Report:

The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2022

Top Vendor Products for Email Marketing Service Providers in 2022

• Epsilon
• Zeta Global

Email Marketing Service Providers Vendor Product Comparisons 2022

• Epsilon - Leaders
  

  Pros:

  • 500 strategy and analytics consultants, 200 operations associates, and 180 office locations appeal to the world's largest financial services, retail, and hospitality firms
  • Data and agency capabilities are the strongest pieces of its current offering; 70% of clients work with Epsilon in a full-service capacity
  • Offers a BI environment where marketers can create customer value scores and explore correlations
  • Provides proprietary data resources to supplement audience profiles and measure customer engagement across channels
  • Security practices are baked into product design, and internal processes and partners undergo regular security audits
  • Leads industry standards bureaus around establishing ethical data use

  Cons:

  • Message creation interface and query editor are not as user friendly as some of the pure self-service applications
  • One client reference found running complex segmentations can delay deployments


• Zeta Global - Leaders
  

  Pros:

  • In 2021, went public, grew revenues by 26%, and quadrupled current client contracts, all while growing profit margins by 55%
  • Proprietary data and new modular platform with embedded AI pay off its vision of 'making sophisticated marketing easy'
  • Increased product investment by 40%, doubled its sales force and product development staff
  • Detailed innovation roadmap links planned development to its primary areas of differentiation and includes features to evoke trust, like data clean rooms for attribution, outcomes-based forecasting, and model output visualizations
  • Can target message content, tonality, offer sequence, and frequency by consumer need states, intent, and psychographics, not just behaviors
  • Calculates email's influence on the business through the myriad data points it gathers through its proprietary media network
  • Staffs its strategy, creative, analytics, and operations services globally, which facilitates affordable, full-service options

  Cons:

  • The Zeta brand needs strengthening in the market
  • Client references wish for a simpler way to copy campaign assets for reuse in campaign creation interface


• Adobe - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Corporate heft provides security practices baked into software development
  • Has an AI Ethics Review Board for limiting bias across its products
  • Broad partner network leverages Adobe into myriad verticals and geographies
  • Adobe Journey Optimizer built from the ground up on Adobe Experience Platform (an event-based architecture)
  • Tailors critical pieces of Adobe Experience Platform — like privacy, ingestion, and segmentation — specifically to campaign creators
  • Integrates natively with the rest of Adobe Experience Cloud

  Cons:

  • Adobe Journey Optimizer launched in June 2021 and is still unproven
  • Reference customers are hopeful but can't yet substantiate any real functionality against capabilities claims
  • Demonstrated capabilities miss the in-line guidance, predictive orchestration, and liquid scripting of more dynamic competitors


• Cheetah Digital - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Positions its overall value, product strategy, and workflow as creating value throughout key stages of a customer's brand relationship: acquisition, engagement, and loyalty
  • Designed to solve global marketer problems, not just offer a suite of functionality
  • Offers its interface in eight languages
  • Applies predictive decisioning to propel customers through their lifecycles
  • Dedicated, distributed module supports franchise-based businesses with template libraries, mailing schedules, and data access appropriate for emailing at a local level with global oversight
  • White-glove service unmatched for big retailers, banks, and hotel chains

  Cons:

  • Reference customers think the platform could be simpler; it's missing the marketer-friendly labels found in other platforms
  • One reference said, 'Its virtually endless versatility makes it difficult to quickly program for email automation'


• Cordial - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Passionate culture and values align authentically with its claim to help brands send a better message
  • Campaign management interface uses marketer-friendly text and labeling and includes quick-start templates and content blocks
  • Stores all campaign assets, segment logic, and workflow in a sortable library
  • Helps users create dynamic content scripting through a drop-down menu
  • Supports real-time data ingestion and transformation
  • Reference customers laud the vendor's servant leadership: 'They are the most cordial partner we have ever had'

  Cons:

  • Needs a decisive growth strategy, clear simple differentiators, and polish to best better-resourced competitors
  • Other functionality is middling compared with other vendors
  • Reference customers say that there's room for more ease of use in the platform interface


• Emarsys - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Unapologetically prioritizes the email marketer in the strategy and design of its product suite
  • Just celebrated its first year as part of SAP with 30% growth
  • Orchestration engine comes prebuilt with common customer journeys, in-line guidance to improve performance based on predicted outcomes, and editable nodes to change sections of a journey without disrupting overall structure
  • Reference customers are consistently highly satisfied with Emarsys' ease of use
  • Platform uses marketer-friendly language throughout
  • Manages consumer data privacy at the data point, not the customer profile, level

  Cons:

  • Less flexibility for data ingestion
  • Packaged reports lag the full analytics environments of other vendors


• Iterable - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • NoSQL data model, limitless data storage, and an automated segmentation module
  • Company culture and take on email unlike those of any other vendor
  • Internal content library retains revision history indefinitely; stores content, segments, segment logic, and workflow in sortable snippets
  • Can set orchestrations and dynamic content based not just on an event occurrence but also on the metadata surrounding that event
  • Reference customers are highly satisfied with Iterable's functionality, account management, and ease of use

  Cons:

  • Lack of support for full-service clients
  • Requires high-volume email and mobile messaging senders with the resources to drive this sophisticated platform themselves


• MessageGears - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Novel hybrid technology bundles a segmentation and campaign management front end that sits directly on a marketer's first-party database with a cloud-based send infrastructure
  • Enables real-time messaging without the data transfer that occurs with traditional ESPs
  • Grew 72% last year
  • Three products comprise MessageGears' Customer Marketing Platform: Segment (segmentation wizard), Message (orchestration and messaging engine), and Engage (headless API that makes data accessible across channels)

  Cons:

  • Campaign management is less feature-rich than that of a standard ESP
  • Relies on marketers to bring their own AI, professional services, and capabilities for distributed businesses
  • One reference explained, 'Since they don't own that data structure, the MessageGears platform lacks some features that would typically be built on top of a vendor-owned marketing database'


• Oracle - Strong Performers
  

  Pros:

  • Brings large enterprises fast technology, 1,000 professional services staff, and the scale of 24 global offices
  • One of the most innovative development roadmaps in this evaluation with dozens of product developments
  • Resources, engineering bench, and decades-long email maturity diminish market disruptors
  • Dedicates a team to customer privacy and auditing partner compliance
  • 55 professional services staff work on one marquee account
  • Vendor's stability and experience

  Cons:

  • The extensiveness of this vendor comes at the expense of its agility
  • Message creation interface and query editor lack the in-line guidance and marketer-friendly workflow of competitors
  • Reference customers use phrases like 'robust, but too complicated' to describe Responsys' reporting, billing process, and campaign management front end


• Braze - Contenders
  

  Pros:

  • More than 1,000 customers; 60% year-over-year growth; rapid expansion in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and a successful 2021 IPO
  • Boasts a 123% retention rate for client companies in its FY 2021
  • Liquid scripting enables individually tailored content in any channel
  • Can auto-ingest data with no predetermined data structure, enabling spontaneous, real-time messaging
  • Stores campaign content, workflow, and segmentation in a sortable library
  • AI-based predictive journeys facilitates complex orchestrations

  Cons:

  • Some ambiguity in its positioning - vision to create human connections between brands and consumers seems antithetical to its emphasis on automation
  • Reports campaign performance but offers limited capacity for customer value analysis
  • Does not provide agency services


• Netcore Cloud - Contenders
  

  Pros:

  • Sends 55% of all the promotional emails in APAC
  • Growing 40% year over year
  • Campaign creation interface, querying capability, and ability to measure engagement outside of just opens and clicks are competitive with its western platform peers
  • Ahead of the curve at applying AI to marketer workflow
  • Offers in-line predictive segments and predictive content/offer performance to guide campaign creation

  Cons:

  • Data integration is less flexible than that of the Leaders in this evaluation
  • Primarily uses customer behaviors and profile attributes instead of contextual data to optimize message content and cadence
  • Lacks packaged integrations with most major content management systems
  • Doesn't support distributed or franchise businesses


• Salesforce - Contenders
  

  Pros:

  • Standalone email volume is up 25%
  • Journey Builder's intuitive visual interface, AI-powered pathing, and in-line analytics originated the campaign orchestration standard that is now emulated by everyone else
  • Elevates ethics and trust as primary values
  • Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology detects sensitive data and works with product teams to eliminate bias in design and use

  Cons:

  • Emphasizes suite development more than email innovation
  • Most advanced email functionality requires add-on applications
  • Product roadmap lists more suite developments than email ones
  • Data integration is not as seamless and automatic as with newer platforms
  • Reference customers grow weary of complex pricing and being upsold in regular business reviews


• Acoustic - Challengers
  

  Pros:

  • Best-performing current capabilities include content management, which can store content in multiple formats
  • Data integration can ingest structured and unstructured data in real time
  • Dedicated, distributed module for local or franchise businesses
  • On-par approach to security

  Cons:

  • Needs more modern technology to pull off its lofty ambitions
  • Current leadership is rebooting critical pieces: new campaign creation interface, new data lake for more integrated data storage, and partner-led reporting and advanced analytics expected this year
  • In all criteria except those listed as strengths, Acoustic trails competitors
  • IBM invested in very limited improvement prior to spinning off what is now Acoustic
  • Acoustic declined to participate in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process

Reference

• Forrester, The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2022, 15-Mar-2022, ID

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