24 april 2018 g00331171 market ... - redpoint global · episerver is a niche player. with its...

Magic Quadrant for Multichannel MarketingHubsPublished: 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 theirmultichannel marketing initiatives. Our inaugural MMH Magic Quadrantexamines a market unifying customer data across channels, enhancingpersonalization and decisioning with AI, and integrating customer journeyanalytics.

Market Definition/DescriptionGartner defines the multichannel marketing hub (MMH) as a technology that orchestrates acompany's communications with and offers to customer segments across multiple channels. Theseinclude websites, mobile, social, direct mail call centers, paid media and email. MMH capabilitiesalso may extend to integrating marketing offers/leads with sales for execution in both B2B and B2Cenvironments.

Further defined:

■ Basic multichannel marketing includes functionality for segmentation, campaign and messagecreation, campaign workflow, and campaign and message execution.

■ Advanced analytic functionality enables customer-level data and analysis and modeling such aspredictive analytics, journey analytics and customer profile management.

■ Advanced execution functionality includes personalization, content management, eventtriggering and real-time offer management in both inbound and outbound environments.

■ Digital marketing capability, as part of an integrated multichannel marketing solution, includesfunctionality for programmatic advertising, mobile and social marketing, and web and emailmarketing. 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, andthe Internet of Things (IoT).

Magic QuadrantFigure 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 multichannelmarketing hub solution. It attracts global enterprises and midmarket organizations across a range of

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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 anddata analytics with cross-channel execution capabilities. It leverages access to a common setof audience data that users can share and enrich across other Adobe applications withinAdobe's Experience Cloud. Adobe Campaign supports the migration of legacy Windows-basedCampaign Classic users to its newer cloud-only Standard version.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Adobe reorganized its marketing cloud applications under theExperience Cloud umbrella to better align products with organizational dynamics. WithExperience Manager and intelligent content capabilities, it took steps to streamline integrationsand workflows between creatives, marketers and analysts. These workflows help marketers findrelevant images, personalize layouts and assets, automate tasks in bulk, and deliver tailoredexperiences faster. Adobe also leveraged its partnership with Microsoft to integrate AdobeCampaign 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 itsmarketing cloud application to Azure, leveraging Azure's capabilities in data rightsmanagement. By providing open access to capabilities powered by Sensei, Adobe's artificialintelligence (AI) platform, the company plans to transition from an applications focus to aplatform 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 tousage 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 netbelow-average reviews from references.

■ Reference clients cite technical support and professional services as areas in need ofimprovement, 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 customerdata platform (CDP), suggesting a focus on single-customer view, analytics, and data collection andorchestration. B2C marketers with robust first-party data seeking to coordinate analytics andactivities among a diverse set of customer interaction systems should consider AgilOne.

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Strengths

■ Product: Users praise AgilOne's ability to ingest data from disparate systems and orchestrateactivation across channel-specific interaction tools. Its focus on first-party data and analyticsenables marketers to gain insights from their customer base and apply these to develop moretargeted 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 GoogleCustomer Match and Facebook Custom Audiences. AgilOne developed its configurablecustomer 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 bythe General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scheduled for enforcement in the EuropeanUnion this May.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, AgilOne plans more content models, more machine learning enhancementsand platform enhancement to support additional enterprise use cases.

■ References: AgilOne references praise the company's distributed marketing and segmentationcapabilities, citing the ease of deriving data insights from the platform. The company alsogarners positive scores for its event-triggered marketing and predictive analytics capabilities.

Cautions

■ AgilOne requires more integration with outside vendors than do marketing hubs with substantialnative execution capabilities. Marketers with a complex variety of channel-specific executiontools should proceed with caution.

■ AgilOne focuses on B2C marketers with the data to support analytics-driven personalizedrelationships with consumers. Marketers that lack extensive customer data collection, consentand 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 onserving enterprise retail, media and financial services customers, its solution features sophisticatedsegmentation capabilities. B2C marketers seeking to unify customer data for email-drivenmultichannel execution should consider Cheetah's Marketing Suite.

Strengths

■ Product: A customer data layer combining demographic, transactional and event data powersthe Cheetah Digital Marketing Suite. Segmentation capabilities incorporate descriptive,predictive and prescriptive insights for real-time execution. The platform enables "in themoment" adaptations to predesigned customer journeys based on external data inputs.


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 MarketingSuite's campaign management functionality. It introduced an archiving service that preservespersonalized messages at the individual level and enhancements to the content editor andmobile reporting. Advances to segmentation capabilities brought faster data processing times.Cheetah Digital also bolstered its mobile marketing functionality to meet rising compliancerequirements for the GDPR and other regulatory frameworks.

■ Roadmap: Cheetah Digital plans to invest in its data-handling capabilities in 2018. It intends toincorporate AI and machine learning to enhance messaging automation and better anticipatemarketer needs. Cheetah also plans to focus on creating a distributed, more scalable, openplatform that increases connectivity with other martech solutions and data sources.

■ References: References note the platform's flexibility, chiefly its ability to integrate multiple datainputs, and the ease of developing customer segments and delivering personalized marketing atscale. Clients praise Cheetah's good value for the price and consider the account team atrusted, 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 theentrance and exit of executives may call into question Cheetah's ability to execute on its MMHroadmap.

■ References scored Cheetah below other vendors in this research for ease of deployment. Theynote user interface speed issues and inconsistent technical support responsiveness. Customerscontinue 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'soverall product capability rating. They note a desire for greater insight into the productroadmap.

Emarsys

Note: Emarsys did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Therefore, Gartner analysisis based on other credible sources, including public information and discussions with Gartner clientsthat use Emarsys products/solutions.

Emarsys is a Niche Player. The company targets enterprise and midmarket organizations acrossretail, hospitality and travel verticals. Marketing leaders seeking strong, vertical-specific expertiseand personalization capabilities for mobile, web and email marketing initiatives should considerEmarsys.


Strengths

■ Product: A common data, analytics and omnichannel platform developed in-house at Emarsysprovides the foundation for the company's Marketing Platform. The suite offers email, web,mobile, SMS, social, direct mail and advertising personalization capabilities. The ArtificialIntelligence Marketing (AIM) solution further optimizes marketing timing, content andcommunications across channels. More advanced campaign analytics capabilities includepredictive analytics, product recommendations and incentive recommendations (for retention).

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Emarsys enhanced its out-of-the-box offering with dynamic contentcapabilities, user permissions and strategic reports linking channel performance to businessimpacts. New vertical-specific configurations for subscription e-commerce, airline, hotel andretail correspond to key use cases, enabling new clients to gain the benefit of Emarsys' industryexperience. Emarsys also launched an AI-optimized Web content personalization solution.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, Emarsys will further develop its AIM to include improved algorithmicprediction of optimal channel, offer, content and timing. Users will be able to develop their ownAI models, automation blueprints, next-best-action guidance and standardized content blocksto enable content personalization at scale. Planned enhancements to AIM's data onboarding,and extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) capabilities intend to help marketers optimizeand manage outbound marketing. The company intends to use AI to help users report andvisualize performance.

■ References: Customers give Emarsys high marks for its email marketing, attribution and socialmarketing features. References consistently note an engaged and responsive Emarsysimplementation and support team. They cite price, value, product functionality and pricingflexibility as key drivers in their selection of Emarsys.

Cautions

■ References cite the Emarsys roadmap as an area of concern. Instability of past feature releasesdrives some to defer adoption of new features until they are confirmed to be stable and workingas promised.

■ References cite Emarsys' mobile marketing product immaturity, and note that end-user trainingand deliverability assistance fell short of expectations.

■ Given the industries it targets with its multichannel marketing hub, Emarsys has lowmarketplace 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 contentmanagement, digital commerce, digital marketing and rule-based as well as AI-basedpersonalization for midmarket organizations, and divisions and subsidiaries of global enterprisesprimarily in North America and EMEA. Marketers seeking campaign management, personalizedexperiences for performance marketing and rapid time to value should consider Episerver.


Strengths

■ Product: Episerver's Intelligent Campaigns solution simplifies the process of collecting websiteevent data and activating it in direct marketing campaigns triggered by on-site behaviors. It canorchestrate personalized messaging among email, SMS and mobile push channels. Its ProfileStore data platform features connectors to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics solutions forCRM integration.

■ New capabilities: Episerver continued to integrate and build upon its 2016 acquisitions ofOptivo, a campaign management and customer intelligence solution, and Peerius, apersonalization engine, into its single digital experience platform (DXP). DXP also has webcontent management (WCM) and digital commerce capabilities. Optivo and Peerius will beintegrated with each other, but will remain separate but complementary with Episerver'scampaign management platform. Episerver's commitment to the Microsoft Azure PaaS forcloud deployment gives it the ability to deliver new capabilities as Microsoft continues to investin the platform's features and marketplace.

■ Roadmap: In addition to planning incremental product improvements in the areas of testing andanalytics in 2018, Episerver intends to add new features such as social and advertising-basedacquisition channels, and advanced AI models for campaign optimization across alltouchpoints.

■ References: Episerver elicits its highest marks for multistep, multiwave campaign creation.Customers also cite solid event-triggered marketing capabilities and customer support. Theygive the platform high marks for ease of use.

Cautions

■ Episerver's approach to intelligent campaigns supports a relatively narrow range of marketingtactics. Its solution focuses on welcome and onboarding messages for new customers,reactivation for lapsed customers, and retargeting for recent website visitors who failed tocomplete a transaction. It lacks the flexibility of more advanced systems, especially in areas ofmedia and customer acquisition.

■ Episerver Campaign receives low marks from reference customers for search marketing, socialmarketing, content management and predictive analytics, features it plans to address throughintegrations with other Episerver products. Its scores for real-time offers and web analytics alsowere below average.

■ References describe Episerver as lagging in innovation and automation, citing stagnation withEpiserver 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 agrowing feature set of IBM Watson's AI capabilities. B2C and B2B marketers seeking strong


customer segmentation, extensive marketing functions and multiple deployment options shouldconsider IBM's solution.

Strengths

■ Product: IBM Watson Marketing comprises several multichannel marketing solutions,including Watson Campaign Automation (SaaS), IBM Marketing Software (on-premises), WatsonReal-Time Personalization (SaaS), Watson Marketing Insights (SaaS), Watson CustomerExperience Analytics (SaaS) and Watson Content Hub (SaaS). This combined portfolio addsbroad functionality to IBM's MMH offerings.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, IBM launched Watson Marketing Assistant. This AI-enabled tool helpsusers perform tasks, pull performance reports, and understand the sentiment and tone ofcampaign messaging. Through a partnership with MediaMath, IBM Media Optimizer beganproviding management capabilities for owned and paid marketing channels. Watson Marketinglaunched a managed-hosted version of IBM Campaign, enabling user access to the capabilitiesof Campaign with the flexibility of cloud or on-premises deployment.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, IBM plans to have Watson Marketing Insights put predictive capabilitiesdirectly in the hands of marketers, helping them understand everything from audienceengagement levels to lifetime value and churn risk. The company seeks continued expansion ofits Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) partner ecosystem, expanded capabilities for paidmedia, and centralized audience management and segmentation capabilities. It plans toincrease investment in IBM Watson Marketing Insight's predictive capabilities to drive real-timepersonalization. IBM is working to ensure its offerings help organizations meet operationalrequirements of the GDPR before regulations go into effect.

■ References: References give IBM high marks for its automation features, together with its abilityto complement other products, notably IBM UBX. They also praise the platform's speed andreliability.

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 availablein 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 alsonote lack of ease around solution updates, particularly with larger implementations.

Listrak

Listrak is a Niche Player. Its solution offers multichannel marketing capabilities centered oncampaign orchestration and mobile marketing. Listrak primarily services retailers, consumerpackaged goods (CPG) firms, and travel and hospitality service providers. B2C marketers seeking a


multichannel marketing hub that focuses on customer engagement and conversion should considerListrak.

Strengths

■ Product: Listrak's SaaS-based platform focuses on helping its clients achieve and market to asingle, complete view of the customer. Its platform offers a range of capabilities to unifycustomer and audience data; generate and apply AI-driven insight; orchestrate, automate andpersonalize campaigns; and support multichannel engagement.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Listrak added unified profiles, and probabilistic and deterministiccross-device identification aimed at improving targeting. It expanded its personalization focus,including advanced segmentation, AI-driven campaigns and programmatic advertising. Thevendor enhanced Listrak Composer with dynamic and predictive content and productrecommendations. Listrak improved its mobile offering with the addition of native SMS and amobile SDK that includes triggered messages to IoT endpoints. It added a new travel andhospitality suite. In early 2018, Listrak launched a beta version of Listrak CRM, a solutionfocused on customer analytics, data modeling, and customer and audience segmentation. Italso launched a set of dashboards, and data visualization and exploration tools aimed atincreasing customer insights.

■ Roadmap: The company plans to continue adding capabilities to Listrak CRM throughout theyear with a focus on predictive analytics and advanced insights. Listrak also plans to extendmobile into SMS filtering, and app and wallet push notifications. It plans to further enhancepersonalization functionality with predictive web content and add householding capabilities toits customer profiles.

■ References: Customers give Listrak high marks for email, mobile, social and event-triggeredmarketing. They also indicate web analytics is an area of strength. Users praise the company'sability to understand their business needs, support them as a strategic partner and delivervalue.

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 viewof first-party data.

■ Client references rate Listrak's advanced analytics, specifically predictive analytics andcustomer journey analytics, below average compared with other vendors evaluated in thisresearch.

■ Despite the growing importance of personalization and recent updates to Listrak'spersonalization engine, clients also score it below average in this area.


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 financialservices industries. The company continues to build visibility with B2C companies. Marketersprioritizing 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 modulesprovide multiple channel-specific capabilities, augmented by a large catalog of partnersolutions. The company incorporates predictive analytics for marketing program and channelinsights, and customer journey analysis. AI-powered predictive content delivers real-timepersonalization. These functionalities link to Engagement Platform's dashboards, offeringinsights into campaign performance. Sales engagement functionality helps keep B2Borganizations 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. Marketoannounced a partnership with Google that includes hosting Engagement Platform on theGoogle Cloud Platform. To augment its Ad Bridge component, Marketo added integration withLinkedIn 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 toincrease marketer productivity and collaboration. A new marketing performance insightsdashboard is also in the works. The account-based marketing app will add account hierarchies,with improved targeting, personalization and reporting capabilities. Marketo plans to integrateEngagement 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. Referenceclients cite Marketo's lead management, email and account-based marketing functions as keystrengths.

Cautions

■ Engagement Platform's capabilities and feature set are complex, requiring dedicated skilledresources or third-party professional service providers to maximize platform use.

■ References report challenges around implementation. Marketo scores below the average ofother vendors evaluated in this research for ease of deployment and ease of integratingEngagement 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 optimizetheir use of Engagement Platform. They note a need for more responsive technical support forhigh-level projects.


Maropost

Maropost is a Niche Player. With a solution that features revenue optimization, the companyprimarily serves midmarket organizations in retail, healthcare, financial services, and travel andhospitality. B2C marketers at midmarket companies seeking a multichannel marketing hub solutiondesigned for lean marketing teams should consider Maropost.

Strengths

■ Product: Maropost offers a multichannel marketing hub focused on marketing automation, dataanalytics, personalization and AI-powered marketing. Its Revenue Optimization Suite enablesorchestration across web, email, mobile and social, with data integration support for socialadvertising. 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 sharingbetween sales and marketing teams and measure marketing ROI and contribution to revenue. Itenriched email marketing with open-time optimization and a live content countdown on expiringoffers. Underscoring its focus on conversion, Maropost added send time recommendationsbased on conversion optimization, leveraging its DaVinci AI when clients have limited historicaldata. It also supplements its existing data capture with the ability to track session behavior.

■ Roadmap: Maropost's 2018 roadmap involves deepening its multichannel personalizationcapabilities overall and within individual marketing channels. Planned improvements includesimplifying A/B testing, adding a content and product recommendation engine to email, andadding an A/B testing module to mobile. It also plans to expand mobile marketing functionalitywith triggered messaging and behavioral segmentation and a text messaging API. It plans tobuild 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 andserve as a strategic partner. Clients rate Maropost above average for lead management andevent-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 clientreferences' consideration sets, slightly below average across all vendors profiled.

■ Maropost lacks advertising capabilities. Although it supports data integration with FacebookCustom Audiences, the lack of native capabilities requires clients to invest in additional tools tomanage digital advertising in-house or to rely on agency partners.

■ Channel selection and optimization remain highly manual and still don't utilize Maropost's AIcapabilities.


Optimove

Optimove is a Niche Player. Optimove's focus is cross-channel e-commerce, with a multichannelmarketing hub solution that features customer profile management and self-optimizing campaigns.B2C retail, e-commerce and financial services brands seeking an analytics approach to segmentdiscovery and message targeting across channels should consider Optimove.

Strengths

■ Product: Optimove focuses its multichannel Relationship Marketing Hub on the collection andunification of consumer data to enable analysis, life cycle modeling and campaign planning.Optimove segregates customers by life cycle stage, using increasingly granular behavioralsignals to recommend ideal customer marketing campaigns. The company also offers datascience 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. Thisfeature lets users define test segments, treatments and holdout groups, following which thesoftware continuously optimizes the match between each marketing offer, microsegment andchannels. These include email, Facebook, SMS and mobile push messaging using Optimove'snative channels or third-party systems via API.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, Optimove will continue its rollout of Optibot, which proactively surfacesrecommended actions to marketers based on campaign insights. Optibot triggers notificationsto users with campaign insights by segment and life cycle stage. Opitmove's AI is planned toautonomously improve current campaigns, stop poor-performing activities and easily pivot tonew campaigns.

■ References: References praise Optimove's modeling capabilities as well as its strong serviceand account management teams. Product functionality, a consumer focus and strongconsulting 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 analyticsmodule 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 arelong 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 marketingapplications, and has a comprehensive underlying data infrastructure. B2B and B2C marketersseeking deep customer centricity, a foundation for AI and the ability to orchestrate a unifiedcustomer experience should consider Oracle's solution.


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 assetsof the Oracle Marketing Cloud enable horizontal integration into other offerings such as OracleBluekai, Oracle Maxymiser and Oracle Infinity Analytics.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Oracle enabled the integration of Oracle Data Cloud attributesthroughout the Oracle Marketing Cloud offering, using applications with a common ID graph tomap first-party data to second- and third-party data for audience insight andacquisition. Marketers gain capabilities such as Responsys Program Orchestration to triggerdisplay media retargeting campaigns. Oracle strengthened its Adaptive Intelligent Apps, itsability to use machine learning to gain customer insights and recommended actions.

■ Roadmap: Oracle's 2018 plans include CX Audience, a cross-channel and cross-platformsegment creation tool that ingests event and consumer attribute data from across theenterprise. B2B marketers using the Eloqua suite gain a LinkedIn Sales Navigator app thatdelivers native insights from social selling activities. Oracle also plans to launch a SalesforceCRM app, as well as enhanced auditing capabilities for objects within the Oracle Marketing andCX offering.

■ References: References cite the performance and functionality of Oracle Responsys, and theynote Oracle Eloqua's robust functionality for lead management. References also note Oracle'sstrengths in personalization, multistep/multiwave campaign creation and campaignoptimization.

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 modulesbeyond its messaging-focused tools.

■ References express concern that implementation can be complex, and that Oracle's sales teamdoesn't clearly outline the potential intricacies upfront. Users cite additional challenges workingwith offshore implementation partners.

■ Use cases for Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Marketing, such as send-time optimization orproduct recommendations, are more conservative than AI offerings from other Leaders. Oracle'shorizontally integrated products represent untapped potential for transformative artificialintelligence 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


providers. B2C and B2B marketers seeking a multichannel marketing hub that can integratecustomer 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 withcustomers, extending beyond promotional messaging.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Pega introduced a new AI feature to address privacy and disclosurerequirements of the GDPR. It also added new features and tools to make "always on" marketingeasier for traditional marketers to learn and leverage. Pega extended its marketing capabilitiesto include advertising with its paid media module featuring direct API integrations with Googleand Facebook. Pega differentiates its advertising offering by keeping personal data within anadvertiser's firewall and applying next-best-action calculations to direct paid search, social anddisplay campaigns.

■ Roadmap: Pega plans improvements to its platform by adding more KPIs to model goals andoutcomes for optimizations and by making heavier use of AI to optimize outcomes. It plans toaccelerate deployment and extend its back-office functions with consulting and technicalpartnerships in the marketing ecosystem.

■ References: Pega receives its highest marks in the areas of real-time offers, personalization andcampaign 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 fullbenefit of its deep architectural approach. "Complexity" is a descriptor clients regularly use inrelation to Pega implementation and deployment.

■ Pega gets mixed reviews from reference clients for its web analytics, segmentation, data miningand attribution metrics. Below-average scores reflect challenges some marketers — especiallysmaller ones — report in leveraging these tools.

RedPoint Global

RedPoint Global is a Niche Player. With a focus on retail, financial services and insurance, andhealthcare industry sectors, its multichannel marketing hub solution features a flexible customerdata platform, in-line analytics, and robust orchestration. B2C marketers seeking customer data andprofile management and a multichannel orchestration engine should consider RedPoint.


Strengths

■ Product: RedPoint's Customer Engagement Hub solution includes a customer data platformthat creates and unifies consumer profiles built from diverse enterprise data, which givesmarketers the ability to view and orchestrate customer journeys across multiple marketingsolutions or vendors. Prebuilt integrations with other marketing solutions ensure RedPointcustomers can leverage high-volume orchestration capabilities to manage the customer journeyacross any existing components in their stack.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, RedPoint's Customer Engagement Hub expanded its real-timecapabilities, adding a product recommendation engine, web interface for single customer viewlookup, enhanced dashboards and reports, and machine learning for optimization. RedPointalso added partnerships, enhancing its list of data, content and analytics integrations. Theseinclude connectors to messaging solutions from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and Cheetah Digital,which are crucial to multichannel execution. RedPoint also expanded its DMP integrations toinclude KBM Group's Zipline, a connector that enables marketers to deliver targeted adsleveraging first-party data.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, RedPoint plans for continued investments in a new web user experience formarketers and real-time dynamic customer journeys powered by machine learning. RedPointwill also continue support for additional NoSQL databases. New product bundling such as OEMemail, SMS and mobile push solutions will simplify deployment for particular industryverticals. RedPoint is also coming to market with a GDPR offering with PossibleNOW.

■ References: References give high marks to the company's customer and professional servicesteams. Marketers seeking personalization and cross-channel orchestration report selectingRedPoint 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 channeltechnology 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 additionalintegration 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 astrong understanding of their data.

Resulticks

Resulticks is a Niche Player. With a solution that features robust data management capabilities, thecompany targets consumer electronics, financial services, healthcare, retail, travel and hospitality,and telecommunications organizations. Resulticks has a strong customer base in India and theAsia/Pacific region. It's building a presence in the U.S. market. Marketers seeking data


management, multitouch attribution and multichannel campaign orchestration capabilities shouldconsider Resulticks.

Strengths

■ Product: Resulticks' mCloud platform is supported by an audience data management module. Itincludes connectors to external data sources, plus segmentation, propensity modeling and leadscoring functionality. mCloud's campaign creation and orchestration module includes dynamicoffer management, real-time communication rule engine, machine-learning-driven analytics andreporting across the customer journey. The platform can function as a stand-alone MMHsolution and integrate with other marketing automation platforms.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Resulticks reconfigured mCloud around a new master datamanagement 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 alsoadded distributed marketing capabilities for B2B2B and B2B2C use cases, enablingdifferentiated levels of campaign access for channel and agency partners. Resulticks added amobile app that brings marketers essential campaign metrics and benchmarks, and added anumber 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 aimsto launch a marketing plan generation tool that leverages historical customer data. Resultickswill look to integrate new channels and endpoints into its orchestration module, advancing thedigital voice assistant marketing it launched in 2017. The data management module willeventually 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'sintuitive interface, strong data integration, customer targeting and channel orchestrationcapabilities, and analytics. References praise the speed with which Resulticks delivers newfeatures. mCloud received above-average scores across every major capability compared withother vendors evaluated in this research.

Cautions

■ Balancing ambitious platform expansion plans and customer growth objectives requires ameasure of agility that would test even the most seasoned organization. It remains to be seenwhether Resulticks can sustain this pace on multiple fronts.

■ Although not the driving force of its market entry strategy, Resulticks can be used tocomplement other MMH platforms. This "coexistence" approach may hinder the company'sscale and expansion aspirations as an MMH.

■ Users can be overwhelmed by the platform's breadth of capabilities. References note a desirefor quick-start templates to maximize the available functionality.


Sailthru

Sailthru is a Niche Player. With a solution featuring sophisticated event-triggering andpersonalization capabilities, the company primarily supports organizations across the retail and e-commerce, entertainment, media and publishing, and travel and hospitality sectors. Marketersprioritizing 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 mobilemarketing and data-driven personalization capabilities, which extend across channels. Sailthrunatively supports first-party data onboarding, with third-party data onboarding and matchingenabled through partner APIs. Customer profiles amass demographic, behavioral and intentdata from multiple sources. Predictive analytics span the customer journey, enablingpersonalized campaigns based on interest and intent factors.

■ New capabilities: Sailthru sharpened its mobile marketing capabilities in 2017. It now enablesusers to create dynamic segments based on mobile behaviors and trigger mobile messagesbased on website or email activity. Users also can personalize mobile app content based oncustomer engagement in other channels. Sailthru added an overlays product to its SitePersonalization Manager. In addition, Sailthru invested heavily in customer success andtechnical support capacity to offer a higher level of client service.

■ Roadmap: Sailthru's 2018 plans call for simplified personalization processes, the ability todeliver push notifications based on expressed interests in other channels and predictivecustomer journeys. Expect interface improvements to better support multichannel journeyplanning, the addition of app-based retargeting in Lifecycle Optimizer and improveddashboarding capabilities. Sailthru also aims to automate weekly reporting covering emailperformance.

■ References: Reference clients give high marks to Sailthru's email marketing, personalization,segmentation and event-triggered capabilities. They praise the platform's flexibility, reliabilityand user friendliness. They also appreciate Sailthru's client service, citing the company as astrategic partner, and view Sailthru as providing solid value for their investment.

Cautions

■ Despite expanding its multichannel marketing capabilities, Sailthru's mobile and socialmarketing, and customer journey and predictive analytics functions don't receive the same highmarks as its core email marketing solutions. References note some gaps in reportingfunctionality.

■ Customers express a desire for greater ease of use, noting that maximizing some Sailthrutoolsets demands technical capabilities. This requirement may prove challenging for smallerteams that lack such capabilities in-house.

■ As Sailthru focuses on innovation and new solutions, references note lagging updates to basiccapabilities, reflecting potential organizational growing pains.


Salesforce

Salesforce is a Leader. Its solution supports regional and global organizations across a broad rangeof industry sectors. B2C marketers seeking cloud-only multichannel marketing hub deployment —particularly when integration to Salesforce assets in customer service, sales and its CommerceCloud platform is a priority — should consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Strengths

■ Product: Salesforce continues to round out its multichannel marketing capabilities. MarketingCloud components include Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, Advertising Studio,Salesforce DMP, Data Studio and Journey Builder. Pardot, part of Sales Cloud, is Salesforce'sB2B marketing solution supporting lead management and account-based marketing (ABM)capabilities.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Salesforce added Data Studio, a data-sharing platform focused onsecond-party data. It offers marketers access to premium data for purchase and gives datasellers the ability to provision their data. An OEM partnership with Thunderhead, rebranded asInteraction Studio, will ingest customer interactions and build in-the-moment profiles forindividuals. Partnerships with Sitecore and Google 360 analytics boosts Salesforce's access toweb content management and web analytic capabilities.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, Salesforce will continue to build its customer data profile with a data layerthat integrates first-, second- and third-party data. This year, Salesforce's Einstein platform isslated to deliver journey recommendations, determining the next-best journey for individualconsumers 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 developedas 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 ITresources needed. They also cite a desire for better integration among the client service teamsacross 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 andautomate multichannel marketing. SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud enables cross-channel campaignmanagement, event-triggered marketing and targeted advertising for global marketingorganizations. Large enterprises looking for a multichannel marketing solution that measures and


optimizes marketing impact, especially those using other SAP solutions, should consider SAPHybris Marketing Cloud.

Strengths

■ Product: SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud (an on-premises version is also available) supportsmultichannel marketing campaigns across online and offline channels. It also enablesbudgeting, reporting and analysis for iterative marketing improvements through integrationswith SAP ERP and other third-party systems that track spending in financial systems, which canaid in measuring and proving marketing contribution to revenue.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, SAP updated the user interface of its campaign designer, enhancedreporting and dashboards, and improved campaign and program planning. It capitalized on lastyear's acquisition of Abakus by embedding SAP Hybris Customer Attribution into the marketingcloud to enhance attribution and measurement. A 2017 acquisition of customer identitymanagement company Gigya enables SAP to improve its identity, preference, consent andprofile management capabilities. It enhanced event-triggered marketing with inputs from IoTevents. SAP expanded social marketing, adding support for LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp, andmobile, adding geolocation-based offers.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, SAP plans to add campaign portfolio optimization and marketing mixoptimization, and to enhance its behavioral segmentation capabilities. It also plans to use SAPLeonardo Machine Learning to expand further into data-driven segmentation with the ability tofocus on goal-based segmentation. It also intends to enhance its account-based marketinghierarchies to link related accounts within client organizations.

■ References: Client references view SAP as a strategic partner and chose the platform for thisreason, as well as its vision and roadmap. They value SAP's ability to understand their businessneeds better than other competitors considered. References rate SAP above average onperformance and scalability, service, and support. Clients specifically give SAP high marks forsegmentation and event-triggered marketing.

Cautions

■ References give SAP below-average ratings compared with other vendors evaluated in keyareas such as value, integration and deployment, out-of-the-box functionality, ease of use, andtraining.

■ Clients rate SAP below average in product capabilities such as lead management, webanalytics, real-time offers and recommendations, email marketing, and mobile and socialmarketing. Client ratings for SAP's social marketing and web analytics declined noticeably fromlast year.

■ Abakus, acquired in 2016, is now fully embedded. However, client references rate SAPattribution metrics well below average, with some clients relying on other vendors for thisfunctionality.


SAS

SAS is a Leader. Bolstered by its reputation in data management and advanced analytics, SASattracts global clients across the financial services, telecommunications and retail sectors.Marketers seeking an analytics-focused marketing hub with an emphasis on personalization andperformance 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 resourcemanagement. The solution is designed for power and flexibility, with a focus on revealingcustomer insights and automating repetitive tasks.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, SAS took steps to address perceptions that its tools are only suitablefor advanced users. It simplified its user interface and added AI features designed to providemore accessible insights and explanations to business users. Its Viya front end includes a newmobile interface and a new visual tool for data preparation.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, SAS will focus on a 'hybrid' campaign management approach that unifiesdigital and nondigital interactions, and a modernization of its marketing resource management(MRM) offering, called 360 Plan. Additionally, SAS is extending its cloud offerings withcontainers and microservices, and incorporating AI and machine learning technologies into itsproducts. Its roadmap includes more customer data platform features, including privacycontrols, support for streaming analytics and IoT-based data collection and activation, and newopen-source integrations. Its AI innovations include proposed features including customerjourney oriented "Smart Tasks" that provide the best offer for a given interaction.

■ References: SAS gets outstanding ratings for attribution metrics and good ratings for mobilemarketing analytics and segmentation and/or data mining, reflecting the strength of its analyticsfoundation. Users praise its flexibility and breadth of support for activities from planning throughexecution.

Cautions

■ Customers deploy SAS most often as an integrated solution consisting of modules from itsextensive Viya suite. These integrations, although supported by a rich set of partnerships, canbe costly and complex.

■ SAS focuses on cultivating trained professionals through affiliation with academic institutionsand providing educators with free software and training materials, as well as broadening itsreach by supporting Python, R and other popular scripting languages. Still, finding data scientisttalent 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 contentmanagement/digital asset management (DAM)/product information management (PIM) solutioncompared with other vendors in this research. References note its web analytics capabilitiesfunction below expectations.


Selligent Marketing Cloud

Selligent Marketing Cloud is a Niche Player. It primarily serves upper midmarket or large enterpriseorganizations across the U.S. and Europe, particularly in the retail, financial services, media andtelecommunications sectors. Marketers seeking high-volume, data-driven engagements acrossdigital channels should consider Selligent.

Strengths

■ Product: Selligent Marketing Cloud consists of multiple modules for native MMH capabilitiessuch as email, website and mobile personalization capabilities. A universal customer profilewithin the entire solution ensures that engagement activities at one touchpoint appear in eventmarketing and real time for decisioning in other channels.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Selligent focused on improving predictive capabilities, drawing onweb behavior and third-party data to recommend content. Newly launched Selligent Cortex isavailable in the site module and provides a machine-learning-driven recommendationengine. Mobile messages now contain rich content with enhanced (open-time) personalizationand product recommendations. Location-based capabilities such as geofencing were added toenable contextual in-app and push messaging. Selligent also released a new feature to managemultilanguage and multichannel content and workflow. Content blocks allow users to reusepredefined content across messages and channels for easier content creation.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, Selligent plans to expand its AI and machine learning capabilities acrossoffers, content, audience and journey optimization. It also plans to invest in expanding into newchannels through native capabilities and relevant third parties. The company will focus onchannels such as Rich Communication Services RCS (Android), customer care, messagingapps and web push. It plans to introduce enhanced reporting and intelligence, andadd 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 toyield commensurate results for a multichannel marketing hub. Market potential remains, butisn't yet fully realized by prospects.

■ References indicate a need for quality control improvement in new version releases. Somereferences mentioned technical frustrations to the point of wanting to roll back updates untilSelligent resolved them.

■ References cite a need for more U.S. support staff, noting that most of Selligent's criticalsupport staff is located in Europe.


Sitecore

Sitecore is a Visionary, offering a cloud-based multichannel marketing hub solution focused onpersonalization. The company primarily serves organizations in the services, manufacturing,banking, and travel and hospitality industries, with a strong presence in North America. Marketersseeking a solution that extends multichannel marketing into customer experience design andoptimization should consider Sitecore.

Strengths

■ Product: Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) 9 is part of the new Sitecore Experience Cloud andincludes the functionality of Sitecore Experience Database (xDB), Sitecore Cortex machinelearning and Sitecore Experience Manager. It also includes an xConnect API to gather andintegrate customer data. XP supports customer analytics, marketing automation and campaignsacross web, mobile, social and print.

■ New capabilities: In 2017, Sitecore added xConnect to improve data integration with third-partyplatforms and enhanced Sitecore Cortex machine learning to improve personalization, testingand optimization. Sitecore added an integration with Stackla, a content marketing platformfocused on social and user-generated content. It also strengthened its encryption for tightersecurity and compliance, and improved the path to migration for clients. An enhanced UI isdesigned to improve ease of use for marketing teams.

■ Roadmap: Planned for the third quarter of 2018, Sitecore will launch XP 9.1, enhancingsegmentation 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 learningcapabilities 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 enablericher engagement.

■ References: Client references rate their overall experience above average and give Sitecore highmarks for traits including value, integration and performance. Compared with other vendorsevaluated in this research, Sitecore's platform scores above average for functionality inmultistep 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, buthas since focused more on CRM integrations than native capabilities. Only a small percentageof 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 onother vendors for segmentation and optimization.

■ Email marketing remains a soft spot in Sitecore's feature set. It released Email ExperienceManager in 2016, but 100% of its client references still rely on other providers for emailmarketing, rating Sitecore below average in this area.


Zeta

Zeta is a Niche Player. Its data-driven campaign management solution primarily attractsorganizations in the retail, travel and hospitality, financial services, media, telecom, and healthcareindustry sectors. Marketers seeking a multichannel marketing hub solution backed by managed andstrategic 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-partycustomer and marketing data. The unified data model now enables machine learning to scalesegmentation, 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 andproduct integrations, adding advanced machine learning optimization from Boomtrain and morerobust customer signals such as life events from Disqus. Its partnership with Kitewheel enablesZeta clients to measure and create customer journeys. New templates and upgraded contentinterface aim for simpler authoring of high-impact personalization.

■ Roadmap: In 2018, Zeta plans to enable real-time personalization through its data assets toimprove prospect interaction. The company looks to offer scalable personalization and eventtriggers based on cross-channel behaviors such as social conversations, publisher websiteactivity and predictive models. Zeta's investment in Visto opens new possibilities for bettermeasurement, recommendations and programmatic advertising. Zeta will continue to refine leadmanagement and distributed marketing capabilities to serve sales organizations such asinsurers.

■ References: References give their highest scores to Zeta's overall experience and productvalue. They note the Zeta team's strategic partnership approach and its commitment to theirbusiness needs. Zeta's solution set — especially email, multistep campaigns and real-timeoffers — 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 theData Cloud platform. Global marketers should review Zeta's additional license agreements andconsent management tools to ensure consistency with the marketer's specific GDPRcompliance efforts.

■ Outside of email and SMS, Zeta customers demonstrate more modest use of full-suitemultichannel marketing capabilities. For example, low client adoption of programmaticadvertising suggests that Zeta's retail customers are not yet executing an omnichannel strategysupported by the Zeta product roadmap.


■ References report concerns with Zeta's total cost of ownership and limited out-of-the-boxfunctionality. They note a cumbersome product upgrade process as well as complexities in theuser experience that make certain tasks more time consuming than anticipated.

Vendors Added and Dropped

None

Inclusion and Exclusion CriteriaFor inclusion in the 2018 Multichannel Marketing Hub Magic Quadrant, Gartner focused on vendorsthat 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 effectivelytarget customers or stage the offers to make during interactions. Although this may beoffered through partnerships, we will look for proven integration and references of actualutilization.

■ Campaign optimization: Ability to balance and coordinate multiple constraints to maximizeexpected value from single or multiple campaigns or engagement. Functionality enablestrade-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 ofeach interaction.

■ Customer journey analytics: Ability to track and analyze the way customers andprospects use a combination of available channels to interact with an organization overtime. It should cover the multichannel nature of customer engagement, including humaninteractions (e.g., a call center), digital marketing (i.e., website, app and email), customerservice (i.e., live chat), physical locations (i.e., retail stores) and those with a limited two-way


interaction (i.e., display advertising). Although this may be offered through partnerships, welooked for proven integration and references of actual utilization.

■ Customer profile management: Marketers seek to unify and synchronize their customerdata across multiple channels, devices and life cycle stages for personalized engagementand campaign orchestration. Vendors should enable marketers to activate their own first-party data while bringing in and utilizing customer data from second- and third-partysources. This includes:

■ A "360-degree" or unified customer profile, which brings together data from internalsystems and data warehouses, point of sale, website, and other engagement data andattributes to enable segmentation and customer analytics, and inform personalization.

■ Ability to onboard data and match first-party data with third-party audiences. Thisincludes data collection capabilities through tags as well as preconfigured integrationswith common marketing point solutions, data partners and analytics tools.

■ Cross-device identification (XDID) techniques to connect the activities of an individualcustomer or prospect across devices and channels. Device identifiers can be explicitlysupplied by the device operating system (deterministic) or inferred statistically fromobservable characteristics (probabilistic). Marketers rely on XDID for ad targeting,analytics and personalization.

■ Advanced execution functionality:

■ Event triggering: Functionality involves the detection, prioritization and execution responsefor significant events affecting a customer relationship.

■ Real-time recommendations: Suited for areas such as offer management and deals withoffer arbitration. It enables the combination of the most-up-to-date information from datacollected prior to the interaction, as well as new data collected during a real-time interactionwith 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 digitalasset management, product information management, and content management fortailoring and optimizing customer and prospect interactions.

■ Personalization: The ability to apply context, including knowledge about users and theircircumstances, to tailor and deliver relevant messaging, content, offers and interactions viadigital channels (e.g., web, email, mobile, social, advertising, search or chat) to maximizeconversion and improve other marketing and business results. Offers largely rule-basedpersonalization and, at a minimum, native execution on the web plus at least two otherchannels (e.g., email, mobile, social, advertising/retargeting, SEM, chat or call center).

■ Multichannel lead management capabilities: The ability to provide lead managementfunctionality for both inbound and outbound marketing initiatives. This includes, at aminimum, lead collection, analytics, augmentation, scoring, process management andnurturing, across a minimum of three lead generation and lead management channels within


a single campaign. In addition, functionality must support bidirectional integration with CRMor sales force automation applications (such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce SalesCloud).

Digital Marketing Capability

We consider specific digital marketing functionality, such as web analytics, social analytics, socialmarketing, 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 ayear of operations at the current rate of cash depletion.

In addition, we placed a strong emphasis on innovative, visionary offerings. Visionaries provide astrong vision for the multichannel marketing market or excel in advanced or emerging areas. Theseinclude customer data platforms and artificial intelligence, identity resolutions, multidimensionalsegmentation, mobile marketing, loyalty marketing and social marketing, and real-time interactionmanagement. They can set strategic direction or demonstrate specific innovative capabilities in oneor more functionality area (such as advanced campaign functionality or digital marketing integration)in multichannel marketing that the market will eventually adopt. Visionaries may have multichannelmarketing implementations from different buying centers, such as customer service or digitalcommerce.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: This is a key differentiator in vendor selection. Therefore, product capabilities aregiven a high overall weighting. Subcriteria include basic campaign and advanced multichannelmarketing functionality, basic and advanced analytics, interaction/journey workflow, andfunctionality for digital marketing. Weighting: High.

Overall Viability: This addresses the overall health of the vendor, including line-of-business offeringmultichannel marketing hub solutions. Viability includes the vendor's history of and commitment tothe continued success and development of world-class multichannel marketing hub solutions.Weighting: High.


Sales Execution/Pricing: This provides an assessment of the overall effectiveness of the saleschannel, and how it deals with presales responsiveness, contract negotiations and pricing for theirmultichannel marketing hubs. Weighting: Medium.

Market Responsiveness/Record: This gives an assessment of the multichannel marketing hubvendor's success in creating and meeting a consistent demand for its product, measured incontinuing client wins and use in its installed base. Weighting: Medium.

Marketing Execution: This provides an assessment of the vendor's overall momentum andperceived multichannel marketing hub focus and presence in the market. Vendors must showestablished and continued broad or specific (such as industry focus) credibility for marketinginteractions in a multichannel environment. Weighting: High.

Customer Experience: This is an evaluation of client relationships with multichannel marketing hubvendors. 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'smultichannel marketing hub clients see this as an important aspect of the overall customerexperience. Weighting: Medium.

Operations: This is the ability of a vendor to meet its goals and commitments. Factors includeorganizational structure (such as skills, experience, systems and other vehicles) that enable thevendor 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


Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: This is the vendor's ability to understand the multichannel marketing hubspace, and its value proposition in the market, and how effective it is at reaching the marketingbuying center for companies purchasing multichannel marketing hub solutions. Vendors must


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 itscompetition and of functionality, and how it articulates continued leadership in its overallmultichannel marketing vision. Weighting: Medium.

Sales Strategy: This assesses a vendor's strategy in using direct and indirect sales channels to sellits multichannel marketing hub. Weighting: Medium.

Offering (Product) Strategy: This assesses the multichannel marketing hub feature set as it mapsto functionality requirements, particularly functionality that enables advanced capability in inboundand outbound environments. Weighting: High.

Business Model: This assesses the vendor's alignment of its go-to-market and sales strategies forparticular 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 purposesin developing new areas in multichannel marketing. Weighting: Medium.

Geographic Strategy: This assesses the vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offeringsto meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography. This can beeither directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography andmarket. 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



Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders consistently do considerably better in overall multichannel marketing performance for basicand advanced campaigns, and for integration with digital marketing. They have high marketvisibility, high market penetration, strong market momentum and a strategic vision for growing themultichannel marketing hub business.

Challengers

Challengers see continued investments in multichannel marketing hub solutions as complementaryofferings to the business applications that are their core competencies. Challengers have adeveloping understanding of the multichannel marketing hub market and basic functions. They seemultichannel marketing as an opportunity to increase revenue and retention in their installed bases,and they concentrate on established clients' needs for multichannel marketing functions andstrategic 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 inadvanced or emerging areas such as inbound marketing and digital marketing. They can set astrategic direction or demonstrate specific innovative capabilities in one or more functional areas(such as advanced campaign functionality or digital marketing integration) that the market willeventually adopt. Visionaries may have multichannel marketing implementations in multiple buyingcenters, such as the contact center, digital commerce or social marketing departments. AlthoughVisionaries show promise in multichannel marketing, they may lack execution capabilities, such asgrowth potential, resources or scalability.

Niche Players

Niche Players provide specific needs in the multichannel marketing hub space. They may befocused 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 multichannelmarketing capabilities (such as advanced analytics) or execution potential (such as sufficientresources or a fully developed market strategy).

ContextMost marketing leaders expect their budgets to rise in 2018 (see "Survey Analysis: MarketingBudgets Skew, Putting More Pressure on Marketers With Lean Martech Budgets") driven byincreased spending on services and marketing technology. Still, marketing leaders find themselvesunder increased pressure to squeeze more out of every marketing investment. After threeconsecutive years of growth, marketing budget growth stalled in 2017, slipping from its peak of


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 apath to resource maximization.

Marketing leaders are investing in platforms and services that enable more relevant, personalizeddigital experiences across the customer journey. They seek MMH vendors with strong customerintelligence and analytics capabilities to improve the targeting, performance and measurement oftheir multichannel marketing strategy. The emphasis on customer insights and marketing analyticscomes 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 areseeking competitive differentiation across the digital customer experience. MMH vendors arehelping companies orchestrate an increasing variety of customer engagements and responding tothe proliferation of consumer endpoints. MMH vendors stay relevant to clients by providing the righttools for collecting and unifying audience data from multiple sources. This enables marketing usersto perform detailed customer modeling segmentation using that data, optimizing the timing andtargeting of personalized messages and offers across seamlessly orchestrated campaigns. Theyadd value by supplying effective ways to attribute results to specific channels, convert campaigndata into predictive insights and prescribe profitable next-best actions for marketing teams.

Market OverviewMultichannel marketing hub vendors are focusing on capabilities that enable rich customerexperiences, which remain a crucial marketplace differentiator. They're supporting the customerjourney with a more unified approach to data. They're also integrating tools that incorporatecustomer 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, channelattribution and customer journey analytics. Key themes this year include:

■ Customer profile management: Successful marketing leaders and their teams need to gatherinformation about customers' behavior and interests, goals, and needs. The aim is to segmentand treat individual customers with the appropriate level of differentiation. This requires rulesand intelligence to determine the right moment to connect with audiences and the right type ofexchange to have. It also involves applying customer insights at each journey stage to fostermore engaging multichannel marketing experiences that drive overall business results. Inresponse to marketer demand for more data control, flexibility and analysis capabilities, MMHvendors are enhancing their ability to unify, synchronize and reconcile customer data acrossmultiple channels, devices and life cycle stages. In many cases, vendors are either explicitly orimplicitly 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 EuropeanGDPR 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


new opportunities to take back control of their data, challenging multichannel marketers whoare reliant on personalized interactions with individual customers. Some vendors areincorporating tools to help organizations meet the GDPR's operational requirements beforeregulations go into effect.

■ Machine learning and artificial intelligence: Predictive and prescriptive analytics techniqueshold the promise of better segmentation and decision making for marketers. Predictive contentbrings the potential of more relevant, timelier messaging and offers delivered to customers attheir moment of need. Nearly every MMH vendor evaluated for this research has machinelearning and AI capabilities in some stage of development that are designed to make customerinsights more accessible and actionable. The predictive accuracy of these capabilities canimprove over time as more data is added to the models. End users of MMH platforms stand tobenefit from a greater ability to discern channel, offer and segment performance, resulting inbetter business decision making and improved forecasting, cross-sell and upsell capabilities.

■ Personalization capabilities: Customers now expect personalized engagement. Gartnerexpects that by 2019, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketingpersonalization, leveraging data, content and technologies to improve business results acrossthe customer journey. As of 2017, 45% of marketers Gartner surveyed said their marketingmostly involved real-time personalization, with 66% projecting they would reach that goal by2019 (see "Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission toAdvance Multichannel Marketing Results"). MMH vendors continue to integrate what hashistorically been a stand-alone tool as a native offering, incorporating personalization enginesthat gather customer data and enable marketers to tailor the content visitors are presentedbased on that data. In duplicating the capabilities of dedicated personalization tools, MMHvendors are contributing to a predicted consolidation of the personalization landscape. By2020, Gartner expects that fewer than 20 stand-alone vendors will remain on the market aspersonalization functionality is built into other enterprise martech platforms.

■ Campaign journey analytics: Marketers strive to deliver contextualized engagement betweentheir company and customers — a connected, ongoing conversation that incorporates two-waydialogue. Doing so requires knowing who — and where — customers are along the buyingjourney. Demand for customer journey analytics is increasing, becoming more of a criticalcapability for MMH vendors. They are integrating tools that help companies reveal details aboutthe customer buying journey that, ultimately, will lead to sales, retention and growth. Core to theefficacy of customer journey analytics are attribution metrics; together, they promise to optimizechannels, improve responsiveness and boost marketing efficiency. MMH vendors are givingincreased attention to both areas, but need to accelerate development of their offerings and/orpartnerships with third-party tools. Customer journey analytics was the lowest-scoringcapability in this year's research, and attribution metrics was not far behind.

Gartner Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.


"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 toAdvance Multichannel Marketing Results"

"Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission to AdvanceMultichannel 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 definedmarket. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skillsand so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships asdefined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financialhealth, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood thatthe individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offeringthe product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio ofproducts.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and thestructure 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 andachieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customerneeds evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor'shistory of responsiveness.


https://www.gartner.com/document/3817064

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designedto deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand andbusiness, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identificationwith the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" canbe driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership,word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enableclients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the wayscustomers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillarytools, 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. Factorsinclude the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences,programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operateeffectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needsand to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highestdegree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape orenhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicatedthroughout 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 ofdirect and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extendthe scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and thecustomer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development anddelivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets asthey map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying businessproposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills andofferings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticalmarkets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.


Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings tomeet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, eitherdirectly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for thatgeography and market.


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