marketing automation

Marketers’ efforts to get to know customers via data collection and personalization may be driving them away instead. On this week’s What It Means, Vice President and Group Director Melissa Parrish discusses what’s gone wrong and how marketers can end the disconnect.

Channel professionals want to talk about expanding their partner programs and building broad ecosystems, but the truth is that many of their basic program and channel management processes are still painfully manual and error-prone. Before accelerating their channel program, they need to apply basic automation technologies to get their front- and back-end systems to a […]

Do you work with marketing resource management (MRM) or mobile engagement automation (MEA) tools? If yes, I want to hear from you! I’m Steph, the newest member of Forrester’s B2C martech research team. I’ve been at Forrester for four years, first as a research associate and most recently as a researcher on the B2C marketing […]

When marketers fail to understand the complexity and nuance of how customers’ core characteristics evolve, people lose trust in them. As they look elsewhere, customers have found a more nimble set of businesses to meet their needs: direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.

The last couple weeks have been an exciting time for the customer data platform (CDP) category. At long last, major marketing technology vendors formally declared their intentions to get serious about managing and activating data for marketing. For the CDP community, the entry of marketing clouds is a big deal, carrying equal parts excitement over […]

(CLICK FOR HIGH RES) The channel technology stack is a group of technologies that brands leverage to manage and improve their indirect sales processes and partner programs. Often, the focus of channel technologies is to make difficult processes easier, automate workflows, measure multi-tier activities, and drive more efficient spending, coverage, and partner communication. The channel […]

Six months ago, we started a conversation about customer data platforms (CDPs). The timing was right; CDPs were driving attention toward a historically sleepy corner of the martech universe centered around data management, gaining traction among vendors, and racking up mentions in the marketing trade press. Questions, hope, and more than a little confusion ensued. […]

It is impossible to overstate the impact automation has on digital transformation. Automation directly impacts customer experience (CX). Software like Reflexis can automate price checks and cut customer wait times by 80%. Robots like LoweBot can guide customers to the proper aisle to pick up home goods. Automation contributes directly to your bottom line. Robotic […]

Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Shar VanBoskirk discusses the new role of marketing — and how acknowledging and embracing change will lead to success.

Marketers today are managing more channels, more content, and more data, while delivering vast quantities of personalized content quickly around the globe. As digital marketing complexity increases, more marketers are embracing automation tools to improve efficiency and speed to market. In our first Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 To 2023, we expect global spending on […]

  Over the past few decades, sales and marketing leaders have been transforming themselves into predictable, data-driven business units. The CRM stage started in the 1990s and accelerated quickly a decade later with lower-priced cloud offerings. The marketing automation stage began to grow exponentially around 2008 and has reached critical mass in its first decade. […]

At $90 billion today and growing to $122 billion by 2022, CMOs are pouring budgets into investments which align their organization’s operations with greater customer and experience focus. Planning and budgeting for the technology and services investments supporting these goals stands as a critical task for CMOs and will only get harder in the future. […]

The world is changing and with it, consumers’ expectations of experiences and communication from brands. The paradigm for customer engagement is shifting from large, monolithic experiences that serve everyone to smaller, more contextual experiences served to consumers in just the moment they need them. Marketers must adopt the right strategy, operational best practices and technology […]

I’m pleased to announce the publication of The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q1 2018. In our 33-criteria evaluation, we identified the 12 most significant vendors – Adobe, Cheetah Digital, Emarsys, IBM, Oracle, Pegasystems, Pitney Bowes, RedPoint Global, Salesforce, SAP Hybris, SAS, and Selligent – and researched, analyzed, and scored them. Forrester defines CCCM as: Enterprise […]

Vice President and Principal Analyst Michael Facemire hosts a panel of his peers — Fatemeh Khatibloo, James McQuivey, and Shar VanBoskirk — to explore the future of marketing.

For marketers, the struggle is real: you want to provide your customers and prospects cohesive cross-channel experiences that demonstrate you actually know them (without freaking them out) — all while reducing the number of vendors in your tech stack. There are positive signs with the marketing technology ecosystem rapidly consolidating — and millions of dollars […]

I think we all accept that business buyers have higher expectations in the age of the customer.  They've  fundamentally changed their buying behavior in this digital age. Unfortunately, too many B2B marketers aren't keeping pace. They must evolve from brand stewards, lead generation machines, and sales supporters to architects of customer engagement across the customer life cycle. […]

  I've just refreshed the core documents in Forrester, Lead-to-Revenue Playbook. While L2RM pioneers have realized significant business gains, they have also realized that L2RM is not just about taking responsibility for the impact of marketing spend on revenue performance or about standardizing, automating, and scaling your current marketing practice. Today's digitally empowered buyer controls […]

Forrester research shows that today’s B2B buyer will find three pieces of content about a vendor for every one piece that marketing can publish or sales can deliver. They are finding this content in an ever-expanding number and variety of channels.  And they are accessing these channels from an increasingly diverse array of devices. Without […]