Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software applications that support marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels. CDPs optimize the timing and targeting of messages, offers and customer engagement activities, and enable the analysis of individual-level customer behavior over time. The purpose of a CDP is to centralize data collection and unify customer data from disparate sources into profiles. CDPs enable marketers to create and manage segments and push those segments to priority channels without requiring coding or use of advanced querying techniques. While CDPs originated to serve marketing use cases, interest from data management roles, IT and other customer-facing roles (e.g. sales, service and support) is on the rise. Digital marketing leaders have long used a variety of systems to design, orchestrate and measure multichannel campaigns. While many of those systems also manage customer-level data and audiences for targeting, they do so in a way that makes both data governance and orchestration across channels (and across competitive vendor solutions) a challenge. CDPs aim to address that challenge by collecting and unifying disparate customer data in a centralized location accessible to marketers. The CDP is not a substitute for an enterprise’s master data management, but it can ensure that customer profile data, transactional events and analytic attributes are available to marketing when needed for real-time interactions.
Gartner defines customer journey analytics and orchestration (CJA/O) as solutions that track and analyze how customers and prospects interact with an organization across multiple channels over time. Most CJA/O solutions subsequently enable organizations to prioritize and orchestrate real-time improvements to the customer experience in multichannel journeys throughout the end-to-end customer life cycle. The journey lens provided by CJA/O solutions offers insights by combining cross-channel interaction data with transactional, voice of the customer (VoC) and customer profile data on a time axis. Other types of analysis in isolation cannot achieve this. This enables data-driven predictions at scale and experimentation with multichannel interventions that can be robustly verified as driving increased customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value.
Gartner defines email marketing as the use of the email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of engagement across the customer journey. Email service providers often bolster their technology platforms with supplementary managed services to improve the value and scalability of the email channel. Email marketing helps marketers deliver information to their audiences after obtaining an email address. This can take the form of product or service updates, new promotions, transaction updates and more. As a relatively inexpensive method for communicating at scale with contacts, email provides value for different use cases across the full customer-engagement life span. Email is the most effective channel for several marketing objectives, including demand generation, conversion to sales, and customer loyalty and advocacy.
Mobile app analytics tools collect and report on in-app data pertaining to the operation of the mobile app and the behavior of users within the app. These areas of app analytics are defined as follows: Operational analytics: Provides visibility into the availability and performance of mobile apps in relation to device, network, server and other technology factors. Operational analytics are essential to capture and fix unexpected app behavior (such as crashes, bugs, errors and latency) that can lead to user frustration and abandonment of the app. Such analytics should be applied at both the app testing phase and after release of the app into production. Behavioral analytics: Shows how app users interact with the app to gain actionable insights, drive app improvements and improve business outcomes. Behavioral data can be analyzed based on correlating clicks, swipes, views and other usage stats based on user profiles, segmentation/cohorts, retention, funnel/event tracking and A/B testing.
Gartner defines mobile marketing platforms (MMPs) as software solutions that help organizations create, activate, execute, analyze and optimize mobile marketing campaigns and experiences. The platforms target audiences on their mobile device through multiple message types such as SMS/text, push notifications, messaging apps and in-app messages. These platforms enable marketers to engage customers and prospects through a range of mobile-specific tactics — spanning mobile websites, mobile applications, smart device engagement, messaging (such as SMS and native applications), push notifications (such as on mobile apps and off websites), location-triggered interactions and mobile wallet cards. Mobile tactics are particularly suited to, for example, providing time-sensitive notifications to audiences, whether that’s in response to a live event, location-specific moment or a fulfillment update. MMPs also help measure and optimize the effectiveness of mobile strategy. MMPs can operate as stand-alone solutions within a marketing organization’s tech stack, or operate alongside other marketing technology. These technologies can include a set of capabilities within a multichannel marketing hub (MMH), marketing automation platform (MAP), customer data platform (CDP) or other marketing automation applications. Stand-alone MMPs are a more specialized solution, often used in conjunction with an MMH, email platform or B2B MAP.
Gartner defines multichannel marketing hubs (MMHs) as software applications that orchestrate personalized communications to individuals in common marketing channels. MMHs optimize the timing, format and content of interactions through the analysis of customer data, audience segments and offers. MMHs are foundational for multichannel marketing, customer journey orchestration and next best action programs.
Gartner defines personalization engines as technology that enables marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about them, their intent and context.
Gartner uses the following market definitions: Web analytics tools — Specialized analytics tools used to understand and improve the digital CX, attract and retain users, and analyze operations and actions taken across responsive websites and mobile apps. Product analytics tools — Tools and processes used to understand the behavior of users across products or services to inform decisions about how to improve the product experience and increase product engagement. Digital experience analytics tools — Tools that provide diagnostic insights into visitor activity and the CX on responsive web and mobile apps, enabled by advanced analytics and machine learning, session replay and heat map technology.