Advertising technology (ad tech) platforms help digital marketing leaders plan, buy and manage digital advertising campaigns across channels, including, but not limited to, display, video, streaming TV and audio, mobile, social media and search. They provide functions for campaign planning, media buying, advertising analysis and optimization and automation. Ad tech platforms can be used by buy-side and sell-side agents.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are software applications that support customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing, sales, service, commerce and other sources. CDPs unify customer data to facilitate its output to coordinate profiles between cross-functional systems, create segments and/or audience targets, optimize offers and/or decisions, and inform analysis while distributing insights that create triggers for other experiences.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to products and services that enable organizations to manage, analyze, and enhance customer interactions. This category includes markets that support functions such as customer engagement, service delivery, experience personalization, and operational efficiency - aimed at improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business outcomes.
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.
Marketing refers to the products and services that enable organizations to plan, execute, measure, and optimize strategies for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers across digital and physical channels. This category includes markets that support content creation, campaign management, data-driven personalization, performance analytics and brand strategy—empowering businesses to deliver targeted, measurable, and customer-centric marketing experiences.
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, primarily delivered as SaaS, that orchestrate personalized campaigns and event-driven customer journeys across marketing channels. These applications leverage customer data, predictive models and real-time insights to optimize the timing, channel and content of interactions. MMHs apply advanced analytics, AI and prescriptive intelligence to help marketing and technical teams manage the end-to-end life cycle of customer journeys. Although MMHs overlap with customer data platforms (CDPs) and personalization engines, their primary focus is enabling marketing users to manage large-scale consumer interactions, particularly in owned media channels such as email and app push. Multichannel marketing hubs empower marketers to deliver personalized media and orchestrate customer journeys, thus driving revenue, engagement and loyalty. These SaaS applications unify customer data, predictive insights and real-time decision making to optimize interactions across digital channels. MMHs enable multidisciplinary teams to manage campaigns and event-driven journeys via advanced analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and prescriptive intelligence.
Personalization engines use knowledge about customers to create and deliver an optimum experience for them and measure the impact on customer experience. These engines apply AI, advanced analytics and business rules to create meaningful experiences across channels that facilitate customer engagement and drive revenue. Personalization engines create a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties designed to enhance the recipient’s experience. A recipient can be a prospect, customer (known or anonymous) or employee (engaging with a customer or prospect). In commercial settings, the engines apply advanced analytics to interpret customer data — whether known or anonymous, behavioral or contextual — and adjust engagement based on where the customer is in their journey and how they’re interacting. The engines adapt content, offers and interactions in real time that facilitate the customer’s journey.