") driven by increased spending on services and marketing technology. Still, marketing leaders find themselves under increased pressure to squeeze more out of every marketing investment. After three consecutive years of growth, marketing budget growth stalled in 2017, slipping from its peak of
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 29 of 35 12.1% of company revenue in 2016 to 11.3% in 2017.1 The slip may be temporary. Sitting at the nexus of people, process, technology and customer engagement, multichannel marketing offers a path to resource maximization.
Marketing leaders are investing in platforms and services that enable more relevant, personalized digital experiences across the customer journey. They seek MMH vendors with strong customer intelligence and analytics capabilities to improve the targeting, performance and measurement of their multichannel marketing strategy. The emphasis on customer insights and marketing analytics comes as marketing leaders must refocus on ROI by centering efforts on the right customers.
As social, mobile and commerce engagements drive a growing share of revenue, brands are seeking competitive differentiation across the digital customer experience. MMH vendors are helping companies orchestrate an increasing variety of customer engagements and responding to the proliferation of consumer endpoints. MMH vendors stay relevant to clients by providing the right tools for collecting and unifying audience data from multiple sources. This enables marketing users to perform detailed customer modeling segmentation using that data, optimizing the timing and targeting of personalized messages and offers across seamlessly orchestrated campaigns. They add value by supplying effective ways to attribute results to specific channels, convert campaign data into predictive insights and prescribe profitable next-best actions for marketing teams.
Market Overview Multichannel marketing hub vendors are focusing on capabilities that enable rich customer experiences, which remain a crucial marketplace differentiator. They're supporting the customer journey with a more unified approach to data. They're also integrating tools that incorporate customer insights into the delivery of personalized messaging and content in near-real or real time. They're driving greater brand relevance by fortifying capabilities in machine learning, channel attribution and customer journey analytics. Key themes this year include:
■ Customer profile management: Successful marketing leaders and their teams need to gather information about customers' behavior and interests, goals, and needs. The aim is to segment and treat individual customers with the appropriate level of differentiation. This requires rules and intelligence to determine the right moment to connect with audiences and the right type of exchange to have. It also involves applying customer insights at each journey stage to foster more engaging multichannel marketing experiences that drive overall business results. In response to marketer demand for more data control, flexibility and analysis capabilities, MMH vendors are enhancing their ability to unify, synchronize and reconcile customer data across multiple channels, devices and life cycle stages. In many cases, vendors are either explicitly or implicitly building features associated with customer data platforms, resulting in an emerging hub-and-spoke (i.e., customer data and profiles/channel execution capabilities) model.2
■ GDPR compliance: Closely related to the theme of customer data management, the European GDPR stresses the importance of a data subject's rights, the manner in which data breaches are dealt with and general control over personal data.3 The regulation goes into effect 25 May 2018. With the rollout of GDPR alongside other modern privacy regulations, customers have
Page 30 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 new opportunities to take back control of their data, challenging multichannel marketers who are reliant on personalized interactions with individual customers. Some vendors are incorporating tools to help organizations meet the GDPR's operational requirements before regulations go into effect.
■ Machine learning and artificial intelligence: Predictive and prescriptive analytics techniques hold the promise of better segmentation and decision making for marketers. Predictive content brings the potential of more relevant, timelier messaging and offers delivered to customers at their moment of need. Nearly every MMH vendor evaluated for this research has machine learning and AI capabilities in some stage of development that are designed to make customer insights more accessible and actionable. The predictive accuracy of these capabilities can improve over time as more data is added to the models. End users of MMH platforms stand to benefit from a greater ability to discern channel, offer and segment performance, resulting in better business decision making and improved forecasting, cross-sell and upsell capabilities.
■ Personalization capabilities: Customers now expect personalized engagement. Gartner expects that by 2019, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization, leveraging data, content and technologies to improve business results across the customer journey. As of 2017, 45% of marketers Gartner surveyed said their marketing mostly involved real-time personalization, with 66% projecting they would reach that goal by 2019 (see "Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission to Advance Multichannel Marketing Results"). MMH vendors continue to integrate what has historically been a stand-alone tool as a native offering, incorporating personalization engines that gather customer data and enable marketers to tailor the content visitors are presented based on that data. In duplicating the capabilities of dedicated personalization tools, MMH vendors are contributing to a predicted consolidation of the personalization landscape. By 2020, Gartner expects that fewer than 20 stand-alone vendors will remain on the market as personalization functionality is built into other enterprise martech platforms.
■ Campaign journey analytics: Marketers strive to deliver contextualized engagement between their company and customers — a connected, ongoing conversation that incorporates two-way dialogue. Doing so requires knowing who — and where — customers are along the buying journey. Demand for customer journey analytics is increasing, becoming more of a critical capability for MMH vendors. They are integrating tools that help companies reveal details about the customer buying journey that, ultimately, will lead to sales, retention and growth. Core to the efficacy of customer journey analytics are attribution metrics; together, they promise to optimize channels, improve responsiveness and boost marketing efficiency. MMH vendors are giving increased attention to both areas, but need to accelerate development of their offerings and/or partnerships with third-party tools. Customer journey analytics was the lowest-scoring capability in this year's research, and attribution metrics was not far behind.
Gartner Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 31 of 35 "How Markets and Vendors Are Evaluated in Gartner Magic Quadrants"
"Toolkit: Multichannel Marketing Heat Map, 2018"
"Synchronize Campaigns and Continuous Engagement With Two-Speed Marketing"
"Gear Up for the Evolving Multichannel Marketing Landscape"
"Survey Analysis: Compare the Tactics and Priorities of Leading Multichannel Marketers"
"Presentation of Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission to Advance Multichannel Marketing Results"
"Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission to Advance Multichannel Marketing Results"
Evidence 1 "Presentation of CMO Spend Survey, 2017-2018: Budgets Recede Amid Demand for Results"
2 "A Marketer's Guide to What Is — and Isn't — a Customer Data Platform"
3 "What Marketers Need to Know About GDPR: Frequently Asked Questions Answered"
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Page 32 of 35 Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Gartner, Inc. | G00331171 Page 33 of 35 Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
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