The Hottest Technologies and Solutions from IRCE 2016
Hot Email Trends and Technologies for E-commerce Today
Here are some of the hottest technologies and solution providers that caught our attention at the Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition (IRCE) last month in Chicago. They give insight into the future of email for the e-commerce market, especially the application of predictive analytics.
Some Email Service Providers (ESPs) on the Cutting Edge
Technologies for the rapidly growing e-commerce market are constantly changing and improving. Here are some of the ESPs leading the way:
- dotmailer — Established in 1999, dotmailer is the United Kingdom’s top email-marketing provider, with more than 70,000 users in more than 150 countries. dotmailer’s easy-to-use platform allows users to build and send personalized and optimized messages to multiple channels and applications, as well as build lifecycle and nurturing campaigns quickly and without any coding required. Thanks to a deep integration of e-commerce and marketing platforms (in particular, their integration with Magento is very sophisticated), users get a high level of insight and control over data to connect with their customers. Plus, automated abandonment, reengagement, and loyalty campaigns help maximize customer lifetime value.
- Emarsys — Founded in 2000, Emarsys is a leading provider of marketing automation software and the first marketing cloud for e-commerce and retail businesses. A combination of machine learning and data science powers customer intelligence in this intuitive Cloud-based platform, which enables one-to-one interactions between marketers and customers across all channels. Emarsys has more than 1,500 clients in more than 140 countries.
- Listrak — Since 1999, Listrak has been at the forefront of e-commerce email-marketing innovation, offering a digital marketing automation platform designed exclusively for online and omni-channel retailers. From a single, integrated platform, Listrak users can create personalized, seamless experiences across all customer touchpoints. Plus, users get actionable customer insights from Listrak’s reporting and analytics capabilities to create segmented messages, predict sales cycles, and analyze lifecycle migration. And Listrak fully integrates the capabilities of browse and shopping-cart abandonment within its native platform, negating the need to purchase and integrate other technologies for these mission-critical, e-commerce campaigns.
- Silverpop/IBM Marketing Cloud — Offering email-marketing, lead-management, and mobile engagement solutions, this Cloud-based digital marketing platform uses customer data and individual behaviors to drive personalized messages in real time. It offers behavior-based insights and an intuitive engagement engine to provide relevant one-to-one experiences across the entire buyer journey. More than 5,000 brands currently use IBM Marketing Cloud around the globe.
- Sailthru — Founded in 2008, Sailthru is a cross-platform marketing company that helps e-commerce retailers build deep, long-lasting relationships with their customers. Its Smart Data platform helps businesses make real-time automated decisions for optimizing their subscribers’ experiences across email campaigns, mobile apps, and websites. The Sailthru platform tracks users’ behavior and preferences to create unique customer profiles that can be used to develop targeted, personalized messages for individual customers. In effect, Sailthru has an impressive set of predictive marketing capabilities built right into its platform.
- Remarkety — Relatively new to the scene and founded in 2012, Remarkety is a data-driven email-marketing platform for e-commerce businesses that uses customer behavior and purchase history to create segmented and targeted marketing strategies. Features include product recommendations, abandoned-cart recovery, email newsletters, automated order follow-ups, and personalized coupons. The platform integrates with major e-commerce platforms, serving thousands of clients in more than 70 countries. Although it lacks many of the capabilities of its older competitors, the user interface and underlying capabilities thus far appear to be setting it up for some solid growth potential.
Some Top Companies That Provide Predictive Marketing Technology
If you’re looking for companies that offer predictive modeling technology to drive product recommendations, here are some of the latest and greatest:
- Loyalty Builders Analytics — This is an automated service that predicts buying behavior of customers, including who will buy, when they’ll buy, how much they’ll spend in the next period, lifetime value potential, risk of defection, and best product recommendations. The process is simple, requiring no databases, platforms, data integration, or analytic skills. It uses readily available data that users already have and doesn’t require personal customer information. Loyalty Builders indicates that the company has tested its technology in many hundreds of marketing programs across various channels. Overall, the company claims that its services have helped clients typically achieve from 10% to 30% lift in revenue based on data-driven customer intelligence.
- MailChimp — Thanks to MailChimp’s new Product Recommendations feature, businesses can now send emails personalized with items that target the right customers with the right products. According to MailChimp’s blog, this tool was created for e-commerce stores that have had a minimum of 50 different customers in the past year, more than 10 available products, and more than 500 orders in the past year. When an e-commerce business connects to MailChimp, the purchase history of individual customers is analyzed to make data-driven predictions about what they’re most likely to buy in the future.
- SmarterHQ — Combining real-time behavior recognition with historical customer data, this contextual marketing technology leverages a company’s current ESP to create automated and personalized email campaigns. With more than $25 million from several rounds of investment capital, SmarterHQ starts its users with essential triggered campaigns that help build a foundation for more sophisticated growth over time. This is accomplished by using such data as engagement level and purchase probability to add more context to basic behavioral triggers. In addition, year-over-year data can be leveraged to reengage customers based on seasonal shopping patterns.
- AgilOne — This is a predictive marketing cloud that helps e-commerce businesses deliver omni-channel experiences to boost both customer loyalty and profitability. AgilOne includes a number of turnkey connectors to ESPs, its own webtag, integrations with e-commerce and tag-management systems, and other capabilities to help aggregate customer data into one place. Funded with more than $40 million from multiple investment rounds, AgilOne comes built-in with predictive models that claim to make advanced predictive targeting easy for marketers. This appears to be one of the most sophisticated predictive-marketing tools on the market. Its goal is to help retailers develop more valuable customer relationships through predictive modeling, thus engaging customers at the right time with the right offer and delivering a superb customer experience.
- Windsor Circle — This predictive lifecycle and retention marketing platform helps e-commerce businesses grow customer lifetime value and boost customer retention. The platform allows users to see key retail and retention metrics on more than 70 charts, as well as easily create custom segments. It also helps track unknown visitors and turn page views into revenue by enhancing customer profiles. Using a retailer’s existing marketing software, Windsor Circle powers predictive, personalized, and automated emails throughout the entire customer lifecycle, including browse abandonment, cart recovery, post-purchase, and win-back campaigns. Windsor Circle integrates “out of the box” with a number of major e-commerce platforms; if yours is not one of them, the company will scope and implement custom integrations, as well.
Looking for ways to improve your email-marketing results? Contact us today and we’ll discuss how FulcrumTech can help you get the most out of your email campaigns.