CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 14 April 2022
- 14 April, 2022 11:54
Sitecore deliver new-look DXP following acquisitions
Sitecore has debuted the latest version of its digital experience platform (DXP) featuring fully integrated capabilities brought in by the recent acquisitions of Boxever, Four51, Moosend and Reflektion.
Key new capabilities of Sitecore Send include support for six additional languages, plus improved design and efficiencies around user experience off the back of Moosend’s marketing automation and campaign management platform.
Sitecore Discover, meanwhile, has an enhanced Commerce Engagement Console (CEC) including revamped appearance library and editor to provide better user experiences and more control over merchandising. Widgets also now include type filters and rule exports thanks to Reflektion’s AI-powered digital search platform, which predicts individual shoppers’ purchase intent based on patterns, context and needs.
Sitecore Personalize has been fully integrated with Sitecore Experience Manager and offers channel diagnostic testing and real-time personalisation functionality to complements Sitecore’s CMS. New connectors on the Sitecore Marketplace for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Responsys and Klaviyo are also on offer, as well as AI-powered product discovery capabilities to support commerce-related use cases such as intelligent search, product listing pages and product recommendations. This capability comes from Boxever, a customer data platform (CDP) providing decisioning and experimentation.
Finally, Sitecore OrderCloud has expanded marketplace support capabilities such as order routing flexibility, supplier empowerment and pricing flexibility. There’s also a new Inventory Records feature for inventory management flexibility. These features were made possible following the acquisition of Four51.
“Sitecore is committed to delivering a composable DXP that meets the continuously changing needs of brands – unifying content, experience and commerce, enabling them to offer exceptional customer experiences while continuing to innovate for whatever demands are around the corner,” said Sitecore chief product officer, Dave O’Flanagan. “Ambitious brands have outgrown the one-size-fits-all vendors, and they will not settle for piecemeal point solutions – they need a stack of best-in-class features that work in harmony together – and this is what Sitecore delivers.”
Sitecore is planning to continue investment in Minneapolis, San Mateo, Greece and Ireland, where the four acquired companies were founded. The acquisitions were made off the back of a US$1.2 billion war chest designed to aggressively extend the platform’s capabilities.
Validity buys MailCharts
This week’s martech acquisition news is from Validity, which has purchased MailCharts, a platform for data-driven campaign planning across ecommerce marketing teams.
The data quality and email marketing platform provider said adding MailCharts into the Validity product portfolio will help email marketers launch more creative and optimised campaigns. MailCharts provides users with a vetted index of brands to plan, report and build out their next campaign or customer journey. By layering these capabilities onto Validity’s, users can determine whether competitors, other brands and their own campaigns are having problems with sender reputation, deliverability, inbox placements and clicks, the companies said.
“Our goal with this acquisition is to provide every marketer with robust competitive insights into how their campaigns perform compared to those of competing brands while also delivering one of the world’s largest libraries of emails that will truly inspire marketers around the world,” Validity SVP, global head of email solutions, Greg Kimball, said.
Under the terms of the deal, MailCharts’ product will continue as a standalone offering but also plug into Validity’s Everest email marketing platform. Financial details were not disclosed. Validity’s portfolio also includes DemandTools, GridBuddy Connect and BriteVerify.
“The combined power of MailCharts and Validity allows marketing teams to not just model their campaigns after their favourite brands but monitor deliverability and success of their own email marketing efforts as well,” MailCharts CEO and co-founder, Tom Buchok, added.
Amobee brings Innovid into its CTV advertising toolkit
Adtech player, Amobee, said its decision to add Innovid’s CTVA advertising delivery and measurement platform into its cross-platform measurement and attribution offering will give advertisers more independent data-driven insight into campaigns.
According to the company, the collaboration will give advertisers a more unified view of the total TV universe, along with deeper insights into audience reach across linear and streaming content. Innovid recently acquired global converged TV measurement provider, TVSquared, to bolster its converged TV performance measurement credentials. This is now available to Amobee clients across Australia.
Through its work with Amobee, the TVSquared by Innovid platform has measured converged TV campaigns for local advertisers across key categories such as retail, food delivery and travel.
“We are heavily investing in partnerships that give advertisers more flexibility and control so they can achieve their business goals across the total TV landscape – whatever that may look like,” said Amobee director, BD and partnership, Adam Hunt. “We’ve added Innovid to our mix of partners to offer our clients access to their world-class automated platform for the deepest insights into converged TV campaigns. Together with our partners, we are shaping a modern TV ecosystem centred around independence, interoperability and collaboration.”
HypeAuditor launches Shopify integration
Influencer marketing management platform, HypeAuditor, has completed an integration with Shopify aimed at providing comprehensive analysis of sales-focused influencer marketing campaigns.
HypeAuditor’s platform encompasses influencer marketing workflows, discovery of relevant creators, campaign management tools and analytical results reporting. The new Shopify integration is automated, assigning corresponding click rates, sales and ROI to specific influencers and campaigns in order to calculate sales performance.
HypeAuditor CEO, Alex Frolov, said analysing sales data from the Shopify platform and cross referencing it with campaign data from an influencer marketing platform can be time consuming and expensive.
“By integrating HypeAuditor with Shopify, ecommerce brands will no longer be held back by this archaic exercise. A campaign can now be set up in less than five minutes, and the rest of the process is automated, enabling a clear, strategic analysis of an influencer campaign,” he said.
Salesfore ups ante on CRM analytics
Salesforce has taken the wrappers off new CRM Analytics innovations to surface AI-powered, actionable insights directly in the flow of work.
Salesforce’s CRM Analytics is the latest incarnation of Tableau CRM. Fresh enhancements include CRM Analytics App for Slack, which integrates analytics directly into an employee’s workflow, along with aggregated predictions from Salesforce Reports directly into the Slack workflow to help people better analyse deals at risk, customers at risk of leaving or invoices at risk of getting delayed. Open Image Modal Predictions in Slack then delivers aggregated predictions based on records in a report, including top predictive factors and improvements.
Salesforce said Search Insights now uses natural language to search from the analytics landing page within CRM Analytics for dashboard, dataset and next-best groupings related to the search. A new Energy & Utilities Analytics offering has also been released, while Public Sector Analytics offers greater insight into department efficiency and compliance management with actionable intelligence inside the Salesforce workflow.
In addition, Salesforce is releasing new industry-specific versions of its Revenue Intelligence platform, which brings Sales Cloud together with CRM Analytics in a form of unified revenue management command centre. The ambition again is to deliver advanced analytics powered by Einstein. The four industry sectors cloud offerings are Financial Services Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud Consumer Goods Cloud and Communications Cloud.
Neustar brings unified identity to Google Cloud Analytics Hub
Neustar, a TransUnion company, has debuted its Unified Identity data and identity resolution capabilities in Google Cloud Analytics Hub.
The launch provides businesses with seamless access to Neustar’s high quality consumer data sets, aimed at helping them utilise cloud analytics capabilities to inform nationwide marketing campaigns. The company said this will help marketers and data scientists improve their own customer data assets, build privacy-focused consumer databases and power more relevant experiences. The news coincides with the preview of Analytics Hub, a fully managed service built on BigQuery that allows Google’s data sharing partners to securely exchange data and analytics assets in a bi-directional way.
“Analytics Hub makes it very easy for businesses to securely access partner data, like that offered by Neustar, with BigQuery,” said Google Cloud director of partnerships, Manvinder Singh. “By bringing its widely-used data sets to Analytics Hub, Neustar is ensuring that customers have seamless access to data, as well as advanced analytics capabilities, to help inform marketing campaigns and critical business decisions.”
Neustar EVP and GM of marketing solutions, Michael Schoen, said the integration with Google Cloud Analytics Hub supports marketing and analytics teams resolving gaps in their consumer data sets. “Brands and agencies can now better align their organisations around a single source of identity-backed, consumer data truth, and the positive impacts inclusive of improved customer experience and marketing ROI can be transformative.”
8x8 and Genesys partner up
Cloud-based communications platform, 8x8, has teamed up with Genesys on a new integration to help cross-functional teams better communicate in order to reduce customer churn and employee friction.
The product integration sees the 8x8 Work enterprise voice, video meetings and team chat capabilities integrated with the Genesys Cloud CX platform. This enables secure, in-network call transfers between the contact centre and the rest of the organisation plus a unified company directory with API-driven user provision, again for easier collaboration between agents and subject matter experts across the organisation.
There’s also integrated single sign-on for user authentication, shared user presence status and full cloud Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) support for multinational organisations with employees and customers in 50 countries by offering local direct numbers, toll free number, and calling plans in addition to support for local emergency services. The integrated offering is now available in the 8x8 App Store and Genesys AppFoundry.
Alida to open Sydney data centre
Alida plans to launch a data centre in Sydney in winter 2022 in order to provide enhanced data services as well as scale to serve more customers operating in the Oceanic region.
The experience management and insights vendor, formerly known as Vision Critical, said having an onshore data centre will help it to better meet the needs of customers in Australia and New Zealand by increasing data performance and speed. Having locally available data will enhance the data collection process and efficiently meet clients’ regional compliance requirements, especially with public sector customers.
“We made the decision to launch this service expansion after carefully listening to our customers and taking action on their desired data needs,” said Alida president of products and engineering, Riaz Raihan. “We look forward to offering our customers in Australia and New Zealand a local CX solution that yields high performing and reliable data collection services.”
You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page
