Twilio SendGrid Ads launched
SendGrid was primarily an email marketing platform that Twilio acquired. Twilio SendGrid Ads adds additional capabilities to create ads for Facebook, Instagram and Google.
This could be very useful. You can reuse your campaign content across emails and ads (or posts). You can also have a single user repository for email marketing and display advertising, allowing you to run more integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
While this is helpful, you do need to consider if it makes sense to club all your multi-channel marketing and advertising capabilities into a single product or go with something more scalable such as investing in platforms such as customer data platforms (CDP) or journey orchestration engines (JOE) to build your own omni-channel tech stack….
Salesforce to acquire ClickSoftware
Salesforce has signed an agreement to acquire ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion.
ClickSoftware specializes in solutions for field service organizations and mobile workforces (think Shift planning, scheduling, dispatch, route optimization and so forth).
It will be part of Salesforce Service Cloud. In fact, Salesforce Field Service Lighting, which is a component of Salesforce Service Cloud, already provided these services in partnership with ClickSoftware since 2016.
If you are a customer of both, you will have one less vendor to manage. But in terms of any real product integration, any more than what already exists, that will probably take time…
Zylotech partners with Bombora
B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) has partnered with Bombora to provide Bombora’s B2B intent data within the CDP.
Bombora collects intent data — data based on business users’ online behavior to deduce their intent to do something. An an example, it can analyze behavior to know that business users are researching specific products and are likely to buy. As a marketer, if you have a better handle on your potential customers’ intentions, you can target them appropriately.
Zylotech will essentially combine this third-party intent data feed from Bombora (using Bombora’s Company Surge product) with its first-party data as part of customer profile, which you can then use for segmentation or whatever..
IgnitionOne launches consultancy service
MarTech vendor IgnitionOne has launched its dedicated consultancy service to help customers with planning, strategy, customer data management, data science, analytics and other service required to be able to make best use of their platforms.
Interestingly, the service also includes “guaranteed results”. CDP vendor Lytics also had a similar “guarantee” in their newly released StartSmart program.
Martech platforms such as these are increasingly becoming complex and require lot of technical (e.g., data science or integration) as well functional (e.g, personalization) know how. Additionally, most of these platforms are proprietary and so the vendors themselves are some times better placed to provide these services than third-party service providers or channel partners.
* Header image source: Twilio Sendgrid
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