News,  Vendor Selection

Customer Data Management Projects Vary by Company Type and Geography

8 Nov 2022 /

We are almost there. I’ve done my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrix research on Customer Data Management, the survey has been analyzed, insights and trends have been written up and the vendor scorecards/profiles completed. The report is now with those vendors for fact checking and we expect to publish later in November.  

Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management (CDM) process in place: a process that includes the consolidation and aggregation of all data collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements. 

The global market for customer data management platform software is rising dramatically as companies invest in their CDM process to ensure success in their digital marketing and digital selling. IDC has sized the CDP software market at $ 2.2 billion in 2021 with an annual growth of 62%. The vendor landscape is quite stable with several well-established independent CDP vendors who are now challenged not only by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, but also through increased competition from tools that enable in-house IT teams to build their own CDP equivalent.

Our survey of 1500 business professionals included this question, “Which of the following processes do you automate, or plan to, with your CDM platform?”. The top six processes named were:     

  • Customer profile resolution
  • Digital experience personalization
  • Business reporting and analytics
  • Mkt. execution testing/optimization
  • Market segmentation
  • Cust. lifetime revenue calculation
  • Channel optimization analysis

When asked, “Which anticipated top 3 benefits are driving your investment in customer data management automation in 2022?”, well over one third of companies cited content personalization. But that varies across the regions. Real-time personalization and measurement of intent are more important in North America while European respondents are still focused on getting to a single customer database and/or single source of truth, a more basic CDM initiative.

These are the 15 vendors that qualified for the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Customer Data Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):

ACTIONIQ, BLUECONIC, CALIBER MIND, CROSSENGAGE, EULERIAN, EVERGAGE, LEADSPACE, LYTICS, NGDATA, REDPOINT GLOBAL, SALESFORCE, SITECORE, TEALIUM, TERMINUS, and TWILIO

Although Evergage was acquired by Salesforce back in 2020, a significant number of respondents named and rated that brand unprompted. Indeed, the list above is a broad mix of vendors with a wide variety of claims: data consolidation, collecting entire clickstreams, creating a “golden record” through identity resolution, enabling intelligent engagement, and identity tagging, even ABM predictive analytics this time. The CDM challenge is different across the B2C and B2B spectrum. It also varies according to whether you are a medium-sized company or a large international enterprise. 

Watch out for the final version of the report in full detail next month. 

Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill