Latest Gartner personalisation software rankings led by Dynamic Yield, Evergage

Dynamic Yield and Evergage, which was recently acquired by Salesforce, have again topped the latest annual list of personalisation engines from Gartner.

The analyst firm defines personalisation engines as software that applies context about individual users to select, tailor and deliver messaging, such as content and offers, through digital channels in the name of marketing, customer experience or commerce. Key functionality stretches from in-session behaviour tracking, predictive analytics and data collection and manipulation, to A/B and multivariate testing, rule as well as algorithm-based targeting, next-best actions and offers, and performance tracking.  

Leading the pack in this year’s top right-hand Magic Quadrant of visionary leaders are Dynamic Yield and Evergage. The latter was acquired by Salesforce in February and has just been rebranded under the CRM giant’s brand moniker.

Dynamic Yield’s strengths included its artificial intelligence (AI)-based predictive audiences features, user-friendly testing and the highest client reference scores for personalised recommendations. Evergage, meanwhile, has been noted for its contextual and customisable algorithms for optimisation, data science support and real-time decisioning engine. Both vendors also topped the 2019 edition of the personalisation rankings.

Also featured in the visionary leaders quadrant are Emarsys, Monetate, Adobe, Certona and RichRelevance. Just one vendor was featured in the lower visionary quadrant with less of an ability to execute – Qubit.

There was also one challenger listed with a strong ability to execute, Episerver, while vendors listed as niche players with a lower level to execute included Insider, ZineOne, Attraqt and Boxever.

According to Gartner, adoption and utilisation of standalone personalisation engines is being driven by three key trends. The first is a doubling down on digital commerce, with most users surveyed by the analyst firm citing website page personalisation as a primary use case.

In response, much of the recent and ongoing innovation from personalisation vendors is in support of digital commerce objectives, Gartner stated.

“Recent improvements in product recommendation capabilities reflect vendors’ understanding of natural consumer behaviours; for example, they are providing image-based recommendations based on visual machine learning rather than on keywords [one black dress is not necessarily like another, for example],” the firm commented.

“Vendors are also investing more in advanced merchandising capabilities. Vendors like Attraqt and Certona provide retail merchandisers the ability to boost and bury capabilities, while vendors such as RichRelevance and Monetate enable intelligent slotting to help users prioritise slotting where merchandise or content is placed most effectively. These improvements are all in service of helping marketers create better and more lucrative customer shopping experiences.”

Another key trend is the push by personalisation vendors to improve client success, a reflection of the low levels of personalisation maturity across brands today, Gartner said.

The third trend influencing platform adoption and advancement is templates. “Most personalisation engine vendors evaluated in this research come equipped with native data modelling templates and reporting templates. However, many are now beginning to offer templates that help marketing teams personalise content and experiences across channels and touchpoints, too,” Gartner stated.

“These templates have the added effect of alleviating potential bottlenecks caused by having to rely on developers and designers to build out similar, custom templates.”

The analyst firm noted Insider, Dynamic Yield and Episerver offered libraries of content templates marketing teams can use to personalise engagements via Web, email, mobile applications. Several other vendors such as Emarsys, Boxever and Adobe have launched use-case or industry-specific personalisation templates to help marketing teams with more specific personalisation around business case documentation or workflow management, for example.  

“Vendors will likely continue to expand their template libraries as marketing teams across maturity levels attempt to scale their personalisation efforts through accelerated test setup and experimentation, content creation, and variation,” Gartner added.

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