Some interesting news this week.
Salesforce has introduced a Loyalty Management offering as part of their “Marketing Cloud”. Customer 360 Audiences, their Customer Data Platform (CDP) is also a part of same Cloud. (The offering will be generally available later this year).
Earlier, in 2020, MasterCard acquired SessionM (CDP + Loyalty) and Oracle acquired CrowdTwist to offer Loyalty Management capabilities.
In an increasingly Omnichannel world, Loyalty programs also need to span across physical and digital channels. A key requirement, therefore, is to be able to access customer transactions across all those channels, and then stitch them together to create a single view of customers. You also need to be able to then segment users. This is where CDPs play an important, foundational role. Here’s my earlier post on this.
Bangalore-based, retail-focused CDP Manthan and personalization solution provider RichRelevance have completed their merger (which was announced a year or so back). The merged entity is called Algonomy.
A CDP is really foundational for building Omnichannel personalization at scale. So in that sense, this will probably be a good match for customers.
Algonomy’s website lists CDP and Personalization as separate products, so it looks like these products will be available on their own as well. In any case, such integrations often take time. It will also be interesting to know if RichRelevance will keep supporting other non-Manthan CDPs or non-retail personalization use cases?